By BILL PENNINGTON 

Through the woods Michael had dashed, an obstacle course of logs and limbs, and then on the winding roads he ran with his father every morning at 5:30. Later came the individualized weight workouts carefully calculated to build the muscle Michael could summon for explosive, sudden movements. Some days, a boxing lesson might follow. Watching television in the evenings, the two would do push-ups during the commercials.

But in the winter of '89, having just turned 18, Michael reached a crossroads of a scope that surmounted the simple passage from adolescence to adulthood. Strahan had never been trained to be a football player; he pursued a paradigm of fitness. In fact, other than some youth games as a 7-year-old, he had not played organized football until he was 16. That was when Gene, on a hunch, sent Michael to live with his uncle, Art, in Texas. After one season of high school football, he earned a scholarship to Texas Southern, located in Houston.

''But after that first semester of college, I had taken everything out of my dorm room because I was never going back,'' Strahan said last week. ''I hadn't grown up in the States and I didn't understand or like the lifestyle. I didn't know anything about American football really, didn't know how to play my position. Other guys knew what they were doing, had all this football muscle and were mean and tough. I emptied my room -- lamps, clothes, pillow, sheets, right down to the last pencil and eraser. I was going home.''

Christmas came and went in Mannheim, and so did New Year's Eve. Mid-January was approaching.

''Isn't it time for you to go back?'' Gene asked. Michael answered that he was not returning to Texas.

''And he asked me what I was going to do,'' Strahan said. ''I said, 'I'll work for you.' He looked at me again and said: 'What are you going to do?' He said the 'you' a little louder, like he was saying, 'What are you going to do for you?'

''It clicked in my head right then that my father had a vision for me and a plan, but he couldn't do it for me. Your parents can't take care of you forever. I had to do it.''

Parents Set an Example

These days, as Strahan charges through offensive linemen sacking quarterbacks for the Giants at a pace more furious than any defensive player in N.F.L. history, he will sit in the team's locker room and revisit the lessons of his days literally running at the heels of his father. He will focus on the solitary days that followed at Texas Southern.

These days, everyone wants to know how Strahan, at 270 pounds, can so routinely throw 330-pound linemen aside and still sprint stride for stride after quarterbacks. Strahan has 15 sacks entering the Giants' game tonight against the Minnesota Vikings, a rate that would give him 27 sacks for the season and obliterate Mark Gastineau's 1984 league record of 22 sacks.

''I'm asked, 'Why now?' and I've asked myself, 'Why me?' '' Strahan said.

The better question might be to ask Strahan what he did on Easter Sunday in 1990 or on Thanksgiving in 1991 and 1992.

''I was alone, the only one in my dorm on campus because I didn't fly home for those holidays,'' Strahan said. ''I would put on my roommate's weighted shoes and run the football stadium steps. I would run the empty streets. I would run laps around the gym and go back into the stadium and run the steps again. And I would call home and my father would say, 'Mike, it will pay off in the end.' I guess he was right. I certainly couldn't tell him anything about working hard to get what you want.''

Strahan's mother, Louise, said last week that she was proud of him, the youngest of her six children, for a variety of reasons, among them his willingness to absorb the tenets preached in the household.

''Never start something and then not finish it,'' Louise said in an interview from her home in Houston, where she and Gene retired to a few years ago. ''Don't ask anybody to give you anything, just ask them to give you an opportunity. You can be anything you want to be, just know you're going to have to work for it.''

When the family doctrines were recited to Strahan again last week, he slowly nodded his head. Without looking up, he quickly added: ''If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. That was my father, persistent to a fault.''

Gene Strahan was a pretty good boxer in the Armed Services tournaments, with a 1-1 record against the top Marine heavyweight, the future world champion Ken Norton. But in 1967, the 31-year-old Sgt. Strahan left the Army and enrolled at Prairie View College. For three years, he went to school full time and worked full time.

''With five kids at home and me on the way,'' Michael Strahan said. ''He had two jobs, and my mom earned money sewing R.O.T.C. patches on uniforms. She also coached our basketball team.''

In 1971, Gene got his degree and went back into the Army, as an officer.

