By the time I crossed into Mower County, Minnesota, the smell of manure was overpowering. Driving with the windows down was making my eyes water, and using the air conditioning only filled the Touareg's cabin with the previously unknown odor of refrigerated crap. The Volkswagen crested a hill and descended into a valley, towards the factory in Austin where Hormel cures pork shoulders and mystery bits into Spam. By the time I drove past it, the stink of Spam overpowered the fertilizer. Bring the stink, Austin!

Austin, Minnesota can stake a few claims to fame: The aforementioned Spam plant; the birthplace of John Madden; a population over its 712 square miles that, were it moved to Manhattan, would fit into four square blocks; and the seat of Mower County, which means the Mower County Fairgrounds are located there and, by extension, the reason for my visit: lawn mower races.

Watching lawn mowers race is an unsettling experience, not unlike watching hockey players fight or expensive cars crash. Unsettling, yet fascinating. The sport has popped up in Maine and Arizona and points between, where machines with names like Sodzilla and Weedy Gonzales hash it out in regional races for a chance to win a title and a plastic trophy at the nationals. The meager trappings keep mower racing firmly in the grassroots: "Nobody's going to spend $10,000 to win [those]," says racer Andy Tronnes.

Racing alongside his father, Brian, 19-year-old Andy has been modifying lawn mowers for seven years. The class in which he races requires that only the mower's chassis needs to be original, leaving him free to cut, weld, fabricate, and rework everything around it. "There's a lot of ingenuity involved," he tells me as we stand in the muddy field that doubles as the racing pits. He lifts the hood off his mower to show me how the original steering linkage - a bent piece of steel rod held in place by cotter pins - has been replaced by a solid aluminum bar and adjustable, threaded tie rods. The camshaft of his Briggs and Stratton engine wasn't aggressive enough for racing, so Andy removed it and ground the lobes to a profile he designed. On the hood, a tach is bolted to a pedestal in the driver's line of sight like a '69 GTO Judge. A single chromed Lake pipe wends its way along the running board before exiting in front of the back tire. There is no speedometer, but similar mowers have been clocked over 60mph.

"Where's the safety harness?" I ask, which seems a perfectly reasonable question for a machine that can keep up with highway traffic.

The reels on my tape recorder spin in my pocket, recording silence for several pregnant seconds. Brian looks at me as though I'm the idiot cousin on the Family Feud who has just offered up the world's turdiest answer. "I sure don't wanna be strapped to that thing when it rolls over."

Mowing the grass, for me, has always been fraught with misgivings, from the minor apprehension about wasting a Saturday afternoon to the metaphysical terror of building character - the same euphemism that was deployed by my father when convincing me that cleaning dogshit out of the pen was as noble an endeavor as raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Men like me could never have invented mower racing, because we would never associate lawns with sports, unless there were trophy classes for watching crabgrass grow from a hammock, which might actually prove to be more entertaining than NASCAR. But then, we couldn't invent mower racing, because we were beaten to it in 1973, halfway across the world in a smoky English pub, by an ex-rally racer named Jim Gavin.

Gavin was growing disenchanted with the ballooning costs of fielding a rally team and, as he and the locals enthusiastically tossed back pints, they began devising a new series of racing which was accessible to anyone. Their objectives were simple: No cash prizes, no modified engines, no sponsorship. The possibility of motorized barstools was discussed, then the merits of wheelbarrows. Gavin glanced out the pub's front window at a groundskeeper padding around a cricket pitch on his riding mower, and that's how, according to lore, the British Lawn Mower Racing Association was born. Nineteen years later, Chicago-based Gold Eagle Company - which makes a gasoline additive called Sta-bil - formed the United States Lawn Mower Racing Association based on the British blueprint. Their creation stories are tidy to the point of sounding apocryphal - BLMRA organizer Mark Constanduros even calls Gavin's revelation a "legend" - but lawn jockeys retell them with the conviction of a True Believer.

Bruce Kaufman is a True Believer.

PR man and president of the USLMRA, Kaufman is blessed with a 10,000-watt smile and an enthusiasm for his sport that, in a perfect world, could be bottled and sold as a cure for depression. "People call me 'Mr. Mow it All'," he beams, extending a hand and a business card that identifies him as such. In the fifteen years he's been overseeing the Association, Kaufman has smoothed all of the wrinkles out of putting on a race, but tonight his headset is crackling with radio traffic that demands his attention. He tugs my arm back to a trailer with a satellite uplink on its roof and opens the door to reveal what's lit his candle at both ends: a humming, blinking wall of green LEDs and video monitors. "This is our first live webcast," he explains. "Isn't it cool?"

Kaufman's headset has a hammerlock on his time, calling him off to another emergency, so I wander over to a row of white mowers, where Dave Stratton - a burly, gregarious man with a shaved head and a Van Dyke - is fastening the hood of one shut with a knotted-up bungee cord.

