For years, Barron Miles has made his living shutting down some of the speediest receivers in the Canadian Football League. But now, as the B.C. Lions prepare to open training camp in Abbotsford on May 31, the 36-year-old defensive back knows his toughest assignment may no longer be on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Miles is simply trying to stay one step ahead of Father Time and says he’s excited about this camp—and this season—because he knows he doesn’t have a whole lot of football left in him.

“I’m a realist. I know that I can’t play forever,” he told the Georgia Straight before joining a dozen teammates helping out at a recent football clinic for more than 200 kids at the Lions’ training facility in Surrey. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be healthy. That’s a plus. So as long as I can stay healthy and continue to enjoy the game, we’ll see what happens.”

Age has hardly been a factor for the Roselle, New Jersey, native, who is preparing for his fourth year with the Lions and his 11th in the CFL. The personable Miles, the second-oldest player on the Lions roster (behind only 38-year-old kicker Paul McCallum), has been a West Division all-star in each of his three years on the West Coast. Last year, he had three interceptions to go along with a pair of blocked punts. The year before that, Miles led the CFL by picking off 10 passes.

But the veteran has been around long enough to know how it works in professional sports: as players head for the twilight of their career, they usually find themselves and their performance the subject of added scrutiny. Lions coach and general manager Wally Buono has made a habit over the years of putting veteran players like Eric Carter, Carl Kidd, and Antonio Warren out to pasture sooner than they would have liked. Miles certainly doesn’t want that to happen to him and insists his age is merely a number and that his recent on-field accomplishments speak for themselves.

“It [my age] is a number, but at the same time, when an older player messes up, he’s getting old. When a younger player messes up, he’s just young and dumb,” he said with a laugh. “It depends on how you’re playing. If you’re playing well, it’s not an issue. If you’re playing bad, then it becomes an issue. So I just don’t want to play bad.”

That’s why Miles plans to work as hard as ever once camp gets under way, knowing that the effort he puts in now will pay dividends once the season starts. Along with his wife and three children, he lives and trains here year-round, and all his years of service have taught Miles that no matter how hard he pounds away in the gym in the off-season, there’s no substitute for the grind of training camp.

With only two preseason games on the CFL schedule, there really isn’t a lot of time to work the kinks out in game action before teams start playing for keeps. And with coaching staffs using much of that exhibition action to evaluate youngsters and newcomers, veterans often don’t see much more than a couple of quarters of game time before the season starts in earnest. That places that much more importance on the work done on the practice field over the next few weeks.

And that’s why Miles is ready to buckle his chinstrap and get down to business. But that’s not the only reason he’s excited about the start of another football season.

“You have to use training camp to get your timing together, but for the most part it’s the camaraderie. You’re gone for six months and you haven’t seen guys, and it’s a time for the guys to get back with each other and get used to one another, catch up on times, since they haven’t spoken during the off-season,” he said. “As much as guys work out on their own over the winter, nothing is like training camp. You don’t sit there [in the off-season] for four hours, five hours, eight hours watching film, practising, watching more film, and then meeting. The two-and-a-half weeks we have for training camp is needed, but it is a grind.”

One of the things Miles—a product of the football factory at the University of Nebraska—looks forward to with the start of every new season is the chance to mentor some of the new faces in the Lions den. Miles—a likely candidate to go into coaching when he figures he’s taken enough lumps as a player—embraces his role as the elder statesman in the defensive secondary and is happy to impart whatever wisdom he can to rookies, even if they’re challenging to take his job.

“I’ve been doing that for years now. It’s what I do. I grew up in a system [in Montreal, where he played the first seven years of his CFL career], when I first got in the league, with guys in front of me who helped me, and they were older than me and they helped me out a lot. They weren’t worried about me taking their jobs because they were confident in themselves, so that instilled in me the same attributes. I feel that no one out here can take my job, so why can’t I help them? If they do well and push me and play just as well as me, we’re going to have a pretty good team.”

Miles and the Lions feel they have some unfinished business after dropping the western final on home turf last November. The nucleus of last year’s team remains intact and Miles is a big part of that group. But he’s not getting any younger, and he knows he won’t have many more chances to get his hands on the Grey Cup for the third time in what has been a splendid career. So he’s ready to give it his all starting on the first day of what just might turn out to be his last training camp as a player.