Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

ZIONSVILLE — Maybe this is the secret to surviving Sundays at age 35, 192 games into a career that wasn’t supposed to start and certainly wasn’t supposed to last. It’s 1:04 p.m. on Mike Adams’ day off. A bead of sweat drips down his forehead. He’s grunting his way through a Warrior II pose.

“Oh, man!” he exhales. “I needed this one. You can hear the cracking in my legs!”

The cracking is a good thing. This is his weekly maintenance, his weekly release. Adams is a dinosaur by NFL standards, the third-oldest Indianapolis Colt, younger than just two players — Adam Vinatieri and Robert Mathis — on the team’s 53-man roster. He’s the small safety from the small school whom the league can’t get rid of, the heady defensive back who’s authored an unlikely career built on subtleties as much as strength or speed.

Now, more than ever, his is a game played between the ears. The problem? The body. You know: 13 seasons of pounding on the muscles that blanket his 5-11, 205-pound frame.

Which brings us to the Warrior II.

Ten years in, he started to feel it, the way every player does. It was 2013. Adams was in Denver, starting for a Broncos defense that would reach Super Bowl XLVIII. He slogged off the practice field one day, soreness stretching head to toe, mind wondering if that 5-11, 205-pound frame was breaking down and his career was grinding to a halt.

“I’m tight all the time, man,” he confessed to teammate Champ Bailey, a 15-year vet by that point. “I can’t feel like this.”

He didn’t feel like the player he was once. His explosion was fading, his recovering slowing. Father Time was winning. He needed to heal quicker, recover faster, earn that edge back. His career depended on it.

So he did something about it. A week later he walked into a yoga studio.

“Man, after one session I was sore as hell,” Adams remembers. But he kept at it.

The Broncos lost the Super Bowl that year by 35 points. All indications hinted that Adams’ career was over. Denver let him walk in free agency. Weeks passed. Months passed. The phone never rang. “I’m probably done,” he told himself. He started digging into his financials, sizing up how much money he’d saved, wondering what would come next. He went home.

It wasn’t until late June — after free agency, after the draft and just as minicamps were commencing — that the phone finally did ring. It was his agent, telling him two teams were interested: the Colts and the Bears. Both needed an answer immediately. Adams was at dinner with friends, back in Paterson, N.J. He sat in his chair at the Cheesecake Factory and asked himself where he wanted to continue his career. Colts or Bears?

“The first thing that came to mind was (Andrew) Luck picking up that ball and diving into the end zone in that playoff game against the Chiefs,” Adams says. “That (expletive) intrigued me.”

So Indy it was. He signed a one-year deal. He’d bet on himself.

Three years later, they still can’t get rid of him. That’s 13 years in the league for an undersized, undrafted defensive back from the University of Delaware who was ranked the 1,151st best prospect before the 2004 NFL draft. That’s 11 seasons with 13 or more games played and four seasons above the age of 30 without missing a single Sunday. That’s durability.

Probably no coincidence, then, that the best football of his career came after he arrived in Indianapolis.

Adams tied for the league lead in interceptions in 2014, at age 33, and made his first Pro Bowl. Signed a two-year extension. Swiped five more picks last year. Made a second straight Pro Bowl. Kept turning back Father Time, kept defying the odds, long after most figured he’d be back home in Paterson doing something else.

Instead he’s here, spending his off day inside an empty studio at Simply Yoga in Zionsville, holding that Warrior II pose, stretching his right leg behind him, jutting his torso forward, holding, straining, grunting, holding it, holding it.

***

Adams is no pioneer, but he is a progressive. The days of NFL players relying solely on the cold tub and a medicine cabinet’s worth of pain pills are long gone. Mathis, at age 35, is a cryotherapy guy. A hyperbaric chamber guy. A NormaTec recovery boot guy. D’Qwell Jackson, 33, flies in a massage therapist from Cleveland each week. Former quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, who played until the age of 40, used to sleep in compression socks.

Mike Adams does yoga every Tuesday.

And he’s not alone in the Colts locker room, though no one does it as religiously. Jackson has tried it. Dwayne Allen has dabbled. Darius Butler. Art Jones. David Parry. Curt Maggitt. Phillip Dorsett. The list goes on.

