The real race is under way well before the green flag

The alarm clock was supposed to go off at 7:45 a.m., but something happened. Maybe it was the dreaded "AM/PM" setting. Maybe "off" was sleepily struck instead of "snooze." It doesn't matter, not with the digital readout showing 8:30, and race day having long since dawned at Martinsville Speedway -- more than an hour away from the Greensboro, N.C., hotel room you're currently sitting in, rubbing your eyes and cursing the alarm and wondering how bad it's going to be.

You'll find out, soon enough. You shower, dress, and pack up the laptop. You're out the door in 20 minutes. No time for the free breakfast downstairs, no time for Starbucks, no time for anything. You zoom past the Greensboro airport and through rolling piedmont that would be pretty to look at if you weren't so concerned about other things. You make time on a four-lane road that reduces to two before the Virginia state line. No cops, thank goodness. Everything's going to be all right, you tell yourself. Just a Sunday morning drive. And you honestly believe that, until you crest the top of a hill, and see the monster sprawled out before you.

Race traffic.

You're maybe 10 miles from the racetrack now, but it doesn't matter. You're too late. You scan the state map, looking for some kind of side road, but there is none. It has you. You spend the next three hours inching along, the speedometer needle sometimes coming to a complete halt, moving more slowly than the guys walking down the side of the road hawking illegal T-shirts. Sure, you'll make it for the race. But Sunday mornings are when reporters get guys like Max Siegel of Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Geoff Smith of Roush Fenway Racing, team executives usually on site only on race days. Other writers, you're certain, are filling up notebooks while you're tooling along inside the belly of the beast.

And it's one that has to be dealt with every week. Drivers and team owners sleep in plush motor homes, either in the infield or in an adjoining lot. Crewmen are at the track at o'dark thirty. VIPs and executives fly over it all in helicopters. The rest of us who make a living in NASCAR have to face the traffic issue every Sunday. Two things reporters talk about more than anything else: hotels, and how early to leave on race morning. Six hours before the green flag, at least. Seven, just to be safe. Eight if there are extenuating circumstances, like the additional security surrounding President Bush's appearance at the Daytona 500 in 2004. It's not uncommon for reporters or PR reps to bring pillows, get to the track at daybreak, and sack out for a few more hours in the back seat of the rental car.

You try everything to beat it. You pore over maps and gazetteers. You hear rumors of secret, dirt-road back ways, some of which work out and some of which don't. You hear horror stories about somebody who's been coming in one way for years, only to find that police have blocked off his last left turn 100 feet from his parking space, and he has to go to the tail end of the two-hours-long line. You know a newspaper columnist who once tried to cover the Coca-Cola 600, never got there, and wrote a piece on traffic from his car. Yes, the real race on a Sprint Cup weekend begins not when the 43 cars roll off the starting grid, but hours earlier, as the 100,000 or more coming to see the event battle one another trying to get there.

You become as road savvy as an urban planner, more familiar with street grids than a cartographer. You find obscure, alternative ways in, like the 19-turn backwoods path in Atlanta, the dirt-road passage through the swamps and palm groves at Homestead, the route past the little barbecue shack at Talladega. You couldn't describe these detours if you wanted to. You don't know the street names, only inconspicuous landmarks like a gas station or a white picket fence. You learn through experience that you can leave a little later at Bristol because so many people camp, where to get off Las Vegas Boulevard at Las Vegas, how to avoid the main drags at Daytona and Kansas. It begins to resemble a science.

The security at the 2004 Daytona 500 was enhanced due to a visit by President Bush.

But still, there are some times where you can't avoid it, like the aforementioned episode at Martinsville that unfolded last year. There are going to be some mornings when you hit the wrong button on the alarm, all your back routes fail you, and you're just stuck on the same road as 70,000 other people, having to fight your way in. I have three such episodes that immediately come to mind:

• Sonoma, last year. I stayed in Vallejo to do a column on Jeff Gordon's hometown, and had an easy commute on Friday and Saturday along a pretty two-lane road skirting San Pablo Bay. I mentioned to a California writer where I was staying. His response: "So, you're going to leave Sunday at 5 in the morning, then?" Sure enough, on Sunday I came to a dead stop about two miles from my hotel, blocked by all the traffic coming from Oakland and Sacramento. So I backtracked, taking a 90-minute detour through Napa and Sonoma, picking my way through the vineyards to Infineon Raceway. Note to self: Next time, stay on the other side of the track.

• Charlotte, 2002. Night races are deceiving. You think you can leave a little later, but you can't. I decided to have breakfast with a friend on the morning of the 2002 Coca-Cola 600, and I paid for it by sitting in traffic for nearly four hours, the longest it's ever taken me to get to a track. My noon departure time was much too late for a 5:30 race. The murderous slog up U.S. Highway 29 was exacerbated by worries that my car was overheating, fears that led me to keep the air conditioner off. Now, every time I go to Lowe's Motor Speedway, I take another way in. And I'm there before noon.

• Daytona, 2005. The problem here wasn't getting to the track, but getting back. It was about 2 a.m. when Tony Stewart finally won the rain-plagued Pepsi 400, so those of us working for daily newspapers didn't have much to write. About 90 minutes later, I tried to leave the racetrack. I've never had a worse experience in an automobile. Traffic was gridlocked. It was so humid that windows kept fogging up, and it was difficult to see the cars on either side of you. Hour after hour passed. I had the radio at full blast trying to stay awake. By the time I got back to my Lake Mary hotel room, it was 6:30 and daylight. Perhaps not coincidentally, I haven't been back to the 400 since.

In no other sport does just getting to the event require such a cagey test of will. But that's race traffic, which you disrespect at your own peril. It's always there, every Sunday, thwarting the best attempts of tracks to manage it or visitors to circumvent it. There are times where it feels like some living, breathing thing, a wild animal that must be wrangled into submission. Those who love racing challenge it head-on, but in reality they have no other choice. Racetracks will change, cars will change, drivers will change, but race traffic will always be there. Like the cockroaches, it will outlast us all.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.