career. Now after injuries, surgeries and personal
tragedies, Mark can picture the day this all comes
to an end."Three years ago," Mark began. "I was cheering Dick Trickle on and saying 'Yeah, I hope he wins because that'll add five years to my career. I'll be able to drive these things until I'm 55, I know I can.' That was only three or four years ago and I don't feel the same anymore."
A year ago Mark went into Loudon suffering from multiple injuries he received in a practice wreck a week earlier in Daytona. But in typical Mark style he endured and finished in the top 10.
"We had a good result up there anyway, a good top-ten finish, and I just had my eye on the target-the Winston Cup championship. No matter how bad it gets all that does is make me more determined. The worse I hurt, the harder it is. The more devastating the situation, the more determined I get, and I gave it everything I had."
After the 1999 season he underwent back surgery. But while the pain isn't what it was before, Mark's starting to suffer from some discomfort again.
"I'm having a little bit of a problem, just a little bit. It's nothing like what I had, but things are not going as good the last three or four weeks as they had been." Mark was one of the first drivers to see the benefits of a daily workout routine and continues his workout program today. It's everyday activities such as sleeping that he has to be cautious doing. He needs to be conscious every moment and what affects it could have on his back. Even with his physical problems Mark plans to see out his commitments.
"I'm the kind of guy that will always do what I said I would do. I signed a piece of paper that said I'll drive these cars for five years; I'll drive them for five years. I might not continue after that, I can't say, but this is a demanding sport and we all get real tired and we all get beat up from time to time."
Despite what outsiders may think, driving the car isn't fun
for Mark. What's fun is being competitive and winning. And
with the number of races and number of good teams, the odds
are that you'll see more downs than ups. So what is fun for
Mark?"Just feeling the love of my family. That, to me, is a fun that might not necessarily make me laugh but makes me feel good and makes my heart smile. Because I've had so little of that, it's growing more and more important to me all the time and getting more and more difficult with every year's schedule and that's one of the reasons why I can see the end of my Winston Cup career from here, whereas five years ago I couldn't see it."
Personal tragedies have taken their toll on Mark as well. He lost his father and stepmother in a plane accident two years ago. This May he lost nephew Christain Lovendahl, a young Busch series crew chief, in an auto accident.
"It's a long time down the road, but I want to have a family and I want to have time to come to my sister's side when she loses her son and my granddad's side when he loses his son and to my best friend's son's side. The deaths that I experienced over the past three years have changed me dramatically.
"Now, nobody said I had to, but, me, I feel like that I have a commitment to do and I made that commitment and I'm gonna do it and that's it. I've needed to take care of some other things over the past three years that I haven't taken care of and that makes me feel differently about what I do. I still do it with the same passion, but I'm probably not thinking of doing it as long as I was three years ago."
