Crash and Burn: What My Son's Motocross Accident Taught Me About Running on Empty

There's a moment every mom knows the second it happens. Your stomach drops before your brain even catches up. Mine happened on a race track, watching my 14-year-old son's final lap of the weekend.

Colton is an early rider. Still learning, still building experience, but genuinely talented. The weekend before, he'd placed first. This weekend, only his second official race, he was sitting in a position to take third. For a kid this new to racing, that's a massive accomplishment.

But something was off.

You could see it in his body language before that last jump. The tiredness. The heaviness. He wasn't riding with the same sharpness he'd had all weekend. And then, on that final jump, he didn't land it.

He crashed. Hard enough that it caused a pile-up on the track, and another racer landed on top of him.

I don't remember deciding to run. I just remember running faster than I ever have in my life.

He rode off that track on his own, which I will be grateful for every single day. But he suffered a pretty bad concussion and was out of racing for some time after that.

In the days that followed, once the fear settled enough for me to actually think, I kept replaying it. Not just the crash itself, but everything that led up to it.

Colton had signed up for more races than he probably should have, not realizing each race actually means two runs, spread out across an entire day. That takes an enormous amount of energy, especially for a body still learning what it's capable of.

He didn't rest properly. He didn't hydrate the way he needed to.

And the night before his biggest race of the weekend, he went and cut someone's grass because he'd promised to get it done. A commitment he didn't want to break, so instead of resting, he spent the evening before burning energy he didn't have to spare.

He was burning the candle at both ends. And his body, at some point, was always going to send the bill.

I don't say any of this to blame him. He's 14. He's learning, and honestly, this is exactly the kind of lesson most of us don't learn until we're adults, if we learn it at all.

Because here's what stuck with me most in the aftermath: this wasn't really about motocross.

We can push and push and push, telling ourselves we'll rest later, we'll slow down once this is over, once this project wraps, once this season ends. We overcommit before we've even ramped up. We say yes to one more thing, one more race, one more obligation, because we don't want to disappoint anyone or break a promise.

And for a while, it works. Until it doesn't.

Because eventually, if we aren't taking care of ourselves, there is a consequence. Sometimes it's quiet, a slow erosion nobody else notices. And sometimes it's very loud, very physical, and impossible to ignore.

Colton's crash was loud. But the buildup to it? Quiet, gradual, easy to miss. Just like it is for most of us.

I think about how many of us have been in his position professionally. Taking on too much, too fast, before we've properly built up our capacity for it. Not speaking up when the load is getting heavy. Not delegating because we'd rather push through than admit we're maxed out. Saying yes to the extra project the night before the big presentation instead of protecting our energy for what actually matters most.

We tell ourselves we can handle it. Right up until the moment we can't.

And here's the part that gutted me most as I literally watched him sleep that first night after his crash: the impact was never going to be just his. Another racer went down because of that crash too. Whatever happens when we're running on empty doesn't just affect us. It ripples out to the people around us, whether we mean for it to or not.

Our team feels it when we're stretched too thin and start dropping things. Our families feel it when we come home with nothing left to give. Our clients feel it when we're too depleted to show up the way we normally would.

Imagine if we treated rest as part of the preparation, not something we squeeze in after everything else is done.
Imagine if we taught ourselves, and our kids, to recognize the signs of empty before we hit that final jump.
Imagine if pacing ourselves was seen as strength instead of holding back.
Imagine if we got as intentional about recovery as we are about ambition.

Colton is okay now. He's back to being himself, slowly working his way back toward racing again. But that day changed something in how I think about pushing limits, mine and his.

Because talent and drive can only carry you so far if you're not also protecting your energy. At some point, the body keeps score, whether it's on a race track or in a boardroom.

We can go, go, go for a while. But eventually, if we don't pay attention, we crash and burn. And when we do, it rarely takes down just us.