The Drag-and-Drive Hangover – That Feeling You Get When You Try to Return to a Normal Life
When you excessively drink, chances are a hangover will be waiting to greet you the next day. It’s not that we ignore it, but we’re having such a great time we bother to think ahead to the next day.
After completing this year’s Sick Week Presented by Gear Vendors Overdrive, I’m here to tell you that not being on a drag-and-drive this week SUCKS!
To expand on this, my first drag-and-drive was Sick Week 2022. About a month before the event, I performed as some typical males will: doing something stupid to injure myself!
The ensuing pain led me to do the drives on Sick Week from track to track alone, and I didn’t follow the specified route until the final day. I rolled back to work on Monday, and the normal grind probably masked my ‘drag-and-drive-hangover.’
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At this year’s Sick Week, I rolled in a Dodge Durango sporting the “Sick The Mag” colors (I now understand why so many people yelled and beeped at me). Most of the time we had 3-4 people in the Durango, and the conversations were spirited.
We also followed the routes almost excessively, which meant stopping for broken down competitors, checkpoints and longer days versus the Google “shortest distance between two points” approach I took in 2022.
The final day of Sick Week, Friday February 17th, is when lack of sleep really started to smack me in the face. I had a front row seat on the struggle bus. But the excitement of the final day, crowning winners and seeing who would survive the week was my “energy drink” to power through it all. Yes, I did supplement that with an actual energy drink too!
The next morning felt like a blur. I got up at 7 a.m., had the wide-eyed panic “I’M LATE - NEED TO BE AT THE TRACK” moment, then realized Sick Week was over. But as tired as I still was, I couldn’t fall back asleep.
My head was spinning with everything I was fortunate to see and talk about in the last six days. The rest of the day disappeared in a two-hour drive from Orlando back to Gainesville, and I fell asleep earlier than I had in weeks.
The next day, I had signed up to announce a bracket race at my local track, Gainesville Raceway. Going to the track early in the morning felt oddly normal, and the fact my voice never completely checked out for a 10-hour day was amazing.
Fast forward a couple days, and now it feels weird. I’m reading all the recaps from numerous participants on Sick Week, and Sick Ward as well. My head fills with all the late nights, the cruises, the checkpoints, the calls for broken parts to fix allowing a competitor to just “finish the week.” It’s official; I’m in the “drag-and-drive hangover” phase.
Then today, in one of many recap Facebook posts I’ve read, I commented “The drag-and-drive hangover is real.”
The response from competitor Alex Wagle on “tips to beating that hangover” was perfect – “Place 8 ounces of VP C16 (fuel) in a cup and sniff it throughout the day. Change your rear tires twice every day, and any sleep over 2 hours is a complete waste of time.”
So, when is the next drag-and-drive event?
Written by Derek Putnam. Photos courtesy of Chris Story Foto.
If you have thoughts / feedback / ideas, please e-mail us at derek@sickthemagazine.com