Colin Kaepernick is already the owner of the NFL record for most rushing yards in a game for a quarterback, but he believes he’s even faster right now than he was when he torched the Packers for 181 rushing yards in January.
Peter King of TheMMQB.com reports that Kaepernick thinks he has significantly improved his speed while working with a crew of track and field athletes that includes Dwight Phillips, the 2004 Olympic gold medalist in the long jump.
“I trained with a few Olympic runners and jumpers,” Kaepernick said. “Just to try to get a little bit faster, a little bit better. Anything I could do to try to get a little bit better and stay ahead of the competition. I think the biggest thing was the form of running and how to be more efficient when I run. I feel like that has helped me to this point, and it’s something I’m trying to improve on more and more, but I think those few weeks with them were very valuable.”
Kaepernick says that Olympians are able to spend so much time studying every intricacy of running that they notice things football players wouldn’t consider.
“There are a lot of details to running that I never even thought about,” Kaepernick said. “I just went out and ran. I think I can be faster. I think I can be quicker.”
The question is whether the kind of form running that Olympic sprinters do can translate to faster running on the football field. Running fast in a straight line while wearing shorts isn’t the same thing as running fast in football pads, while carrying a ball and dodging tacklers. But if Kaepernick’s speed has improved even slightly, that’s good news for the 49ers, and bad news for the rest of the NFL.