Archives for September 2020

September 28, 2019

Found another old document in my files, from March 15, 2019:

For hurdlers, falling isn’t a metaphor. It’s a reality that can happen in any race, over any hurdle, even when things are going perfectly well. The first time I fell was over the ninth hurdle in a 110m race my sophomore year of high school – my first year of running hurdles. I wasn’t expected to do much because I was so new to the event and because I hadn’t performed at a high level up to that point in the season. But there I was in the thick of things in a very competitive race that featured two good hurdlers from our rival school. One of them was way ahead of everybody, but, after a slow start, I was gradually catching up to the other one. By hurdle nine I was coming up beside him, about to pass him. But because I was so giddy about the possibility of beating him, I forgot the hurdle was there and I smacked into it with the foot of my lead leg, lost my balance, and tumbled to the ground. I did a stop-drop-and-roll move and got back up and finished the race, but ended up in last place when I could’ve gotten second. read more

September 28, 2020

I wrote the thoughts below back on January 30, 2019. I came upon the document this morning as I was looking for another document in my Microsoft Word files, and felt it would be worth sharing here:

I always tell my hurdlers that a breakthrough will occur, but you can never predict when it will happen; you just have to trust that if you stay diligent, the breakthrough will occur. Training for a race that lasts less than 20 seconds means that 99.9% of your time is spent training while only .1% of your time is spent competing. So of course there’s going to be some anxiety on the day of a race, because of fear of all the training going to waste. In practice my hurdlers do multiple reps of drills, work on the various phases of the race, and do all kinds of workouts and exercises to keep their bodies healthy and ready for competition. So the hope is always that the things we worked on in practice will shine through for us on race day. But the reality is that it takes a high level of calm focus to be able to duplicate in a race what you were able to do in practice. That level of focus is developed through repetition. In a race, you have one chance when the gun goes off to either do it or not, whereas in practice you can keep going back and trying again every time you make a mistake. So it takes many races to get to a point where you can execute the movements you practice while training without the need for the mind to tell the body what to do. In races there is no time for thinking, so the body has to do it on its own. To get to a point where the body is that in tune with what it needs to do doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why when athletes say, in reference to executing certain movements, “I can do it practice, but in meets it just doesn’t work,” I respond by saying, be patient, be persistent. My experience has been that the breakthrough always does come eventually, and when it does, that changes the athlete’s entire outlook on hurdling, and validates all the hard work and frustration. read more