Bill Belichick strode through the sponsored, inflatable tunnel entrance to the Patriots’ practice earlier this week toward a podium at the bottom of a small grassy hill. It was a distance of, roughly, 15 yards.
Wearing a sliced-up, fire-engine-red Patriots sweatshirt and jogging shorts, he talked for a few minutes beginning at 9:27 a.m., before starting a journey that brought him to the goalpost of one nearby field, then to the end zone, then across a practice field behind a phalanx of Gatorade coolers, a twirling whistle in his hand.
The scene was rather innocuous until I was reminded that he just turned 71 and, in a matter of just a few minutes, had already traveled more than some people his age do in a day. Bill Belichick still looks, sounds and moves like Bill Belichick. When milling about on a series of grassy fields with far younger counterparts, he doesn’t stick out like some retiree ambling about Latitude Margaritaville. Perhaps the compounding benefits of a workday full of sun, exercise and social time really does keep someone young (outside of walking almost the entirety of Tuesday’s practice, Belichick also spent the remainder of his free time locked in several long conversations).
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Still, it got me wondering: How far does he go during a normal practice? And how can we contextualize the vigor of someone who is, technically, the second-oldest coach in the NFL but appears somewhat unfazed by time? Belichick was for a while a coach in some ways overshadowed by other age-related feats taking place inside his own building. But heading into his 49th NFL season (29th as a head coach), his contemporaries still revere him as one of the most brilliant defensive minds in the sport. Maybe that’s because he never slows down (literally).
“There is definitely something there,” says Dr. Owen Deland of the Hackensack Medical Group, who specializes in patients age 65 and older. “We have this idea that your physical health and mind are somehow separate, but they are parts of the same process. It accounts for these dynamic people always moving around. There’s that dynamism in their personality to go along with it. [Movement] is my favorite prescription to recommend for people.”
While the prospect of getting Belichick to wear some kind of step-tracking device felt like a nonstarter, luckily all football fields have a convenient manner in which to identify distances. Our yard-maker estimates were crude, to say the least, but they provided an interesting look at a coach who has always been sneakily fit. Almost a decade ago, he ran the Nashville Half Marathon in 2:36:46 at age 62, a sub-12-minute mile pace. His 5K time from the race, of 33:58, was five minutes better than what some running age-graded pace calculators consider an “intermediate” time for 60- to 65-year-olds. Tackle Trent Brown told The Pat McAfee Show recently that Belichick is on a treadmill for “two hours a day.” Pete Thamel, then of Yahoo! Sports, noted that Belichick turned his draft film room office into a de facto gym, often riding an exercise bike while evaluating prospects.
Belichick also spends a great deal of time around extremely active people. For example, his most trusted associate, the Patriots’ director of football and head coach administration Berj Najarian, finished the 2022 Boston Marathon in 4:49:43 to benefit his organization Who We Are.
So, spanning the length of a few practice fields over the course of two hours wasn’t going to be a challenge.
That doesn’t make Belichick’s daily journey any less incredible. If he were to wear GPS tracking devices like the ones donned by most NFL players during practice to calculate their distance traveled, his would look a bit like long, looping bends of Cedar Point’s Steel Vengeance roller coaster across massive fields. He moves constantly, stopping only semiregularly to write something down.
From 9:27 a.m. to his final whistle at 11:17 a.m., Belichick was jogging, backpedaling, dodging live plays in which he started snaps as a kind of deep safety observing the offense from a central perch. He was dodging kicks and looking out at his practice field, fittingly, under a sign on a back shed that read: NO BULL. While this is not exactly a Spartan race, the fact that Belichick completes this journey almost daily has myriad benefits.
“If you move around, you get endorphins, and our body has this positive feedback cycle that says, ‘Oh, you’re doing this thing, good job, I like this,” Deland says. “That’s why endorphins exist. That’s such a good place to be at that age.”
Deland says he asks his patients, broadly, to reach for more than 4,000 steps per day, but said that only 10% to 15% are usually hitting the mark. He joked that, after being consulted for this article, he would use Belichick as an example with patients in need of some motivation. After less than two hours, Belichick almost secured his daily total.
At one point during the end of practice, he was pacing forward and backward along the same 15-yard stretch of grass so often that it may have needed additional sodding. When Bailey Zappe was throwing, Belichick would suddenly materialize behind the huddle. Then he’d switch vantage points.
In total, our wildly unofficial Belichick tracker had him at (again, VERY ROUGHLY) 1,192 yards, or the equivalent of 0.68 miles, or about 12 times up and down the football field. A request through the Patriots for any information about Belichick’s daily step count or his current workout routine was received politely but not responded to as of the publishing of this article.
On average, the most-traveled players in an NFL game are wide receivers and cornerbacks, who normally log about 1.25 miles over the course of a 60-minute football game, according to Runner’s World. If we were to add in Belichick’s two hours on the treadmill, which Brown referenced before, he could log anywhere between 4.5 and 6.5 miles per day (treadmill estimates taken from here).
Longtime Patriot Matthew Slater told reporters earlier in training camp that he “marvels at the fact that [Belichick] is able to maintain the competitive stamina that he has.” Perhaps that’s due in part to the fact that, whenever a player looks around during practice each day, their coach is not far behind.
