April 24, 2021
Below is video of the Zoom call I hosted on April 11 with hurdling legend Renaldo Nehemiah and his high school coach Jean Poquette. It was a very informative and enjoyable talk! We discussed many of the workouts that Poquette used in helping Nehemiah to become the first high school hurdler in history to break the 13.0 (hand-timed) barrier while running for Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School in New Jersey. As a collegian at the University of Maryland, Nehemiah continued to flourish, as he broke the 110m world record twice his sophomore year, setting an NCAA record of 13.00 in the process — a record that wasn’t broken until forty years later by Florida’s Grant Holloway. In 1981, Nehemiah became the first hurdler in history to break 13.00, as he set the world record a third time in 12.93. Poquette’s coaching methods were non-traditional for sprint events in that he emphasized endurance over speed, as Nehemiah often trained with the quarter-milers and half-milers in addition to doing a lot of hurdle-endurance work. So take some time to watch the video and learn how the greatest hurdler in history became the greatest.
