CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In running as in NASCAR, the fastest start up front. So like a start-and-parker who unleashed a monster qualifying lap, I'm much too far forward on this cold Sunday morning, surrounded by sinewy professionals decked out in singlets and treating this charity 5K as if it's an Olympic final. But my eyes are on the boyish figure wearing a white T-shirt and red Ultimate Fighting Championship shorts, someone who also happens to be our host -- Kasey Kahne.

Like a lot of people in the NASCAR garage these days, Kahne is a runner. He's also a very good one -- so good, he's hoping to finish this footrace in a blazing 18 minutes, knocking out the six-minute-mile pace he routinely turns on his treadmill. Hours earlier at Charlotte Motor Speedway, he had climbed out of his wrecked No. 9 car in a huff, claiming illness but also angry over yet another brake failure. His Richard Petty Motorsports team had to find another driver to finish the event, beginning a chain of events that led to Kahne's release from RPM and his early move to Red Bull Racing, the organization he had agreed to drive for next season.

Kaey Kahne, left, settles in to race pace during the '5Kahne.'

“

I don't think you have to do it, but I don't think it hurts to work out. And for myself, I think it helps me.

”

-- KASEY KAHNE

But here on this 44-degree morning, all that is yet to come. Runners try to shake limbs awake, the chill making their breath emerge in smoky plumes. Wearing a numeral on his race bib that matches his car number -- it will be the last time he'll compete using the No. 9, as it turns out -- Kahne looks about as fresh as can be expected after a short night's sleep. He stands under a banner displaying the race name, a "5Kahne" designed to raise money for the Kasey Kahne Foundation.

The goal of yours truly, a regular runner for about a year and a half who churns along at a considerably slower pace than Kahne, is to try and keep up with him. And I manage to do it -- for about 100 yards. The horn sounds, the pack surges forward, and suddenly I feel like the human equivalent of a Prism Motorsports car, with faster runners in their fancy technical gear blowing past me like I'm standing still. Soon it becomes difficult to maintain even visual contact with Kahne, his brown hair and red shorts bobbing along near the front of a group that's rapidly becoming stretched out. Then the leaders turn a corner, and he's gone. I won't see him again until the finish line.

Even so, the pursuit has me energized, and pumping along at a personal-record pace. The clock at the first mile marker reads 8:04. I'm feeling pretty good about myself until a bearded figure pulls alongside on my left. It's Jimmie Johnson, who had started further back. He's a strong runner, too, with a targeted training regimen that demands miles at a seven-minute pace that would leave me in dry heaves. Trying to cover myself, I mention that I'm running on less than three hour's sleep, the early morning following a very late night at the track. "That's about right for me, too," he says. "The baby didn't want to fall asleep when we got home."

And with that, he's by me, loping along with a flowing, enviable stride, making it all look so effortless, just like he does each weekend behind the wheel of the No. 48 car. We pass the Carolina Panthers' football stadium and turn into a neighborhood where the hills begin, and this lowlander starts to hang on for dear life. Suddenly I feel like pulling off to the side of the road with a vibration.

Even Johnson has felt this way before, although he was just in middle school at the time. He thought cross-country would be a perfect way to stay in shape for motocross, the kind of racing he did before he got into cars. So he joined the team. "They popped the gun and we took off, and within a half mile I couldn't see the leaders anymore," he remembered at the speedway a few days before Kahne's event. "I thought, well, maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was."

He's gotten a lot better since. Running is a cornerstone of Johnson's fitness regimen, an intense blend of weightlifting and cardiovascular work designed by his New York trainer, John Sitaras. There are weeks when Johnson focuses on long runs, logging between 20 and 25 miles at what he calls a "reasonable" pace -- which, at eight minutes a mile, would still leave most people gasping. Then there are a weeks where he does short runs, turning between 10 and 13 miles at a torrid pace of seven minutes a mile or faster. These are no casual jogs. Johnson's running workouts are all pace-based, and Sitaras demands the driver meet certain time limits.

"I'll have a four-mile run distance that I have to do in 28 minutes on those weeks," he said. "That's a burner."

Kahne began running in much the same way, growing up as an active kid playing stick-and-ball sports. He's run for as long as he can remember, but gotten more serious about it over the past year. To keep from getting bored, he'll stagger his routine, running six miles one day and doing intervals -- run hard for a mile, jog for a mile, and repeat -- the next. While his training isn't quite as precise as Johnson's, Kahne estimates he runs about 10 to 12 miles a week on average, much of it on a treadmill where he can turn a blistering six-minute-per-mile pace. (Continued)