Randy Moss Has a Free Fitness Boot Camp, and Will Happily Leave You in His Dust

We have done 100 push-ups and 200 squats already, lost count while running seemingly endless circles around the perimeter of a rugby field, and now this swarm of 290 people gathered at an athletic field in Charlotte, North Carolina, is lined up and ready to sprint.

Somehow, Randy Moss is one person away from me.

He is 38 years old now—ancient, in athlete years. But he is also still 6'4''; he still glides across the turf on the same stick-thin legs he had the day he was selected 21st overall in the 1998 NFL Draft, and still lopes from drill to drill at this free boot camp with the lanky ease of an athlete born to run.

We are running sideline-to-sideline sprints in teams of four, and I am calculating just when I might sprint alongside one of the fastest and most successful receivers to ever play professional football.

And suddenly, before I can think, the time is here.

Just as quickly, before I'm even midway across the field, Moss is at the opposite sideline, finished.

Next to me, Emily "Breeze" Ross Watson, the co-organizer of the event, shakes her head.

"He's just so fast," she says in awe.

"It's not fair," someone adds.

It really isn't. Moss once ran the 40-yard dash in 4.25 seconds. He still holds the NFL's single-season touchdown reception record (23, in 2007), and is second on the all-time touchdown reception list (156 to Jerry Rice's 197). He was playing professional football as recently as 2012, after 14 years in the league, and boasted in August that he still had the skills to play in the NFL, briefly fueling whispers of a comeback.

Instead, he's hosting a free, twice-weekly boot camp in Charlotte that is averaging 300 participants per session.

What, exactly, is he doing here?

The short answer, Moss will tell you, is that he's getting a workout.

The long answer goes back a few months. Watson, an avid CrossFit competitor, was drawing around 50 to 70 people to a weekly boot camp she was holding at another Charlotte location. Eric McCoy, the owner of STAX Charlotte, a CrossFit box that runs the Moss boot camp, took notice.

"What if we could do something even bigger?" McCoy asked Watson.

"Like 100 people?" Watson said.

"Let's do something more than that," McCoy replied. "Five hundred. A thousand. Who knows? Let's just make it as big as we can get it."

McCoy had a secret weapon that he knew would draw participants: Moss. The Randy Moss Football Academy, in which Moss coaches wide receivers from the high school to the pro level, runs out of McCoy's CrossFit building, located just south of uptown Charlotte.

The two have been friends for a while. A few months ago, McCoy finally persuaded Moss to try CrossFit, a workout the football player grudgingly began to appreciate, and then even enjoy.

The intent never was for the seven-time Pro Bowl player simply to slap his name on the venture as a lure to weekend warriors who want to claim they've sprinted at the "Moss boot camp." Moss helps lead the workouts, which Watson formulates, and goes through the drills alongside participants.

When he bellows that we're doing 30 burpees for a warm-up, followed by 20 squats and 50 alternating lunges, he's doing them, too, all while facing the 300 people who have come to exercise with him.

"I'm out here working out," Moss said. "My name comes second."

Moss's name also comes with a long history of controversial behavior, beginning in his high school years; continuing through college, where he eventually settled at Marshall; and into the NFL, where he most memorably played for the Minnesota Vikings and New England Patriots.

In the NFL alone, Moss once squirted an official with a water bottle; pretended to moon Green Bay Packers fans while celebrating a touchdown; loudly disparaged a post-practice meal in front of the restaurant owners who catered it; got into an altercation with a Minneapolis traffic cop; and called for his Vikings coach to be fired, just before he himself was waived.

Watson didn't remember any of that. She recalled just the good qualities, like his dominance at Marshall, where she used to watch him play for the Thundering Herd when she was a kid, attending his games in West Virginia.

And so when she met her new fellow boot-camp leader, she only knew of the athletic talents that almost certainly will land Moss in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Besides, his personality seemed almost mellow.

"He is completely funny and outgoing and easy to get along with," Watson said. "It was like an instant 'we get each other.' We're like brother and sister."

There are times when the legendary prickly Moss emerges in the free boot camp, though. He admits it. He has no tolerance for laziness or lack of effort, even among the novices who pay nothing for the workouts.

"Me, I'm a professional athlete. I play football, so there's no room for excuses," he said. "Either you want it or you don't want it. I may be a little harder on people than Eric or Emily, so I just follow their lead, really."

But how do you explain this: we're sprinting in another drill, and somehow I find myself grouped with three women who seem to be new to the concept of running, entirely. As the last in the foursome, I'm the final person who has to sprint to the opposite sideline and work my way back with walking lunges.

By our final sprint-lunge combo, I'm the last person on the field—in the entire boot camp.

All eyes are on me as I try to speed through the drill, and Moss stands nearby, offering encouragement.

"I like those lunges!" he bellows. "Yes I do. I like those lunges!"

Watson is right. The disruptive Moss of press clippings and popular imagination—the sometimes difficult, surly player who "left the game with a stain on his reputation"—is not here. This Moss clearly is enjoying himself. This Moss is everyone's teammate.

"The good thing about this is just meeting different people from different aspects of life," he said. "You've got doctors, you've got lawyers, you've got different types of people coming out here from different walks of life. It's just a lot of positive things going on out here. It's different aspects of life, and as you can see, we're out here just having fun. There's different levels of fitness out here, but everybody's here for one reason—that's to stay in shape."

When Moss is going through the boot-camp drills, it's easy to see that his competitive fire still smolders. He grunts as he bear crawls across the length of the field, his long, spindly legs forcing him to practically gallop in order to move quickly. He eyes the competition on all sides before he sprints, never wanting to be beat to the finish.

And when a particularly gruesome drill is called, one in which participants run laps around the field while carrying a partner on their back, it's clearer than ever that he wants to actually win, even as he whoops and hollers like a child enjoying his first roller coaster.

Yes, Moss wants to be first. He does not want some dorky sportswriter boasting about the time she kept pace with him on sprints.

"I think we're all like that," Watson said. "Just being athletes, we both want to win. So we bring that feisty fire and a way to push all the attendees of the camp to work hard and push themselves."

Moss mixes that same combination of welcoming and demanding aura when attendees approach him after the workout to ask for photos.

"How many times have you come?" he spits out whenever someone shyly approaches.

"Uh, today was my first time," a couple people stammer.

"I need you to come four more times," he says. "Then you can take a picture."

It's not clear if the "five time" rule is something Moss has had all along, or something he simply came up with just to be difficult. Before anyone can ask for another photo or any more questions, he's bounding over to talk with other boot-camp participants, laughing and trading stories.

Moss won't say how long he expects to continue coaching this free boot camp, and McCoy can't say for certain how long it will continue to be free (a sponsor currently supplies money to cover costs). But for now, it's an outlet for him to engage with the community, a way for him to supplement his daily 5:30 AM workouts with a little friendly competition.

"Man, I just live day to day," Moss said. "I don't set a planner, so I don't know what the future holds. When I wake up, whatever the Lord blesses me with, that's what I go do."