Maturity, marriage and Missouri help Carl Edwards persevere through winless season

A person who worked with Carl Edwards once joked that he’s so intense, he could break his thumb reading the morning paper. Edwards is a full-throttle kind of guy.

That helps explain how he broke his foot playing Frisbee – and why he bought a special bicycle rigged so that his broken right foot can rest in a protective boot while his left foot does the pedaling. Edwards, 30, isn’t going to let some measly broken foot keep him from staying in shape.

If that sounds a bit extreme, well, it is, but so is Edwards, and he has no plans to change. He has found the place where extreme works hand-in-hand with sanity and that place is home: Columbia, Mo.

It’s there that Edwards can work on his younger brother Kenny’s race car, visit his mother or hang out with his wife, Dr. Kate Edwards, whom he married in January. Edwards announced Oct. 15 that the couple is expecting its first child.

Most important, it’s home where he can let a bad race – and when you don’t win, is there any other kind? – go. He has to let it go because Kate, a physical rehabilitation doctor, won’t let him do otherwise.

“If I’m upset by something, it’s like, we’ll talk about it for a second and she’ll say, ‘Sorry, let’s go do something else,’” Edwards says. “And I’m like, ‘No, wait, this is really bothering me.’ And then I realize, ‘Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.’

“She has a calming effect. She has a really good perspective on things because of her job. That’s very helpful. Every 20 minutes, she walks into a new room and helps someone deal with a problem that is bigger than any problem that I’ve ever dealt with by far.”

That perspective, coupled with the experience of going winless and finishing outside the Chase in 2006 – only to bounce back with 12 victories the next two seasons, including a series-high nine last year – has helped Edwards better handle a winless campaign in 2009.

“For me, 2006, I did the best I could, but I still felt like, ‘Man, this is not right and something is not right here,’” says Edwards, who had a breakout season with four wins in 2005. “Now, I realize we’ll be fine. Just keep working. I’m careful not to let short-term troubles evolve into something big. You don’t want to do that. I see guys do that and it’s not good.”

One would think that the height of frustration came Sept. 2, when Edwards lunged to try to catch a Frisbee and a friend dove and landed on his foot.

Immediately, Edwards knew the foot was broken. This wasn’t the first time he had suffered a broken bone. In July 2007, he was involved in a Late Model crash in Omaha, Neb., and broke his thumb.

He handled the broken foot as well as could be expected thanks to his previous injury.

“I’m sitting there looking at my hand and the thumb is in the wrong direction and I’m thinking, ‘Holy crap, this is going to ruin my whole season,’” Edwards says. “I literally panicked a little bit. About two hours later, I realized this wasn’t going to be that big of a deal. And I swore that no matter what, I’m not going to panic on anything like that.

“That was a lesson. … It’s life, things are going to happen. You’ve just got to take what comes and make the most of it. I’m fortunate that my foot has turned out fine.”
Edwards didn’t miss a race with the broken thumb, and the lesson he learned resulted in his continuing to race vehicles other than Sprint Cup or Nationwide cars – and participating in off-track endeavors. Such as Frisbee.

“Every morning I wake up and I get out of bed and I think right as I take that first step, ‘What the hell was I doing?’” Edwards says. “But it seemed very, very important at that moment to get that Frisbee before my friend did.

“It seemed like the most important thing in the world. I guess all racers have those moments. … Who knows what [injury] will be next? It might be [in] a foot race with the kid across the street.”

Finding A Balance

If getting hurt playing Frisbee is one of the risks involved with being around his friends, Edwards will certainly take that risk. He used to live north of Charlotte but all that left him to do was stew over bad performances in 2006. The last two seasons, Edwards has lived in Missouri.

“When he lived in Concord full time, him and I hung out, we worked out and rode our mountain bikes and stuff,” says spotter and good friend Jason Hedlesky. “But at night, it would be 7 o’clock and he’d be home alone or with his roommates.

“Now, he gets to hang out with his mom, gets to do things with Kate and have a more structured atmosphere around him to help him realize that … there really is more to it than this. At the end of the day, you’ve still got to be a good person and have a good family. Once you realize all that, it starts to settle you down.”

Now Edwards doesn’t have time to stew. There are too many other things to do. And life is just a little bit more normal now that he resides in Missouri.

“I like and respect all the people that I work with,” Edwards says. “It’s not that I don’t want to be there. It’s just I get one or two days, maybe a week to myself, and the rest of the time, I’m racing. So to me, it just helps [to be] somewhere different where I feel like I can take a deep breath and gather myself.”

