In 2015, Kyle Busch broke both legs in the first race of the season.
He missed the next seven or eight races. The pit crew that had been preparing all winter to chase a championship and the bonus money that came with it suddenly found themselves working for a fill-in driver, sitting deep in the points standings, watching their shot at the title slip away before the season was even a month old. The discouragement in those first three months, as exercise physiologist Michael Lepp described it on our show this week, was something the team had to actively fight through every single day.
(Hear how he describes what he learned from Kyle Busch's fight that would inspire PAD Warriors)
Michael Lepp spent fifteen years as Senior Athletic Advisor at Joe Gibbs Racing building championship pit crews. Before that, and all throughout, he was working with cardiac and PAD patients, writing their exercise prescriptions, running a supervised group program he called the Dawn Patrol. He told us on this week's episode of The Heart of Innovations, live on KDOW, that the training plan he writes for a PAD patient and the program he built to win NASCAR championships are the same program. Multifactorial. Individual. Built around a plan. With a mental component that matters as much as the physical one.
When Dr. John Phillips asked Michael what he would say is the secret to what he built at Joe Gibbs Racing, Michael said it was hugs. And then he told the JD Gibbs story.
WATCH THE FULL STORY BELOW:
Michael said he never forgot it. Not because it was soft. Because it was right. "The key in anything," he told us, "isn't the good days. It's the bad days. How do I deal with the bad days? How do I recover from those bad days? That's true in life and everything. I see it in my cardiac patients, my PAD patients, my pulmonary patients. It's no different."
Here is what he said next, and I want you to read it slowly if you are someone who is fighting to keep walking when your legs are telling you to stop.
"Everybody's an athlete. My cardiac patients are athletes. My drivers, my pit crew, they're all athletes. It's what is their sport. Just because you're walking doesn't mean the pain and discomfort you have to tolerate to develop that collateral circulation is any different than any athlete I work with."
Your sport is walking. The pain you feel before you stop and rest, that claudication, that burning and heaviness that tells you you've hit your limit for today, is the same pressure a NASCAR driver feels on lap 400 when they're telling their crew chief over the radio that they don't know if they can make it. They push. And you push. And the body, given time and consistency and the right support around it, responds. That's not wishful thinking. That's the physiology of collateral circulation. New blood vessels. Built by the work.
The pit crew that got fired on the radio after Denny Hamlin dropped from first to thirteenth on the money stop at Darlington went on to become, by Michael's account, the fastest pit crew in the history of the sport. The same people. The same track, four years later. What changed wasn't talent. It was the system around them and what they did with the bad days in between.
You are not in a different category from those athletes. You are in the same one.
The bad days are part of it. The days you don't want to get up and walk are part of it. The days the mental health side overtakes the physical, as Michael put it, are part of it. What determines whether you get your championship at Homestead is not whether you have bad days. It's whether you come back the next day.
If you are struggling to come back, you do not have to do it alone. Our My Steps Walking Program is a physician-monitored, structured three-month program designed specifically for PAD patients, with more than 600 people enrolled and walking right now. And our Facebook community, more than 12,000 PAD patients who show up for each other every single day, is the Dawn Patrol Michael described. The group that takes care of itself on the days when you can't take care of yourself.
Come find us at PADhelp.org. Join us in the Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) Official Group on Facebook. And if something feels off with your legs right now, call the Leg Saver Hotline at 1-833-PAD-LEGS. It's free. Someone will answer.
Go home tonight. Hug the people you love. And come back tomorrow.
The Heart of Innovations airs live every Saturday on AM 1220 KDOW in the San Francisco Bay Area, the #1 healthcare innovation radio program in the Bay Area and the #1 Women in Innovation Podcast in the nation (Feedspot, 2025). Full episodes at PADhelp.org.