At any rate, the purpose of this random blog entry is to give all of my faithful follower(s) a little insight into some of the training I have been doing to get myself prepared for 24 hours of insanity behind the wheel of my speedy little go kart. As I mentioned in my welcome post, driving a racing go kart is actually quite physically demanding. Add to that the focus it will take to stay on point for 24 straight hours, and it becomes a rather mentally taxing proposition as well. The more tired a person's body gets, the harder it is for their brain to process stimulus and react accordingly. As a result, my trainer and I have been working very hard to make 24 hours in a kart as physically "easy" as it possibly can be.
It is very important to get as much training in before I make my 24 hour world record attempt in October, and this includes doing as much driving as possible. Being in the Washington DC area, most go kart tracks, including Summit Point where I will be making my attempt, are not open during the winter months. The weather around here just isn't very conducive to driving a completely open vehicle at 70+ mph. This winter hasn't seen anything like the comically devastating "snowmagedon" event it saw last winter, but it is still a bit nippy nonetheless to be speedily parading around with nothing but a couple layers of nomex separating your skin from the piercing wind chill of sub 30 degree temperatures at 70 miles per hour. (In case you're wondering, this wind chill is in the neighborhood of -5 to +10 degrees Fahrenheit.) With this being the case, I set out to find and indoor go kart track that would allow me eight hours of uninterrupted track time. This is where my gratitude to Francois and his Allsports Grand Prix army comes in. Francois graciously allowed me the use of his state of the art indoor track to test my physical stamina and drive their go kart for eight monotonous hours straight.
As it turns out, a couple of things happen when you sit down on a vibrating vehicle for eight hours in a seat that is about as padded as John Basedow's abs. I didn't feel it when I was driving, but when I stood up afterward, my legs felt like jello. It was about the same as the feeling you get when you've been bed-ridden with the flu and haven't actually stood up for a few days, and then when you do, you think you're going to collapse. Surprisingly, walking was a bit difficult. My neck was also a bit sore but that was to be expected. With stopping only once to use the restroom, eat some chicken and a banana, and take an energy shot, I was able to make it the entire eight hours in pretty much a full sprint, and actually didn't feel too bad when I got out of the kart, apart from the hilarious jello leg syndrome of course. The ride home, however, was a different story. As I was driving back home, the physical enormity of what I had just done was starting to set in. The adrenaline eventually started to wear off and my entire body felt like I had barely survived an encounter with a rather large truck traveling at a rather high speed . A quick ice bath when I got home did a good job of numbing everything and I was able to sleep as well as a super tired baby. All in all I was fairly pleased with how the 8-hour run went, but realize that I have still got a lot of work to do before I can do that for an entire 24 hours.
As will likely become tradition here on Trey Shannon's super duper, radically awesome 24 Hours for TSA blog, I would like to end this post with a couple shout outs. Special thanks of course to Francois at Allsports Grand Prix for facilitating this random act of karting endurance splendor. I would also like to thank my trainer Tim of Gold's Gym in Silver Spring, MD for making sure the training fun never stops, and my body is
Hope everybody is doing well, and please stay tuned to http://www.kart24hour.org/ for event updates and, of course, totally meaningless, overwhelmingly exciting blog posts!