150: From Rookie to Retirement — Why Endurance Fades Faster Today

Not long ago, NASCAR rookies were men in their 40s and 50s, battling the Cup schedule with grit and experience. Today? We’re seeing drivers step into the sport before they even graduate high school—while veterans are stepping out earlier and earlier. The question is: why is endurance fading faster now than ever before?

In this episode of Breaking Boundaries for Champions, we’re tackling the difference between chronological aging (the birthdays on your license) and biological aging (the true condition of your cells, tissues, and performance systems).

Here’s what you’ll discover:

• The Rookie-to-Retirement Shift — why past legends could thrive longer, and why today’s drivers feel drained by mid-career.
• The Real Cause of Early Burnout — stress redefined: Something Troubling Resulting in Essential System Shutdown. We’ll break down oxidative stress, environmental toxins, and the hidden internal stressors that accelerate aging.
• Heat, Endurance & Performance Loss — how untrained heat shock proteins, poor detoxification, and mid-season strain can wreck stamina in ways most don’t see coming.
• Motorsports & Toxins — from exhaust and rubber dust to paint fumes and fire smoke, racing is a toxic environment. And when your liver and detox pathways are overwhelmed, toxins don’t just disappear—they get stored in fat and even brain tissue.
• The 5R Method™ for Longevity — how Reveal, Remove, Replace, Rebalance, and Retain create a repeatable system to extend your biological performance window.

This is not medical advice and we do not claim to diagnose, treat, or cure disease. The purpose of this episode is education—to help you understand the difference between just “getting older” and actually losing your performance edge unnecessarily.

💡 Your Takeaway: You don’t have to “age out” before your time. With functional testing, recovery protocols, and targeted high-performance health strategies, you can extend your prime years and stay race-ready on and off the track.

👉 Grab your free gift, What’s Stealing Your Edge?, in the show notes or bio link, and if you’re ready for personalized support, schedule a free High-Performance Health consult today.

Chapters

• 0:00 NASCAR's Age Reversal Phenomenon
• 1:39 Understanding Stress in Racing
• 4:27 The 5R Method for Biological Age Reversal
• 7:19 Taking Action and Final Lap Wisdom

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Not long ago, rookies in NASCAR were actually in their 40s and now they're teenagers and veterans are leaving earlier than ever. The difference Rapid aging versus age reversal. Today we're breaking down why endurance fades and how you can leverage high-performance health to stay race-ready for the long haul. Stay tuned. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Mordo. If you're like most in NASCAR's top tiers drivers, crews, owners or executives while you're busy chasing podiums, have you fully considered who's taking care of you Right here? You're about to start transforming your mind and body for peak race day performance with High Performance Health designed exclusively for the demands of NASCAR. As a certified High Performance Health coach and consulting hypnotist, I've coached elite entrepreneurs and athletes to higher energy, sharper focus and greater resilience naturally, safely and backed by science. And right now I'm bringing that same engineered approach to the best in motorsports. Here you'll find no wasted time, just a unique blend of integrative health, mental conditioning and proven recovery strategies, delivered in plain language that you can use right away. Imagine a season without burnout, brain fog or the costly crash of your health, because the truth is, the real race starts within. I'm grateful you're here, yes, always grateful for you joining me. I am Jeffrey Mort, your personal certified high-performance health coach. And welcome to another episode of the Breaking Boundaries for Champions podcast. And I want you to think back a few decades.

