Want to feel old, slow and fat? The next time the Packers Experience rolls into town, take your kids, but take part in the fun yourself.
I don’t know if they still run it this way, but the last time I went (which may have been a decade ago), they had a timed 40-yard dash people could run. Posted next to the clock were the times for several Packer players, the slowest of which was Gilbert Brown, which was in the low 5’s (according to the Packers website Gilbert ran a 5.1 out of college).
Now I don’t eat lightning or crap thunder, but I ran track in high school and was part of our school’s 4×100 team. I was considerably older than high school age when I took in the Packers Experience, and considerably heavier (6′2″ and about 210#). Even so, I could swallow my wife whole and still weigh less than Gilbert Brown - given my age and shape, I figured I’d clock in at around Brett Favre’s time (middle-high 4’s).
I walked up to the line and leaned in, arms hanging loose, head up, ready to fly. The buzzer went off and I was like a thoroughbred horse shooting out of the gate; hands slicing through the air, the quadriceps in my thighs bulging from their pumping, propelling me those 40 yards as fast as I possibly could.  When I finished, I looked up at my time, displayed next to those times of the Packers.
I was slower than Gilbert Brown.
To me, that says less about how slow I am and more about how fast he really was. How fast would you be if you strapped an extra 150 pounds to your back? Could you even run? This freakin’ guy, the slowpoke of the Packers, could outrun a guy his same height who was more than 120 pounds lighter.
Make no mistake. To make it in the NFL, you have to be a beast. Gilbert was a beast.