I grew up working my family's beef cattle farm on Sinking Creek in Newport, Va., some 20 miles west of the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. As young kids, my sister and I hated "real work," stuff like picking up rocks from the hayfield so the bailer didn't get bound up, or carrying salt licks to the cart or dragging 60-pound hay bales into piles so the high school boys working for six bucks an hour would have a slightly easier time stacking them on the trailer to the barn.

After Dale Earnhardt Jr. won his second Daytona 500, Marty Smith's thoughts turned to his family farm in Virginia. Marty Smith/ESPN

Naturally, this disgusted my grandmother, who had slaved and saved arm-in-arm with my granddaddy to purchase the place in the 1940s and worked it herself every single day until past her 90th birthday.

It is a gorgeous piece of land. It is a badge of family pride.

The workload increased a bit with age, as I matured from the hay stacker into the hay thrower, as I grew from the little guy who stood between daddy's legs and slopped gobs of paint on the lowest rungs of the gate while he painted the top side, to the teen atop the barn roof in the scorching summer heat, sanding away the rusty spots, pale redheaded skin frying like an egg as "That Summer" and "The Thunder Rolls" blasted from my Chevy Blazer's factory speakers, SPF-nothing, singing off-key into the sander like Tom Cruise into the "Risky Business" candleholder.

I can't stress how much complaining we did. Silently. We didn't dare bitch where Daddy or my Gran could hear. They'd have our hide. It wasn't fun, but the work carried life lessons on which I lean every single day, to this day.

Oddly enough the complaining and hard work are not the memories that rush to mind when I'm back there at my farm, whether physically or simply in my mind. Those memories are so sweet and so simple.

I think about sitting on a tailgate with a Dr Pepper and a pack of Nabs, neither knowing nor caring that my hands were grimy. We didn't get Dr Pepper or packs of Nabs often. I think about jumping in the Blue Hole in frayed cutoff jeans scared a rogue crawdad would pinch me.