Kyle Goon: Derrick Henry has outrun Father Time. Next up? Emmitt Smith.

Where does greatness come from? On a grassy hill on the side of a highway, constructed step by step in the sweltering Dallas summer heat.

This is Derrick Henry’s training ground, where he grinds up steep slopes for months so he can flatten NFL tacklers when football season kicks off. But, while most might be counting down the reps as their quads seize and their lungs threaten to explode, the secret is Henry is counting up.

A.J. Billings, his longtime offseason trainer, doesn’t tell the 20-somethings who come to train with Henry what to expect. When E.J. Smith first trained on a hill with Henry, Billings told the Stanford running back and the other athletes at the session to do 12 sets. Afterward, they collapsed down to chug water, relieved the workout was over.

They looked back up the hill. Henry was still running. He did 10 more climbs.

“E.J. said, ‘I thought the workout was over,’” Billings said. “The thing about Derrick is, no matter what you do, he’s gonna do more. If you do 20 hills, he’s gonna do 25. I told E.J., ‘If you woulda did more, he woulda did more too.’”

Once Smith understood the rules of training with Henry, he spent the next few summers trying to outwork him. But Henry never let it happen. It’s the mentality that has shaped the trajectory of his career and why people speculate he could one day become the NFL’s rushing yards and touchdowns king.

“I want to outwork you,” Henry told me recently. “People will come out and run with me, and I gotta do more. That’s just what it is.”

Smith is not the most famous running back in his own family. That would be his father, Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time leader in rushing yards (18,355) and rushing touchdowns (164) by wide margins. Emmitt has watched Henry and his son run up those hills — and concluded Henry has a chance to shatter his records.

“Oh yeah, I think it’s possible,” Smith said in a recent interview with DraftKings. “He takes great care of his body. He’s in great shape.”

So … can Henry do it?

One of those goals appears more attainable than the other. The Banner projects Henry could become the touchdowns record holder in 2029, while he would need to play until 2031 to catch Smith in rushing yards at 37 years old.

Billings had a hard time conceiving how much work he and Henry will have to put in from now until then — how many hills they’d have to run.

“We have to get through this year, and three more years, three more offseasons? That’s so far away,” Billings said about the 2029 touchdowns projection. “If this was a sport like golf or tennis, noncontact, not so brutal on your body, I would agree with you.

“But, boy, that’s a tall tall task for anybody,” he added, “even the King himself.”

Henry also acknowledged the distance between him and Smith’s most hallowed records. When he inspected The Banner’s projections, he figured it would be years before Smith has to worry about his career marks falling.

“Obviously that’s pretty cool to hear him say [Henry can break them], but I also know in his mind, he’s like, ‘He’s got a long damn way to get it,’” Henry said, laughing. “So, I mean, he can say that because it ain’t like it’s 2,000 yards, 3,000 yards to go. I got a long ways to go. … Either way it goes, he [Smith] is staying comfortable.”

Henry has smashed one of Smith’s records before — in high school. He eclipsed Smith by more than 3,000 yards on his way to becoming the all-time leading rusher (12,124 yards) in a legendary career for tiny Yulee High. He still holds Smith in the highest regard.

“Emmitt Smith is like the Michael Jordan of running backs in Florida,” Henry said with a reverent tone. “He’s the standard. So everybody keeps talking about the records. I ain’t even close to what he’s accomplished.”

But, in the world of elite NFL running backs, Henry is closer than most. Though he started his career with just 1,234 yards through two seasons, fewer than any back in the NFL’s top 10 all-time yardage leaders, Henry’s incredible midcareer surge has led him to No. 9, passing Eric Dickerson (13,259) last week against the Dallas Cowboys.

Henry is a kind of unicorn — at 6 feet, 3 inches and 252 pounds, no one his size has ever been this productive this late into his career.

Once, America fed off tall tales like Paul Bunyan, chopping down redwoods, or John Henry, driving in railroad spikes.

