Racing Toward a Dream
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[0 Comment]Randy Tolsma was driving back from the airport. He'd been out of town on business, and all he could think about was how good it would feel to finally get home to his wife, Tiffanie.
That's when he was pulled over for doing 78 in a 70 mile-per-hour zone. But 78 isn't even half as fast as he drives when he's on the job. Randy races a Chevrolet pick-up at speeds up to 178 miles per hour in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Tiffanie says she doesn't worry about her husband's high-speed laps around a track. It's his off-hours driving that makes her nervous. "When brake lights come on in front of us," she says, "he doesn't slow down." Randy gauges the distance between his vehicle and the one in front of him before deciding whether to slow down. And that holds true whether he's racing or driving to the grocery store.
Tiffanie has missed only one of her husband's 150 races during their ten-year marriage. Their involvement in motor sports has given the Tolsmas something marriage counselors recommend for all couples: a shared dream.
High-Octane Dreams
Racing has been a lifelong passion for both Randy and Tiffanie. Tiffanie's mother used to write for a racing magazine, and her grandparents owned a speedway in southeastern Idaho. Randy saw his first auto race when he was just a few weeks old, too young to know he was watching his dad and his uncles compete against other drivers on an oval track. But it didn't take him long to claim the sport as his own.
"As a kid, everything was racing to me," he recalls. "I raced my friends on bikes. I was involved in all the sports, but racing was my passion."
At age nine, Randy started racing go-karts.
"I remember going to the first race and looking at the trophies," he says. "I found the first-place trophy and figured that's the one I would take home." He competed against two other drivers, finishing third. But he won a championship the second season and claimed 100 go-kart victories before he was old enough to get a driver's license.
He moved up to midget racers—small, open-wheeled cars—by age 15. When Tiffanie Myers, a teenage go-kart racer, first heard about Randy, he was already a well-known driver around Boise, Idaho. They finally met, at a race track, and Randy asked her out the next day.
On their first date, they went to a movie—Stroker Ace, starring Burt Reynolds as a champion race driver. Afterward, Tiffanie accompanied Randy to a friend's house where she watched the guys get ready to take their cars to Oregon for a race. Give Randy credit for single-minded devotion to racing, but subtract a few points in the romance department.
"Racing was the number-one thing in my life," he says. "I told Tiffanie that racing came first and she came second. That's how focused I was on that dream."
Randy was Tiffanie's first boyfriend, and here he was telling her she ranked behind a midget race car. How'd she react to that news?
Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 1998, Fall
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