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Former Oregon defensive tackle Taylor Hart will chronicle his training for the NFL draft with The Oregonian in the coming months.

(Bruce Ely / The Oregonian)

Welcome to the "NFL Draft Diary," The Oregonian's new series that will follow former Oregon defensive lineman Taylor Hart in the months leading up to the NFL draft, May 8-10.

Every few weeks, Hart -- a Tualatin native -- will discuss what it's like to endure a five-month job interview that begins with early training, continues with the NFL scouting combine and university "pro days" and goes through draft day. Hart finished his Oregon career on Dec. 30 with a 30-7 victory against Texas in the Alamo Bowl that finished a season where he shared team co-MVP honors.

In the first "Draft Diary," Hart talks about how he came to train outside San Diego and how he's dealt with a broken bone in his foot. Hart, in his own words:

There are a lot of training facilities all over the United States so when I chose my agent, he recommended Prolific. It's a little smaller down here than the IMGs or other, bigger facilities, but that's something it attracted me to; I wouldn't be in a mass of people, and that's why I chose to come to San Diego. Without school it's focusing mainly on becoming the best athlete and person that I can to be ready for this combine. As far as doing football all day, it's what I've been doing pretty much my whole life.

When we first started here you'd wake up at 7 o' clock and you'd show up at the facility after breakfast at 8 o' clock. Depending on the days, you run first if you do arms (upper-body workouts). If you do legs, we'll run after. The first days we did a lot of running and mostly at the start you work on technique with a running coach on the 40-yard-dash test, the L-cone test and just agility in general. You work on that with conditioning and more technique early in those stages. For example, they've got us working with bungees, and working on the first steps.

From there, we went into lifting and on upper body days you want to focus on bench. It's something all the teams look at so we evolve our workouts around the bench and getting more endurance for your arms for the 225-pound test, too. At Oregon, we still work on well-rounded strength but you still wanted to be the strongest athlete and bench was big for that. Here we mostly focus on these bench aspects for this month, two months before the combine. We've got a great strength coach here to show us the tricks and techniques on how to push out how many reps you can.

Early on we worked on position drills to prepare for the Senior Bowl that I planned on going to, but didn't because of the foot injury. The foot injury happened two weeks in. It was a freak accident. I was doing d-line drills; it could have been from anything. I planted normally but just felt something pop in my foot. I later found out I broke a bone in my foot and so that was a week before the Senior Bowl and that made us reconsider our options. Would I hurt it if I played on it? We found out it wouldn't be possible to play on it without further hurting the rest of my career.

The injury does hurt my preparation a little bit on the combine (defensive lineman participate Feb. 24) because it's almost healed but still, for almost two and a half weeks now, I haven't been able to work on the running techniques. For that I've just been doing as much as I can in the pool workouts. It's been huge to be able to run in the pool with all my correct mechanics.

I keep a great relationship with Oregon. When I hurt my foot two or three coaches called me to see if I was OK. I made great relationships with our trainers so they helped me get the most information I can. I still talk to a bunch of guys who are going through this process. I haven't talked to Josh (Huff) in a while, but I know Wade (Keliikipi) is in Hawaii training. Ricky (Havili-Heimuli) too, they're all doing the same thing.

We definitely do interview preparation on how you present yourself to these coaches for these teams. That's a big deal and that's part of the whole day. You don't do it every day but you want to stay fresh. My position coach also helps out with stuff like, they may ask you a question about a defense and it helps you to be able to analyze and explain what would happen if you saw it.

I'm willing to play whatever any coach would like me to play. We didn't play too much four-down defense at Oregon, more of a three-down defense, but in the NFL a lot of teams play four down. It's just learning new things to be even more versatile and show how I can play any style of defense.

-- Taylor Hart, as told to Andrew Greif