An Ocean You Never Will Cross
by Steve McGill
“When you’re dealing with music, you’re dealing with infinity. There’s no beginning, there’s no end. It’s an ongoing, never-ending journey. It’s an ocean you never will cross.” –David S. Ware
Though the above quote comes from a jazz musician talking about jazz, for me, it directly applies to the hurdles, and the role that hurdles have played in my life. When I was competing throughout high school and college, I instantly became fascinated with hurdling as an art form. As much as I loved the competitive element, what captured my imagination the most was the fact that the hurdlers offered a million and one ways to improve, unlike the sprints, where if you didn’t have the raw talent to start with, there wasn’t much you could do about it. In the hurdles, as it seemed to me, there was infinite potential.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
In college I found out that that wasn’t quite true. Potential was not infinite, and I quickly realized that my talents weren’t going to take me but so far. The moment of epiphany came when I saw 20-year-old Danny Harris break the great Edwin Moses’ winning streak in the 400 hurdles. I’m 20 years old, I thought to myself, realizing that if I wasn’t that good already, or at least sniffing that air, I most likely never would be.
Yet my fascination with the hurdles did not wane. I subscribed to Track & Field News and gobbled up the hurdle articles. I studied the photographs of hurdlers clearing the barriers, seeing what I could pick up in regards to the technique of the greats. Around that time, in the mid to late 1980’s, the greats in the 110’s were Roger Kingdom, Greg Foster, and Tonie Campbell. I also bought a copy of The Track & Field Omnibook by Ken Doherty and inhaled the chapter on the high hurdles. I read and re-read the article discussing Renaldo Nehemiah’s high school training, and the interview that Jon Hendershott did with Nehemiah discussing his ability to stay focused and calm in high-pressure races. Nehemiah, to me, represented the epitome of hurdling as an art form. He was the standard to which I longed to aspire. While I knew I could never run that fast over the hurdles, I yearned to get to a point where I can run over hurdles that fluidly, that effortlessly.
For a handful of races – maybe four at the most – I caught glimpses of that freedom, of that ease of motion, that only a hurdler can feel. But the end of college pretty much meant the end of competing, and the end of the dream. But when I started coaching, I realized that the questions I had been asking as an athlete were questions I could still pursue in this new role. The questions were about technique. What is the lead leg supposed to do? Should it extend horizontally and snap down? Or should it stay partially bent and cycle? What should the lead arm do? What should the trail leg do? How deep should the lean be? As a coach, I had space to explore these questions more thoroughly than I could as an athlete. As an athlete, my focus was strictly on myself. As a coach, I had a crew of athletes to work with, and I quickly came to understand that solutions for certain athletes did not solve problems for other athletes. I couldn’t establish a “right” and a “wrong” that applied to all hurdlers, so I had to be adaptable.
Over the years, through trial and error, experimentation, picking the brains of other coaches, attending clinics, and taking advantage of new technology such as YouTube videos, I developed my own approach to coaching hurdlers – one that strayed from the hurdling styles I had watched and adopted while growing up. My study of Eastern philosophy – the Taoist principle of Wu Wei in particular – led me to establish the philosophy that hurdling should feature an ease of motion, that all the power moves I was seeing in modern hurdling were ultimately inefficient and caused late-race fatigue that led to mistakes and breakdowns. The idea, I realized, is not to try hard, but to minimize one’s effort, in order to maximize the usefulness of one’s effort. That’s why I dropped the snapdown style. It didn’t fit my vision of hurdling as an art form. For me, hurdling has always been just as much about mastering the art form as it has been about competing. And I’ve always firmly believed that if you focus on mastering the art form, winning races will be a natural consequence. If you stay true to the art form, you don’t have to chase success; success finds you.
Over the years I’ve coached some national champions at the high school level, which has validated my approach. Oddly, however, I found that coaching national champions was not inherently more fulfilling than coaching marginally-talented athletes struggling to break 17.00. For me, the journey has always been the source of fulfillment. I tend to distance myself from coaches who name-drop names of athletes they’ve coached, and I try to make it a point not to name-drop myself. Anything that boosts my ego takes away from the purity of the experience of experimentation and discovery. