Nascar Community

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Unlocking Joy Through Activity-Based Community Immersion

Experience-centric communities are the greatest shortcut

to joy that most people never think to use.

You Don't Have to Love NASCAR To Have The Time Of Your Life At A NASCAR Event

Of all the invitations I send out across the year, one gets the most pushback. More than shark diving. More than snowbiking in the backcountry. More than trips that require a passport and a serious commitment of time and money. The one that makes people hesitate every single time is NASCAR infield camping.

And every single time, the people who say yes come back saying it was one of the best weekends of their year.

Here is how it works. At select tracks on the NASCAR circuit, the infield of the race course itself is converted into a massive RV campground. People arrive on Wednesday. By race weekend you have thousands of RVs packed inside the track, creating a temporary city built entirely around one idea: being there together. Full outdoor kitchens. Living rooms with couches and string lights and flags flying everywhere. Four days of walking around, meeting strangers, sharing food, trading drinks, and fully leaning into the experience.

I am not a NASCAR fan. I want to be upfront about that. I went because I got access to an infield spot, which is genuinely rare, and I thought it was worth understanding what this world actually was. What I found was not a race. It was one of the most welcoming, generous, and genuinely fun communities I have ever been dropped into anywhere in the world.

My daughter says it best. She is also not a NASCAR fan. She could probably name one driver if pressed. And yet it is her favorite event of the year, without hesitation. Her reasoning is simple. You could show up to the NASCAR infield with no food, no water, and nowhere to stay, and you would still have an incredible weekend. People would feed you. Hand you a drink. Invite you in. Find you a place to belong. She is right. I watched it happen over and over across four days inside Charlotte Motor Speedway with over 100,000 people around us. Not one person in our group had a favorite driver. And yet when I ask people about that weekend, they light up every time.

That experience cracked something open for me, and I have been thinking about it ever since.

Once I saw it there, I started noticing it everywhere.

I took my kids to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. If you are not familiar, Sturgis is the largest motorcycle rally in the world, half a million bikers descending on a small town in the Black Hills for ten days every August. Leather, chrome, loud pipes, and a culture that, from the outside, looks like it has a very specific membership requirement. I could not have felt less qualified to walk through the gate. What we found was one of the most welcoming, completely disarming communities I have ever stepped into. Nobody cared that we didn't ride. People stopped us constantly, asked where we were from, told stories, and made us feel like we had been coming for years. My kids still talk about it.

I have seen the same thing in the off-road community, where strangers share equipment and dig each other out without being asked. In climbing communities where people coach each other up routes they have no personal stake in. I went to the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.

Triathlons are about as far from my personal interest as anything I can imagine: three activities I have zero desire to do combined into one miserable-sounding package. And yet it was one of the coolest weekends I can remember. Even Burning Man, which on paper sounds like a version of hell to me, becomes something that transcends all of it for the people inside. Because everyone there has chosen to be part of the same thing.

Shared intention creates immediate camaraderie.

Here is what I have worked out from all of it. When people are inside something they love, surrounded by others who love it, they are operating at a completely different level. More open, more generous, more alive. You are not meeting them on a random Tuesday in the middle of their routine. You are meeting them in a highlight moment. And people in a highlight moment are exceptional versions of themselves. That energy is contagious, and you do not need to be a member of the community to absorb every bit of it. You just need to show up.

Briana and I have made this a deliberate practice when we travel. Before we go anywhere, we look up what is happening locally. Not the tourist attractions. Not the standard list. We look for gatherings. Competitions. Festivals. Anything that signals a group of people coming together around something they care about. And then we go. This is the shift that changes everything.

Stop trying to find better destinations.

Start finding better environments.

So here is the invitation. Do not wait for a Reject Average trip to test this. Find something happening near you this weekend. A beach volleyball tournament. A car show. A local cycling event. A collectors fair. Show up with no agenda and see what happens.

And if an infield camping invite ever comes through your inbox from us, do not think about it. Do not ask about the drivers or the race or whether you will understand what is happening on the track. Just say yes.