A few years ago, after weighing in at a mere 100 lbs or so for many years, I gained some weight. Kind of the freshman pizza-butt kind of weight; the kind that I had only previously experienced when I was pregnant the one time and felt a sudden wave of “It is okay to eat finally” kind of relief and disbelief. Only this gainage was different because I told myself that it was just Winter weight. I would sleep it off and when Spring sprung, and the trees gained their leaves, that I would just lose the fat. That is what hibernation is all about, right?

It never happened.

I was too busy to stop and consider why I just ignored that Spring or the Summer of swimsuit weather that followed or the following 4 years of Springs and Summers (with an occasional compromise in swimsuits I would have called fat suits in my younger years). The wax melted off my surfboard because I left it outside. Neglected it, is more like it. I stopped dancing in public. Heck, it became increasingly rare for me to go in public. I stopped singing in the car. My daughter went from 11 to 16 almost without me. I convinced myself that when I was headed towards an airplane ramp that I was never happier, whether it was taking me away from home or pointed back towards the house I increasingly despised.

The thing that kept me busy and constantly in a state of stress (or absolute delight, depending on the day) was my big fake career. I had a career in the automotive industry, dammit! I denied being a blogger but refused to call myself a journalist. I pleaded that, “I am just me, MissMotorMouth and that is enough!” People needed me to tell them the truth and I found myself the perfect person to be the Queen of Honest. Okay, that was self-appointed but I worked hard at putting myself in the center of whatever I thought needed to be stripped bare whether is was dealers doing good deeds, manufacturers showing their human side or auto journalists telling me about their cats and, of course all of the proceeding misbehaving.

Flash forward to a race in Morocco; all women driving off road in a challenge that is more about self achievement as they push themselves through elements that would make most men cry than it is about winning a big trophy and exploding bottles of champagne. The efforts around the rally bring awareness to women as athletes. Heck, it brings awareness that all racecar drivers are athletes. The people of Morocco benefit from parallel humanitarian assistance that spreads the circumference of 3 weeks in a landscape that can only be referred to as harsh. This is one race that can only be described as more of an event of achieving a self-challenge with a footnote to a competition.

After 20 years, this race has done more good than not. It is the first automotive event to be given granted ISO 14001 certification for its environmental mandate. Thousands of the Moroccan poor are given medical treatments by the accompanying rally support crew of doctors and nurses. Micro-start ups ethically employing women and encouraging fair-trade self-sufficiency get earmarked for prize money that comes from race participants who win certain challenges. 110 teams of women prepared for what must have seemed like a lifetime of anticipation to just get to Morocco and head out of Essouria for 9 days of mental and physical challenges that would end in celebrations, tears, broken trucks, bruised egos and personal victories. My personal assignment was to get more US women interested in the race because I am fascinated by the event and so I wrote about it, Tweeted it, Facebooked it and, in the end, nearly flogged it to death.

The pickle started when the race organizers got in a bit of a situation this year. It seems that one of the teams, a team who had won before and that was set to win again, had lost sight of what the rally was about and was caught manipulating the mechanical devices that race officials use to monitor the success of each leg of the cross country rally. The team a installed a device in their electric odometer that allowed them to turn it off and on at will so that they could stay on top. Race officials became suspicious when they could not match the Iritrack data to that of the odometer. That is the technical term for what the rest of us would call cheating.

Now, these bright young women did not ever publicly deny that they did this, as far as I am aware. As in many crisis, almost everyone else involved somehow stumbled. Despite announcing the news of the discovery of misbehavior and consequences to all present at a meeting at the end of the rally, the race organizers proceeded to go about the business of celebrating 20 years of successful events. They had decided to disqualify the team and ban them from future races. They didn’t want this bruise or deface their accomplishments or those of everyone who supports the race and they refused to make a statement about it publicly. Teams who had competed in this year’s race began circulating the ugly truth about the disqualification. Somehow, in all of this mess, the truth got to me first. So, I did what every self-respecting wannabe journalist does these days: I tweeted it. The reaction was a stunned silence with only the sound of re-tweets pinging around the world.

In that silence I decided that, as Queen, the truth had to be told about the women who had brought frustration and anger to the event and it was my responsibility to be the one to tell the story.