Speaker 1: 1:58

In NASCAR, it wasn't unusual to see rookies showing up in their late 40s or even 50s. Take Icon Dick Trickle, for example. He even won Rookie of the Year in 1989 in his late 40s I believe he was 48 years old when he won Rookie of the Year and contrast that with today. Rookies in the Cup Series are barely out of high school. We've got 18-year-olds stepping into one of the highest levels of motorsports and running like champions. And here's the flip side Many veteran drivers are stepping away earlier than ever. Some may move into partial schedules you know, maybe crown jewel events like the Daytona 500, the Coke 600, the Southern 500, or one of my favorites, the Brickyard 400. And others may step down into maybe the Xfinity or truck series or even late models, because endurance in the car just isn't there anymore. And Dale Jr talked about this openly recently on his podcast on the Dale Jr Download. After stepping away he jumped back into a few select races and by the halfway point he felt cooked, hot, frustrated, exhausted. Even 300 laps felt like too much and then eventually he shifted to the shorter, 150-lap late model races where the demand fit his capacity. And, of course, you know, we still see legends like kenny wallace running a single man dirt operation at 62 years old. And then, of course, kenny schrader still running locally at age 70 and, absolutely amazing, those guys are doing that on a regular, weekly basis.

Speaker 1: 3:43

But when drivers are stepping away in their late 30s, early 40s, the question is why? Why are drivers, these athletes at the top of the sport, feeling the effects of rapid aging earlier than before? Now, before we dive in, let me be completely clear. This episode is for educational purposes only and we're not here to, of course, diagnose, treat or cure any disease or give you medical advice. But what I share on this podcast is rooted in the fact that I'm here to help you in functional health and high-performance strategies that are designed to optimize your biology and performance safely and naturally.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Now most people just say that this is simply part of aging and some may say, well, it's the stress of the career choice and that lifestyle. But stress is more than the mental weight of things like kids, career or cash flow. I like to redefine stress with an acronym Now stress S-T-R-E-S-S. That is something troubling, resulting in essential system shutdown. And we have external stressors, which are things like travel and lack of sleep and financial strain, relationship issues. And then, of course, we have internal stressors. These are toxins, gut bacterial overgrowth, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, heavy metals, systemic inflammation. These both can elevate cortisol. Cortisol is our stress hormone and when elevated it can cause essential systems of the body like digestion, reproduction, immunity and so many other systems of the body to actually shut down, to go offline, and that can cause a cascade of health issues.

Speaker 1: 5:42

And one type of stress that most drivers haven't considered is oxidative stress. Think of it like rust on metal. The body is actually oxidizing from the inside out. It damages cells and tissues and accelerates aging Over time. This oxidative stress can weaken endurance, it slows recovery and it chips away at resilience. But the good news is it's completely preventable. And here's where high-performance health gets very interesting, because when your central nervous system and biology are under chronic stress or experiencing that oxidative stress, your body shifts into survival mode. Energy goes to the essentials just keeping you alive and not focused on endurance or stamina, and this is why endurance diminishes. That's why the summer heat feels unbearable, that's why a 500-lap race feels like a 1,000-lap race. And if we ignore this rapid aging, if we address it, we create age reversal, not by changing the calendar, but by reversing something that's called biological age, and I'm going to share with you in just a moment on how we can actually track that and reverse the biological age.

Speaker 1: 7:07

Have you ever skipped the gym for 30 days or even seven days, and feel the difference when you come back? Well, the same is true for heat shock proteins. These proteins protect your cells and improve resilience in the heat, but they only show up when you train them. That's why training like using sauna is so powerful, not just for heat resilience but also for detoxification. It's able to clear out all of those environmental toxins that you might be breathing in at the racetrack the rubber compound from the tire, the compound that they put on the racing surface. You know all the exhaust fumes and the heat buildup from the paint. Basically, you know paint and carbon fiber and plastics. If you can smell something from inside the race car, those molecules are actually making their way into the body and we need to be able to detoxify those and detoxification matters.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Think about Bristol. Just last week, as of the recording of this episode here, the Fords specifically had an issue with the rubber buildup on the headers and that was catching fire and it was filling the cockpits with smoke. The drivers and the crews inhaled that junk. And if the liver can't keep up with those toxins, they don't just vanish, they get stored in adipose tissue this is the fat tissue and then sometimes even get stored in the brain, which is mostly fat as well, and then that slows you down, that ages you faster. So that's just one example, and here's where conventional thinking really misleads people. The body is not a machine. Machines wear out and parts fail. Now, yes, parts can fail in the body too, but the body is a continuous biological process. It adapts and it thrives or it breaks down, depending on how you fuel, recover and clear the system. And, unlike a machine, biology can actually reverse age markers if you optimize it.