Players like Derrick Henry are the closest thing we have to modern-day folk heroes, and his chase in the record books gives definition to how incredible his career has been — and continues to be.

In Dallas, Billings’ own family is divided. His father believes Smith is the greatest ever, for now and always.

“He always says, ‘I don’t want that record to go down,’” Billings said. “I have been working with the King for a decade. If we get close, if our name is right underneath Emmitt, that by itself would be a hell of an achievement.”

Henry grew up idolizing Smith and LaDainian Tomlinson, the two backs ahead of him on the career touchdowns list. But their slippery, elusive running styles are stark contrasts to Henry’s tank-like physicality. Smith and Tomlinson were at least 5 inches shorter and 30 pounds lighter than Henry. They were weaving past and dodging tacklers, while Henry more or less bowls them over.

The closest anyone in NFL history comes to Henry’s size and speed might just be Dickerson, a 6-3, 220-pound sprinter whose single-season yardage record (2,105) Henry pursued in 2020 when he won Offensive Player of the Year.

“LT [Tomlinson] was my guy, but Eric Dickerson … he could fly, man. He was sublime,” Henry said. “I could go on and on about the big backs that played this game at a high level. They’re always so inspiring to me. I just want to give them their flowers, but also still trying to have the same dominance and legacy that they had.”

Henry’s dominance, however, may be unprecedented at his age — and coming to Baltimore has a lot to do with it.

In Henry’s final season with the Tennessee Titans, in 2023, he accumulated 1,167 yards and 12 touchdowns, tying a career-low 4.2 yards per carry. The decline from his best Titans seasons felt age appropriate — most NFL running backs have a severe decline nearing or after 30 — and even the Titans, who owed him for a lot of their success, were not interested in keeping him. “They didn’t offer — not at all,” Henry said.

But, with the Ravens and Lamar Jackson, Henry saw a career revival. His 1,921 rushing yards in 2024 is the 11th-most productive single season in NFL history, and it made Henry the only back 30 or older to rush for more than 1,900 yards.

While Henry’s training regimen has powered this late-career productivity, he also gives credit to sharing a backfield with Jackson.

“He has an impact on your level of play just because of how dynamic he is and the threat to the defense [with] throwing and his legs,” he said. “It kind of takes the pressure off of the running back just because of who he is. So, whenever I came out for free agency, this was the No. 1 spot I wanted to go to.”

Although it might seem tempting for Henry simply to try to replicate whatever worked in the previous season, he determined long ago that being more present is helpful. Henry and Billings use their time together to work on looks, cuts and moves that might help him in the upcoming season and in adjusting for new schemes. They rarely talk about the season before.

“The trap is consistently trying to re-create that peak performance,” Billings said. “Every year you have different linemen, different receivers, you face different defenses. If you’re chasing the ghost of yourself, you can’t have your best performance. We try to create that flow state with goals we can attain.”

Henry is reaching the stage when even the guys blocking for him grew up admiring him from afar. He is their Emmitt Smith, their LaDainian Tomlinson — now they block for him, and he’s still one of the NFL’s best backs. In training camp, rookie Vega Ioane learned the hard way that he needs to watch his back as much as his front when blocking for Henry, who ran him over as he hit a hole hard on a run.

“It’s not just a practice,” Ioane said. “It’s like a game day mindset every day.”

Henry feels great — capable of playing for several more years at least. At 32, he said, his body feels like it did when he was in his 20s. He is one of the NFL’s top five rushers. Baltimore has him under contract through the 2027 season, and Henry said in August he’d like to finish his career with the Ravens.

Henry is more focused on other accolades Smith reached in his career — starting with winning a Super Bowl. Winning drives him more than records do. Maybe chasing the Lombardi Trophy is what truly keeps him young.

“I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon,” he said. “But I’m just taking one week at a time, embracing everything that comes with it. Being grateful.”

Watching Henry chase history — as if he’s climbing one of those Dallas hillsides, refusing to be bested — is a feat we should be grateful to watch, too.