I am 46 years old and I’ve never timed myself running a 40-yard dash. For all I know, I may have missed out on an NFL career, assuming that NFL career didn’t involve catching the ball or throwing the ball or tackling anyone or being tackled. Also, those playbooks look impossible to memorize.
Still, a man wants to know certain things about himself, especially if those things take fewer than 10 seconds to learn.
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I was inspired after seeing 59-year-old NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell run a 40-yard dash in his office hallway in 5.53 seconds. Sure, Goodell was a football, basketball and baseball captain in high school where he was named athlete of the year. And he would have played in college if not for an injury. And he’s been surrounded by top athletes for his entire career. But I have pluck.
Goodell was inspired by NFL Network anchor Rich Eisen, who started the annual #RunRichRun challenge in 2005 to raise money for St. Jude’s hospital. Eisen, 48, ran a 5.97 at the NFL combine earlier last month.
Having never run any distance at all on a football field, and only having a very vague idea of how far 40 yards is, I decided to undergo an intense training regiment. I enlisted the aid of the USC football team, who assigned me to work with Ivan Lewis, the team’s head strength and conditioning coach who was American Football Monthly’s College FBS Conditioning Coach of the Year in 2013.
I met Lewis at the end of the team’s football practice. He’s a giant, square-jawed, deep-voiced man who seems like he is always about to order you to drop and do 40. As I was waiting for him to prepare our session, I joined the reporters interviewing Trojans coach Clay Helton, in order to get inspired.
“Today was a good pad-popping day,” Helton said, which I found inspiring.
Later he said about something else: “They may be big men, but they have little guy skills.”
This really fired me up, since I’m a little guy and running seems like a little guy skill. At 5-foot-11 and 175 pounds, I had the build to beat Goodell. Plus all that pluck.
Lewis’s first question for me involved my dash outfit, which was unconventional: a suit and very old blue Adidas Sambas. I explained that Eisen runs in a suit and tie, and that, unlike Eisen, I don’t own spikes. Lewis said this was going to cost me a half a second of time and implied it was going to cost me nine seconds of looking stupid.
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The first thing Lewis had me do was stand straight and lean forward until I started to fall onto my face. I figured this was a Zen-inspired act in which I placed complete trust in my coach and it would pay off later in a surprising way, like waxing on and off did for the Karate Kid. But Lewis just wanted to see which leg I saved myself with to determine which was stronger. Even though I’m a righty, I’m a 40-yard-dash lefty. Which Lewis said is how it is for most people.
Next, Lewis taught me my stance. Dashers at the combine get to use the whole painted white line up to the edge, which seems lame since it makes it a 39 yard, 2 feet and 8-inch dash. I put my left foot two feet behind the line and kept my right foot a hips-width apart. “Linemen start too wide,” Lewis said. Those were the kind of big-men problems I didn’t have.
I put my right hand on the ground at the top of the hash mark, cupping it like a Lego mini-figure, and placed my left hand behind my back. I put all my weight on the ball of my left foot, while my right foot barely touched the ground. I picked my butt up uncomfortably high. When I took off, I was supposed to swipe and cloak: My left hand would violently come up to my face and then swing behind my back. We practiced increasing my intensity by having me get on all fours and then cloaking and swiping to save myself from falling on my face. A lot of Lewis’ training methods seemed to involve endangering my face. I wondered if this was something that American Football Monthly knew about.
When I exploded off the line, I was supposed to look down until the 15-yard line and then look to the end of the field. That way my body came up like a plane taking off. I should aim to take four steps to the five-yard line and six to the ten. As I ran, I’d pump the arm opposite my leg. My knees should push hard downwards. “Speed is all force production in the ground,” Lewis said. This seemed a little cold and mathematical, and not accounting at all for pluck. But I had decided to dedicate my three minutes of training to following Lewis unconditionally, so I went with it.
The last time Lewis timed himself, he ran a 4.9. Three guys at the combine this year ran a 4.32. To spur me on, Lewis predicted I’d run a 6.0, though he said it in less of a spur-on way than an I-don’t-care-at-all way.
I got into my starting stance and took off. I did not swipe and cloak. I did not pump the opposite arms. I did not look like a plane taking off. I looked like a guy running in a suit from something that was scary, but not very scary.
“Something tells me that was about a nine,” Lewis said.
It was not a nine. I ran the 40 in 5.95 seconds. In a suit. With old sneakers. After not getting a haircut in three months. That’s better than two players in combine history: 300-pound University of Houston offensive linemanIsaiah Thompson’s 6.06 in 2011 and 316-pound Arizona State guard Regis Crawford’s 6.07 in 2004. Both of whom can bench press me more than 20 times.
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Lewis seemed excited, in an end of “Rudy” kind of way. I knew I could do better, but also that I wasted a lot of the USC’s football program’s time. So I put away my metaphoric cleats, which were old sneakers without any tread on them that I now greatly resented.
I learned some important lessons. First, a football field isn’t very big. A 46-year-old writer can run a football field in fewer than 15 seconds and not be out-of-breath. If you took away the pads, the tackling, and the ball, football wouldn’t be much of a sport at all.
I also learned that, while I might have “good knee drive,” I was not destined for the NFL or any occupation that involves physical activity.
Still, I bet I write faster than Roger Goodell.
(Top photo: Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
