4-Brad Keselowski’s Wreckers-to-Checkers Win at Pocono
Playing hurt is the measure of athletic success, as Brad Keselowski won August’s Good Sam RV Insurance 500 at Pocono Raceway just days after breaking his left ankle in a road course testing accident. Few might have projected a healthy Keselowski as a Pocono favorite. He’d won at Kansas Speedway earlier in the summer, but came to Pennsylvania ranked 21st in points. The race turned out to be a coming-out party for the 2010 NASCAR Nationwide Series champion, who followed the performance with three more top-three finishes capped by a Bristol victory, a Chase wild card berth and a fifth place finish in final NASCAR Sprint Cup standings.
FYI WIRZ: NASCAR’s Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart talk finale at Homestead
Much talk will happen before the green flag in Homestead on Sunday Nov. 20 when Carl Edwards takes his skinny three point lead over Tony Stewart to the 1.5-mile oval track Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Florida.
That talk will include the playful comments between Edwards and Stewart as they toy with one another’s mind while the media focuses on them like eagles on prey.
But when the flag drops the public words cease and radio words begin between drivers, spotters and crew chiefs.
The famous runner Steve Prefontaine was once quoted as saying, “Most people run a race to see who is fastest. I run a race to see who has the most guts.”
“Pre,” as he was called, would most certainly have enjoyed Brad Keselowski’s gutsy performance in Good Sam RV Insurance 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race on August 7. Keselowski, sporting a broken left ankle swollen to roughly the size of a small tree, toughed it out for 500 miles to take the checkered flag at Pocono Raceway.
“I came here to win. When you let the pain get into your head that far that you don’t believe you can win anymore, you’ll never win. And I woke up this morning feeling like we could win the race … If you don’t feel that way, you’re never going to win at anything you do,” he said in an interview after the race.
That’s self-motivation, and it is a powerful thing, strong enough to get an injured athlete out of bed and ready to play when the rest of us would probably just reach for a box of tissues and call in sick for the day.
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4-Brad Keselowski’s Wreckers-to-Checkers Win at Pocono
Author: Dwight Drum 
