It's the most vivid memory of my football career, and perhaps the most embarrassing - unless you count the time I whiffed on a tackle and grabbed air, but we'll skip that one for now. I was playing inside linebacker and recognized a reverse. The entire defense was flowing to the right, but I recognized the play from all the film I'd watched, and stayed home. Everything was in slow motion, and I was about to blow the play up and get on Sportscenter.

I took an angle and chased the flanker toward the sideline. There was NO WAY he'd be able to turn the corner on me. Two more steps and I had his ass...one more...

And then he was GONE.

I turned around, and the guy was twenty yards down the field. I'm not kidding. Twenty yards. I had never seen anyone put himself in overdrive like that. It was almost like he was baiting me - waiting for me to get just THAT close, then go into warp speed. It was simultaneously embarrassing, humiliating and fascinating.

Now, in my own defense, the guy who'd "wished" me went on to win an Olympic gold medal in a sprint event and spent a number of years in the NFL, and I'd defy any of YOU to catch him. Trust me, you couldn't unless your name was Usain Bolt, in which case you could catch him but wouldn't know what to do after that.

I've put some thought into this over the years, trying to figure out how I could have made myself fast enough to make that play, and what I've realized is that there's no way on earth I ever could have. All the box squats, parachute runs, sled pulls, Bosu balls and kettlebells in the world weren't catching this dude. I could have trained in a multi-million dollar facility with an internationally known trainer, getting my anaerobic threshold tested daily, eating nothing but hydrolyzed protein shakes and shooting winstrol, and there was NO WAY I was making that play.

Why?

Because this dude was a freak, and I wasn't. Conversely, this guy could have trained in his basement and played in the NFL for ten years. Why? Because he was freakish enough to make the Olympic team and freakish enough to play in the league, and genetically predisposed to do everything a LOT faster than the rest of us.

I have news for you: these guys are OUT THERE, and there are plenty of them. They're called "professional athletes." And what we have in the fitness industry these days is another epidemic where so-called speed and strength coaches get these guys in their gyms AFTER they've already made good, then plaster them all over their websites and claim to be responsible for their success.

My personal favorites here are the so-called "Combine specialists." You take a freak who's had an All-American career in college, train him for three weeks and get a couple of reps on his 225 pound bench reps test, then take credit when the guy wins a Super Bowl ring five years later. Trust me, it happens.

Having been a high school football coach for years, and having actually built numerous athletes from the ground up, this is a major pet peeve of mine: trainers who take an already finished product and claim some hand in its success. I know this industry is all about marketing, which is what we talk about all the time here at the magazine, but this still chaps my ass, because a lot of the guys taking credit for athletes' accomplishments have the wool pulled over the eyes of a lot of people.

What does this mean to you, the reader?

It means you should go into any examination of a trainer or coach's credentials with a healthy dose of skepticism. Do you want to know what an athlete is doing now? Or would you rather learn how that athlete got where he is? If the latter question is more of what you're looking for, take your research a step further and see who's getting them there, as opposed to who's looking after them once they're already millionaires.