I tell him that mower racing looks like entirely too much fun, and he says, "You know Jeeps? It's like that. 'It's a Jeep Thing.' If you have to explain it to someone, they're not gonna get it."

The conversation turns towards the breakneck speeds that some mowers reach. Stratton leans over and grabs the edge of a vestigial cutting deck ("We cut a few inches off of them and weld 'em in place," he explains), using it to roll 450 pounds of lawn mower onto its hood, where it rocks like an upended turtle. The trick to reaching really high velocities, he explains to me, is in the gearing. He points to a small pulley on the crankshaft and an equally small one on the rear axle, connected by a belt. On a normal lawn tractor, it takes four revolutions of the engine to equal one revolution at the rear axle. On a racing tractor, the ratio is nearly 1:1, quadrupling its top speed. Stratton has taken his mower to the dragstrip, where it ran 75 mph through the traps. Insane, but not nearly so as USLMRA legend Bob Cleveland, whose 80.7 mph run garnered him a title of "Fastest Lawn Mower" at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It wasn't a hard title for Cleveland to win; nobody had run a mower there before.

How did he get a start in racing? I asked, and Stratton said that he was at a tavern in northern Wisconsin when he sat at the bar next to Troy Larson, a famous figure in lawn-racing social circles. "He told me he raced lawn mowers and I was like, 'You can't race lawn mowers! You're not missing enough teeth!'" Larson challenged Stratton to bring a mower out and race, so he did.

How many mowers does he have?

"Six real ones, but I have eight racers." He pointed to three nearby tractors, all his, which he plans to run in different racing classes. "My wife won't let me bring home any more."

I stood there and looked at the row of racing machines he'd trucked all the way to eastern Minnesota from North Dakota, and I was amazed.

Seven o'clock clicks past and I'm crouching behind a hay bale that borders a muddy track, my camera at the ready. Touching the other side of the bale is a row of Nomex-clad feet belonging to a clutch of mower racers, inching stealthily forward like they want to steal second. Mower Racing uses a Le Mans-style start, and as the announcer calls out, "On your marks, get set, mow!" the drivers must run across the track and mount their mowers, most of which have names like Geronimow, Mowron, Batmowbile, and Mowna Lisa. Mower racing, it seems, requires a capacity for shameless self-reference that would make Oprah blush.

Five single-cylinder mowers sputter to life and fart their way down the oval track, entering turn one at full throttle and executing long, glorious powerslides around the bend, exiting turn two under full countersteer. I'm reminded of Brian Tronnes' rebuke - I sure don't wanna be strapped to that thing when it rolls over - as the mowers drift perfect pendulum swings through the far end of the track. They come out of the corner on three wheels, the riders throwing the full weight of their torsos around to keep from going ass-over-teakettle, before hitting the straightaway and tearing off, leaving a wake of mud spray that peppers me and the corner workers like pellets.

Watching them, I can't help but think that an understanding of motorcycles is a must for lawn mower racers. It's the only way that one's mind can be wrapped around the notion of a machine where all the available room is taken up with go-fast equipment, and only the tiniest fraction of space is left for the rider to cling to. And cling they do. Most racers have bolted handlebar grips to their steering wheels, partly for control but mostly to aid in the deathgrip that keeps them from launching off and breaking a collarbone when, at some point in the race, a mower inevitably plows through a corner and runs nose-first into a hay bale.

Crossing the finish line first this race is Janet Witt, a 44-year-old administrative assistant at Pensacola Junior College in Pensacola, Florida. Witt broke her collarbone in 2003. That same year, she was voted "Driver of the Year" after winning a national trophy while undergoing chemotherapy.

She is pushing her mower to an impound lot in front of the bleachers, where winners have their rides inspected after the race, as I catch up with her. The wind has stopped blowing - choking the area in aerated dust and the lingering reek of internal combustion. I ask why she thinks something like mower racing has managed to find such a niche. She muses on this for a few seconds.

"I think a lot of it has to do with how everyone helps each other," she says. "We're all friends in the pits." She pauses. "But when the flag drops..." Her voice trails off and a lambent smile flicks across her face as she turns toward the grandstand, her fists held in the air, and the spectators erupt into cheer.

After returning home to Chicago, I began to notice the lawn tractors with their black-and-orange sale signs that were peppering the suburban landscape. I began working the mental arithmetic of how many of my vintage Volkswagen parts would have to be sold to clear out enough garage space for one. My coworkers, on the other hand, began thinking I'd gone Injun on them.

Our intern leaned into the doorway of my office. I looked up from my monitor. He was smirking. "You're not still looking at mowers, are you?"

"Of course not," I replied, "go play in traffic." Then turned back towards my screen and resumed browsing ads for a wrecked Hayabusa to donate its drivetrain, visions of a checkered flag and a plastic trophy dancing through my mind's eye.