There were a few times during my career that covering one race or event on a given weekend wasn't enough.

If the circumstances presented themselves, I sometimes was able to double dip.

One year, the Indy Cars were scheduled to race on Saturday in Phoenix and NASCAR was set for a Sunday race in Atlanta. I sat down with an airline schedule (remember those?) and figured out a way to take a red eye out of Phoenix and get to Atlanta in plenty of time to make it to the track for the Sunday race.

It turns out that everybody was pleased with the idea because the Atlanta sports writer who would have had to cover the race was far more interested in working on the NCAA tournament games in Atlanta that Sunday. He had covered the preliminaries at the track but had also been struggling to decide at which event to use a stringer for on Sunday.

I was excited by the idea of covering two feature events and having bylines in the papers from nearly 1,600 miles apart on the same weekend _ and I was young enough that the prospect of almost no sleep for two days didn't bother me much.

The race in Phoenix ran without a hitch and I was able to get some dinner with friends before heading for the airport. The red eye took off on time and I caught a few winks of sleep on the plane before we arrived in Atlanta at around 5 a.m.

I had booked a room at one of the airport hotels and was able to get my rental car and check into the hotel by 6 a.m. I set my alarm for 7:30 and fell soundly asleep.

When the alarm sounded, I got up. But it was like I was sleepwalking. I probably shouldn't have gone to sleep at all. But I was able to struggle out of bed, get dressed, grab a cup of coffee and a croissant at the hotel restaurant and head for Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Again the race went off without a problem. By the time I finished my writing, about 2 1/2 hours after the checkered flag, I was ready to collapse. I hardly remember the drive back to the hotel.

Normally, I would have taken a late flight or even a red eye to get home that night. But I guessed, rightly, that this was not the weekend to race back to New Jersey.

I was proud of myself for what I viewed as a major accomplishment, although no one else even mentioned it.

It was a lot easier the next time I did a weekend double because, this time, the races were a lot closer together geographically.

In those days, NASCAR had a race in Daytona Beach, FL, on the Saturday closest to the Fourth of July. It was known as the Firecracker 400.

Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) scheduled a race on the Sunday of that weekend at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, Ohio, my old home town. I couldn't miss that.

The only possible glitch was the forecast of rain in Daytona. A postponement until Sunday would have ended my hopes to cover both races and put the pressure on the Cleveland sports writer to cover that race for me on what was supposed to be his day off.

We were on the phone numerous times until the race in Daytona got past the halfway point, making it official and freeing me to get to Cleveland _ if I made my plane.

The race was slowed by several rain delays before NASCAR officials finally decided everyone had had enough and ended it a few laps short of a complete race. I was the last passenger to board the plane in Daytona before they shut the door.

The rest of the trip went smoothly.

My professional life got a little more complicated when Tony George, the president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a member of the family that owned the Hoosier track, decided to start his own Indy car series as a rival to CART.

The Indy Racing League (IRL) was formed to rein in ever-increasing costs, open up the competition to grass roots racers and keep the team owners in the established CART series from dominating Indy car racing and dictating the rules and the schedule.

The split, which began in 1996, also split the already thin fan base and caused a Hatfields and McCoys type of feud, with both sides spitting venom and saying the other side was killing the sport.

It also meant I had more races to cover in person or make arrangements for. And there were plenty of conflicting dates.

CART, which lost the Indy 500 in the split, decided to run a race in East St. Louis, IL, just across the river from St. Louis, MO, on the same weekend as the 500. But, instead of trying to go head-to-head, the CART race was scheduled for the Saturday before the 500.

Although Indy had lost a lot of luster with the split, it was still a big event and drew most of the big names in motorsports journalism. Trying to build up its event, CART offered to fly any of the writers who wanted to cover both events back and forth on a charter.

St. Louis is just a four-hour drive from Indianapolis and it was also the city where my sister Judy and her family lived at the time. I decided to skip the charter flight and drive with Judy and my pal Lewis.

My Indy race advance was written and sent on the wire on Friday, before I left for St. Louis and there was nothing I had to do in Indy on Saturday. Until the CART race was scheduled, that Saturday was always a day for playing in a media golf tournament.

I didn't mind giving up the golf, but the hardest part of the trip was the ride back home after the race.

It was a very long day and we usually made it back to Indy around midnight. That was not a problem except for the fact that we generally got up around 5:30 a.m. on Indy race morning to make sure we were at the track in plenty of time to get parked and be settled in before the 11 a.m. green flag.

We did that trip for several years before the St. Louis race disappeared from the CART schedule.

The eventual end of the CART-IRL split also led to the strangest double I did in my career.

During the 12 years that the two Indy car series ran, there were numerous attempts to heal the conflict and bring them back together.

One year at Indy, I was invited to the motor home of Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor, aspiring race car driver and CART team owner.

We were friendly, but that was the first time Newman had asked me to join him in his motor home.

Once we had settled in, Newman looked at me with those famous penetrating blue eyes and said, "Mike, this war is killing us. You need to do something about it."

I was dumbstruck. What the hell was I supposed to do about the CART-IRL split?

"You've got a national pulpit," Newman went on. "Write a story about how we need to get back together. Maybe they'll listen to you."

I shook my head in wonder and said, "Paul, you know I've been writing story after story for years now about how this split is killing Indy car racing. It's about money and power and nobody is listening to me or to anybody else, it seems."

He shrugged and said, "Well, it was worth a try."

Finally, in May of 2008, there were all kinds of signs that the reunification of the rival series was imminent.

I was scheduled to fly to California for a NASCAR race at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, when I got word of a press conference at the Indy Speedway that same day.

Phone calls to several sources convinced me that the announcement in Indy was going to be the uniting of the IRL and CART, obviously a very important national story.

I called my boss and said, "Should I change my flight to Indy and cover the press conference before I fly to California? We can get somebody in the LA bureau to cover practice and qualifying at Fontana on Friday."

To my amazement, I was told to stay with my original plans and somebody from the Indianapolis bureau would cover the press conference.

That was a little upsetting. But I was even more put off when I called Indy from the airport before I left Raleigh and found they didn't have anyone to cover the press conference.

"They'll fax us the announcment and we'll write it from the office," the Indy news editor told me.

I was aghast. I had written literally million of words since the formation of the IRL was announced in 1994 about the split, which almost killed one of the most important forms of auto racing in the world. And the AP wasn't even going to have a reporter at the press conference that finally ended the conflict.

Again, I called my boss and said, "We've got to do something about this. I'll cover it myself from California."

After some back and forth, she agreed.

I called the head of PR at the IRL and told him what I had in mind and he agreed to work with me.

After arriving at the track in California, I wrote a quick NASCAR feature for Saturday's papers. Then, at the appointed time, thanks to that PR person,, I listened to the Indy press conference on an open telephone line, writing several leads on the unification before getting some of the principles on the line for added quotes.

The copy flowed to NY sports and onto the wire. It went amazingly smoothly.

Just as I wrapped up that story, it was time to cover NASCAR qualifying. 

I got one quick call from my boss with an "atta boy" and that was it. To this day, I'm amazed at how smoothly it went with so many possible things to go wrong.