Speaker 1: 9:18

So over at our private wellness practice, victory Lane Wellness, we use what we call the 5R method to reverse this rapid aging process, and I'll give you the five steps quick and then we'll run through them one at a time Number one reveal. Number two remove. Number three replace, number four rebalance and number five retain. So let's talk about those. How do we reveal? Well, we run functional lab tests, right, big five, and also add in the biological age test, the DNA biological age test, and this actually looks at your biological age, not your chronological age, but it compares it to it. So you know, for example, I'm 52 years old and if my biological age says that I'm 55 years old, I know that there's work to be done and I can actually do things to reverse that biological age. So it's less than my chronological age. And we do this with clients all the time.

Speaker 1: 10:24

And the Big Five Labs actually help to look at the root causes. These are deficiencies and toxicities, hormone imbalances and so much more. So step number two was remove. What are we removing? We're eliminating toxins, we're eliminating stealth pathogens, we're eliminating stressors and so much more. Number three replace we want to restore those deficiencies.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Talking about minerals, talking about vitamins and hormones nutrients the body requires for biochemistry to take place. Remember I said earlier that the body is a biological process and it needs raw materials to do that process. Otherwise it's going to be scavenging. For instance, it might be pulling calcium from the bones, causing weak and brittle bones. You know there's a lot of drivers that are having in the same year. They get in accidents and they're having back injuries, they're having broken shoulders comes to mind. And so you know how is that happening. You know, of course, 150 mile an hour impact can certainly break a back. But could that have been prevented from making sure we have strong bones, and it's not just from taking a calcium supplement, it's from making sure, actually, that we have enough magnesium in the body so that the the body is not trying to pull calcium from the bones and make them weak. So that's just one example of replacing. And how do we know that step? Go back to step number one. We reveal through the functional lab test if a person has enough calcium. And it's actually a mineral ratio, a calcium to magnesium ratio, which is not measured in blood work. We actually measure that through soft tissue, with a simple hair sample, and that's why you can do these labs right at the track.

Speaker 1: 12:08

So number four was rebalance. We want to train the nervous system with things like light, with sleep. That's right. Let me go back there for a second. Light is a nutrient. Think of light. Sunlight meaning is a think of that as supplementation. So that helps to train the nervous system, getting that morning sunlight in the eyes. No sunglasses, I know they look cool, you know, not through a window, not through a windshield, but getting that morning light and sunset light in the eyes helps to set that nervous system. Also, sleep and movement and targeted supplementation help to rebalance. And then, of course, we want to retain all of those results, which brings us to step number five. We want to build a repeatable, measurable system that sticks season after season.

Speaker 1: 12:56

This is the actual blueprint to not just maintain but to extend careers, sharpen focus and keep your competitive edge well past when most are stepping down from driving. And if you're serious about unlocking your edge, I got a free gift for you. What's Stealing your Edge Assessment? You'll find it in the link in the show notes or in the bio link. It's a fast, eye-opening tool to uncover where stress is draining your performance. And if you're ready to run deeper, schedule a free, high-performance health consultation. We'll walk through your symptoms, your goals and the best starting point to turn back your biological age and keep you race ready for decades to come.

Speaker 1: 13:39

So the final lap remember you're not locked into rapid aging. You can train your biology just like you service your car, train your pit crew or execute your race strategy. The rookies may come in young but with the right high-performance health strategies, veterans can extend careers, outlast the grind and write their own legacy. And you can learn more about Legacy, champion's Edge and Pit Precision programs in the show notes or the bio. Those are the programs that Victory Lane Wellness offers. That also supports their Give Back Race for a Reason program helping the kids of racing charities heal through integrative health. You can learn more over at victorylanewellnesscom. Until next time, stay sharp, stay resilient and keep breaking boundaries. Bye-bye everybody.