Time - Speed - Distance

Penguin and I went to Newfoundland that fall to compete in Targa, the rally race that turns the island’s towns and coastlines into a week-long circuit. We weren’t there to chase speed records. Our category was TSD: Time Speed Distance.

TSD is the mathematician’s rally. Instead of pure acceleration, it’s about precision. You’re given a target speed, a set of distances, and a clock. The goal is not to be fastest, but to be exact — to arrive at each checkpoint at the precise second predicted by your calculations. It’s a dance with time itself. Too fast, and you’re penalized. Too slow, same result.

I loved the routebooks most of all. Stacks of instructions with their own iconography: tulip diagrams showing every turn, arrows and notches that looked like runes from some automotive spellbook. To drive by them is to enter a new literacy, a language only shared by navigator and driver. Penguin called out the notes, I responded, and together we translated lines on a page into motion through space.

The roads of Newfoundland were their own story — jagged cliffs, harborside villages, long stretches where the Atlantic seemed to ride alongside us. The TSD category forced us to notice everything: the rise and fall of the road, the small deviations in speed, the way local spectators waved from their porches as if we were part of a parade.

What I admire most about TSD is that it’s not about domination. It’s about rhythm, calibration, attention. It’s rally as meditation. You don’t need the fastest car in the field; you need a steady one, a cooperative partner, and a trust in the mathematics of time.

For a week in Newfoundland, Penguin and I lived in that equation: car, clock, coastline. And it felt like the truest kind of race.