''Like I told my kids,'' Gene said, '' 'Be thankful there's something extra you can do to make your life better. There are worse things.' ''

Gene Strahan's first job growing up in east Texas was cutting and hauling pulp wood, a job that would begin with a five-hour ride to Louisiana.

''It was slave labor, believe me,'' Gene said. ''They would get us up at 2 in the morning, we'd ride in the back hold of the truck and start cutting at dawn. But it paid $35 a week and that was good money then.''

In 1999, a year after he had 15 sacks, Michael Strahan signed a four-year, $32 million contract. That season, his sack total dropped by nearly two-thirds, to five and a half. Strahan became embroiled in some internal team squabbles that year and clashed with reporters he had once charmed. Eventually, his best friend on the team, Jessie Armstead, rebuked him on the field for heedlessly pursuing sacks when the team needed his all-around play.

''Mike just started to listen to everybody about the sacks,'' Armstead said at the time. ''He had to let that sack stat go and just play.''

Teammates noticed how Strahan, stung by Armstead's reaction, retreated for a while, and how he later came back refocused.

''I've had good people around me with good advice,'' Strahan said. ''My wife helps me more than anybody. She listens to me, and I listen to her. She told me the same thing; I had to go play for the fun of it.''

Late last season, Strahan emerged from his shell, both in the locker room and on the field.

''I saw him shed all the worries and just be loud, funny and energetic,'' running back Tiki Barber said. ''And he played awesome.''

After a strong regular season, Strahan had 4 1/2 sacks and 12 tackles in the Giants' three-game postseason.

Among those impressed was Lomas Brown, the Giants' 38-year-old offensive tackle, who played against Strahan earlier in his career.

''Michael watches a lot of film and he's slick about spotting a guy's tendencies,'' Brown said. ''I've watched him trap guys. He watches and waits. Then, at the right moment, when the guy leans one way just a little bit, Michael uses the guy's leverage against him and sends him flying out of the way. When they get nervous and sit back on their heels, then he bull-rushes over them. When they get mad and charge, he slips them and puts on the speed move past them. The guy is scary, man.''

Strahan, who will turn 30 on Wednesday, stubbornly declines to analyze the specifics of his success this season. For the most part, he has also refused to discuss Gastineau's record.

''To me, I'm not close enough to warrant talking about it,'' he said last week. ''If we win the Super Bowl and I set the record, that would be the best year ever. Unless we won it again and I had more sacks.''

That notion elicited from Strahan the howling laugh and gap-toothed smile that are once again so prevalent in the Giants' locker room. He can still be guarded and wary in many interview settings, although ultimately he seems incapable of remaining speechless. Not when he is trying to explain himself.

''If I'm healthy, what's going on this season wouldn't be a one-year thing,'' he said. ''I could play like this for years. Mentally, my game has finally caught up with my physical skills.''

Those physical skills, honed as if it were still 1981 in Mannheim, are hardly ignored, even in his ninth N.F.L. season. In the mirror, Strahan must forever see the chunky, younger brother he was -- ''They called me Bob because it stood for 'booty on back,' '' he said -- because Strahan trains as if he were still following one of his father's rigorous, handwritten training routines.

He does not, for example, lift weights just on the days when all the other linemen lift. He lifts on the days the backs and receivers lift, too.

''Maybe just something small, like for my neck and shoulders,'' he said.

He does situps and other exercises on another scheduled day off, weight training for his legs on another day.

''It's my little weird way to try to stay ahead,'' Strahan said. ''And that's important to me.''

Finding His Own Way

At home in Houston last week, Gene Strahan listened as his son's training, film study and practice schedules were read to him.

''I never pushed him to come along on those morning runs, that's the thing,'' Gene said. ''We'd be up in the woods trying to stay in shape for this elite outfit, and the next day, he would be right back there. I never asked him to come to the gym. He would ride his bike over to my office. I can't explain it but I know how he felt. Something was gnawing at him to make himself better.''

And what of the Christmas break of 1989, couldn't it have all ended then?

''Mike and I, we had spent a lot of time together and he was homesick,'' Gene Strahan said. ''He had to find his own way, that's all. Mike was not going to quit. I knew that. And he knew that.''

(c) Copyright 2001, New York Times Company.