I published a story on my website. I called it an article. I named the women and I called them names on top of that. I was very proud of myself. Women who had raced in previous years began crawling out to tell me their stories of cheating in previous years. Race teams from other events began calling with their similar stories at the races they compete in half way around the world. Manufacturers began pointing fingers at other sponsors, privately and off record questioning other manufacturer/sponsors. The team at the brunt of this had their own race truck referred to as not being a sign of sponsorship by the manufacturer who had let these women race under their banner for so long. A friend of the women sent me emails in desperation, denying any wrong doing by the team. They threatened me. They demanded that I bring down the article. I watched as the visits to my site had tripled my average daily readers and it had an international flavor now. The race organizers sat in silence as my article started getting referred to as a source and was written about on other sites, including the New York Times. I did a whole segment on a weekly podcast and got people who didn’t previously care about the race all riled up. Isn’t that a success? I got the rally attention!

People started getting in trouble and it wasn’t me. I could not get in trouble because I don’t have to reveal my sources and if I used that carefully placed word “allegedly”, then I am above accusations of slander and the law. I was not only Queen, I was a goddess. And I just ruined a lot of people’s year.

This all started to get to me and I made my blog private so that no one could see it for the time but, I made a promise to myself and anyone who would listen that I would be vindicated and return with my guns blazing. I deleted my tweets where I called the women names. I stopped talking about it out loud online as much but I was angry and spoke about it to friends. Ad nauseum. I learned that some friends think that in sportsmanship, you are cheating until you get caught. I learned how much people dislike people of certain countries. I learned what great internet stalkers my friends were as they searched for pieces of the humans on the web under the names of the team and their friend who threatened me. I learned that I had set in place discouragement in athletes who were deciding if they would even participate in future events. What seemed like a success before was now not-so-much because you can’t have a rally if no one shows up.

And then it happened. With a simple statement after all of the storm that I had caused, the race organizers did the right thing and they fessed up to what had happened. It was revealed that the team admitted fault to the organizers. The organizers put the word out that I was free to discuss the events. I made my hidden article public again and I was referred to as “célèbre blogueuse et twitteuse passionnée”, meaning a famous blogger & passionate Twitterer in a French article about the whole debacle. Wow. I was sort of big in another language for a brief bit but the attention and page views were eerily empty feeling.

But here is the reality after a few days of introspection and inspiration:

The women went into denial the moment that they decided that, in a race against distance and themselves, that they could appear to be physically and mentally the best athletes that they could possibly be by interfering with mechanical equipment. The race organizers wanted their event to stay in perfection forever with no criticism because they want the race to grow and bring the benefits to Morocco that it does. The motorsports sponsor of the team turned its back on the team. The friend of the team disqualified team thought that by bullying a mom writing from her sofa, the truth could be rewritten.

None of these people were in the right but I forgive them and offer my apologies for my part in the way that it all unfolded. And here is why:

I woke up after all this.  I have gained the weight and ignored my health but I am still young-ish and not obese (read: I can exercise). I let years with my daughter slide by while I ran, traveling with my ego, so that I didn’t have to decide whether our house was truly our home after years of a painful, needless lawsuit. I let things slip all around me. I allowed people to love me even while I pushed them away because I couldn’t admit that they were worried about me. I realized that I am just a blogger and that anyone can start a blog. I remembered that I am an artist and I love to draw, not pretend to be writing all of the time. I understood that I kept my daughter isolated from friends and family in lieu of my big fake career that my mother, so generously, pays for me to play pretend. She has been good like that and always has been.

In other words, I am no better or worse than a team of athletes who were afraid that they were not good enough and so they pretended and manipulated a way to be good enough and in the end, lost the ability to ever get a chance at redemption in that race. I feel for them that no one offered them the advice that there is a better way than being in self-denial but I am not sure what those feelings are yet. I do understand how they surrounded themselves with advisors and crew members who would support their self denial but not what set that in motion. Hey, Team 138? I am unemployable too and on my way here, I upset a lot of people.

The Rallye Aicha de Gazelles was a success this year and the participants believe that the unfortunate incident of cheating does not overshadow what a great rally it is. Life goes on and everyone is already in preparation for the 21^st rally. Many US women have contacted me that they are ready to go be a part of the event. Maybe I did do some good things in the middle of all of this.

I don’t know if this will be my last article but I do know that I love what I have been doing despite the times when I have stumbled. I want to continue the podcast and my webcast and move back home to Texas, help my mom run her antique business, actually make a living, let my daughter be around family and lifelong friends and visit my automotive friends in Dallas. Most people don’t know this but I used to be an antique and fine art appraiser so it is like going home in more than one way. Living there I can still share my knowledge and passion of the auto industry in my spare time and maybe, just maybe, I can drive in that race in Morocco one day but still be a productive person in the meantime. Above all, living there, I know that if I ever tried to stick an electronic device to the odometer of my life in order to deceive myself, my mother would have my hide.

Who knows. Maybe I will start a little blog about my new life when I get there. In the meantime, I have a 9’2″ surfboard for sale if anyone is interested.