“It’s a mental release for me,” says Maggitt, a rookie linebacker. “I love it.”

“I’m always in the back row, sweating my butt off,” confesses Parry, a second-year nose tackle.

“My wife’s really into it, so I went and gave it a shot,” says Jones, a seventh-year defensive tackle. “And it was way harder than I thought it would be.”

(Of the dozen or so Colts surveyed this week, only punter Pat McAfee said he didn’t enjoy his yoga experience. He mentioned being partially-hungover and walking out of the session halfway through. “I felt like I was gonna vomit,” he says. “I’m the least flexible person you’ll ever meet that you’d think would be flexible. I can’t even touch my toes. I failed the high school fitness test every time.”)

Most, though, are converts. Most wish they were as devoted to yoga as Adams.

“I’d bet 80 percent of the guys in here have done it at least once,” says Allen, who first gave it a shot after recovering from hip surgery in 2013. “We’re getting smarter. Those around us are getting smarter. They understand what it takes to stay on the field. And flexibility is key.”

Adams is living proof. Those sideline tap dances, like his interception of Tom Brady last season? The leaping grabs? In his mind, it all goes back to his core. That’s what the yoga has strengthened. That’s the Warrior II, paying him back.

“If your core ain’t strong, you’re leaving your body vulnerable to injuries,” Jackson says. “Mike knows that better than anyone.”

Yet the late-career revival runs deeper than just yoga. Adams, like most NFL players, never kept track of what he ate during his first few seasons in the league. He laughs at his naiveté today. He’s cut red meat, cut chicken, cut just about anything besides fish and vegetables from his diet. It’s fitting. He earned the nickname that’s stuck with him ever since — “Pops” — when he was a toddler in Paterson, one of seven kids. He loved spinach. Popeye got shortened to Pops.

He’s a throwback when it comes to the weight room. “Me, I do the Rocky Balboa workout,” he says. It was ingrained in him back in Paterson. There was no gym membership, no yoga studio, no personal trainer to call. So Adams and his friends would climb scaffolds and low-hanging light poles and do pullups. They’d do pushups on the blacktop. They’d run hills. They’d climb steps.

“Been doing that forever,” Adams says. “The calisthenics, that stays with you. Guys who are all about weights for a long time, it’s like gravity, it pulls them down. I don’t have that. I got that inner strength, that grown man strength.”

That yoga strength, too. While it’d be impossible to correlate its impact on his week-to-week health, consider: Adams has missed just four games in the past six years. At the point in an NFL existence when most bodies begin breaking down, Adams keeps humming along. He feels better between games, and the muscle soreness that used to stretch from Sunday to Sunday fizzles by midweek.

"You could say it's lengthened my career," he says.

At the very least, Adams says, it’s not hurting him. After all, remember, he figured he was done three years ago. He’ll start his 120th career game Monday night at MetLife Stadium against the Jets, just miles away from where he grew up.

“Most people in this league say they know their body, but they don’t really know it,” says Colts Pro Bowl cornerback Vontae Davis. “Mike is one of those people that knows every last thing about his body.”

***

The session at Simply Yoga starts with instructor Darya Bowskill asking Adams if there are any lingering injuries she should know about, any muscle groups that are particularly tight. He shakes his head. But he knows, just as she knows, that he’s not telling her the whole truth. It’s 13 weeks into an NFL season. There’s always something lingering, something hurting.

“You can see the tightness,” she notes as they begin.

Breathing exercises morph into one pose, which morph into another, and so on. Downward dog. Low lunge. High lunge. Warrior I. Warrior II. Warrior III.

Adams smoothly slides through the exercise. It’s clear: He knows what he’s doing.

When Bowskill orders a particularly demanding pose, he pauses. “That one’s gonna hurt,” he says.

“A little moment of hell,” Bowskill counters.

He works his core, his quads, his calves, his back, his arms. His shoulders, his neck, his rear. About 55 minutes into the session, Bowskill asks him to lie down, flat on his back, and breathe slowly. Out. In. Out. In. Adams slips into a state of utter relaxation.

“It takes you to a whole different place,” he’ll say later.

A few moments into it, he starts snoring.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.