Skip Bayless swears that all of the following things are true, and frankly, he doesn’t care if you believe him or not: He does cardio seven days a week, and has only missed a single session in the last three decades; at 67 years old, his weightlifting routine and diet—which consists of him eating the same meal for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday—are enough to keep his body fat at five percent; and that, for any amount of money, he could beat LeBron James in an eight-mile race.

Fitness is, in his own words, “a subject even more dear to my heart than my beloved Cowboys, Spurs or Sooners.” His only downtime is date night, where he’ll throw on some ice packs while he and his wife watch Jeopardy! and Ray Donovan. We recently asked Fox Sports `1's most zealous early-morning yeller about his famously monotonous lunch-and-dinner routine, his unconventional method of West Coast timekeeping, and his thoughts about "taking a rest day." (Bayless, as you might expect, is uninterested in the concept of giving it a rest.)

GQ: As I understand it, you worked at a barbecue place your parents owned called the Hickory House, and you weren’t big on the duties involved.

Skip Bayless: I have a brother you might be aware of, who is two years younger. [Ed. note: That's chef Rick Bayless, of Mexico: One Plate at a Time fame.] Fatefully for him, he took right to the Hickory House. I despised it. We were both forced to work there from age three or four on. All I could do was mop, sweep, and clean out what was called the bullpen, which was where all the trash was. It was utterly nauseating, disgusting, and deplorable. I still have bad dreams about the bullpen.

But did you at least eat lots of barbecue? Or were you around it so much that you were turned off by it?

I did. I didn’t really have any choice. I would always eat lunch there—chopped beef sandwiches, and then they had their famous twice-baked potatoes where you would scoop all the potato out and put cheese in it and put it back into the shell. You could either get sweet or sour coleslaw, and then fried pies that came in packages. Those were great, but I would never think about eating them today. I knew nothing about nutrition until 1982. I had a big turnaround that year and never looked back.

What happened in 1982?

I covered Wimbledon and the British Open golf for the late, great Dallas Times Herald. At Wimbledon, the very first day I was there, I ran in to another reporter I knew, and he said, “Hey, five of us are going to go for a run in Hyde Park.” I tried to join, and I lasted a half-mile, maybe. All through Wimbledon, I went every day and got a little better.

The woman I was dating at the time was with me, and we rented a car and drove to Scotland for the British Open. I kept getting up every morning to run by myself, and I found I was running a little farther. We were seven hours ahead of Dallas, so I had seven extra hours to file stories. Routinely, I was staying at the golf course until 2:00 A.M. One night, I was just starving, and room service had closed, so my girlfriend suggested that we go walk around. All we could find was a Chinese takeout place that had its food displayed, and the only thing left was sweet and sour pork, just swimming in grease.