Being away isn’t always the best way to be part of a race team. Team owner Jack Roush admits that there are pluses and minuses to Edwards’ choice of living away from the shop.

“He doesn’t have that weekly contact with the race team in the shop that I think is beneficial,” Roush says. “But the things that offset that are the fact that his mental state may be more relaxed, and he may have greater determination and not focus on things that are not constructive by not being in the fray all the time.

“To step back from something for a while sometimes improves your perspective on it.”

Roush recalls a quote from Mark Twain that he uses to describe Edwards’ ability to handle a winless season.

“Was it Mark Twain that said, between [the time] he was 16 and 20 that he was surprised how much his dad had learned?” says Roush (the Twain quote actually was from 14 to 21). “For a person to figure out when he should give, when he should not yield to a contentious situation is something that takes a while.”

Edwards didn’t figure that out in his late teens, as his NASCAR career didn’t start on a national level until he was 23. The stories of him handing out business cards to team owners while in search of a ride are legendary.

Once he got on the track, he was relentless. He could push a truck or race car to the edge, sometimes so far that the right side of the truck or car was always damaged.
Now, with 420 starts in NASCAR’s three national series, Edwards has the ability to push the car to its limits without going overboard, Hedlesky says.

“Carl’s really secure where he’s at – the sponsors love him, Jack loves him, Ford loves him, but you’ve got to get to that point where you don’t feel like you’ve got to race for your life every lap,” Hedlesky says. “These guys that come from nothing, they feel like that.

“You break your foot and you feel like, ‘Damn, I don’t think I’m going to be able to drive this car.’ And then you realize I’ve won nine of these things, I’m a Nationwide Series champion and Jack has my back and it’s going to be OK if they have to restructure the pedal a little bit.”

Edwards has discovered a more even keel, one he attributes to his on-track experiences and recent nuptials.

“80-20 [percent], racing-marriage,” he says. “The marriage side, I didn’t really plan on. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it’s really good for me. [Still], I think it’s mostly racing experience.”

Living In The Now

In his early years, Edwards only knew success. In 2003, he had three wins in his first full season in the Truck series. He then won five Busch Series events and four Cup races in his first full season on both of those circuits in 2005. He finished third in points in both series that year.

Then came 2006, when he had 20 top-10s in Cup but no victories.

“Those cars were so fast and so easy to drive and he was so good with them in ’05 when he won the four or five races that we won and the Nationwide races, maybe it took a little bit of adversity to help him realize, ‘Maybe I’m not invincible,’” Hedlesky says. “And he knows with the organization that we have, the light is at the end of the tunnel. You’re only going to get better.”

Edwards says as long as he can see the organization is working on making things better, he can handle a bad finish.

But don’t think it’s easy. And there are times when he broods, especially at the race track.

“There have been times I’ve looked over at [my wife] and I haven’t said a word in two hours,” Edwards says. “It’s like, ‘I need to be social here.’ But racers are like that. Sometimes you get in your zone and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. She’s good at dealing with it.”

Edwards admits that wins in the Nationwide Series have also helped him handle the Sprint Cup frustrations.

“I like the challenge,” he says. “But I really like to achieve something, too. … The accomplishment of a goal is you worked hard and [winning] is the greatest feeling I can have. It’s way better to win, there’s no other way to put it.”

Not having that winning feeling to fall back on in Cup this year has helped Edwards gain a different perspective.

“What I have to do is just remember I am the same driver, putting out the same effort, everyone at the shop is working just as hard, and, for those reasons, we will prevail,” Edwards says. “We will get back to where we were. You just have to have faith and keep working.”

While he keeps working on the track, he’ll also enjoy his time away from it in Missouri. He’ll go on bike rides, talking with his buddies, sometimes about racing and sometimes about life. He’ll do it even if he has a broken foot, which can make things a little awkward.

“That little bike is a good deal,” Edwards says. “ … It’s a little funny. It’s kind of a goofy little thing. I actually had some Asian tourists ride by and say, ‘You ride old lady bike.’ It’s pretty slow. Which the people I go ride with, they appreciate it.”

In other words, Edwards can handle the slow lane. For now. As long as he can see a day when the bones are healed and victory lane is in his future.

“He’s a creature of habit,” Hedlesky says. “He’s used to riding his bikes. He’s used to hanging out and working on Kenny’s race cars. When you took those things away from him, all he had was all this time to worry about his broken thumb.

“Now he doesn’t have to worry about it so much. He can hang out with his wife. Things are going to be OK when you go home.”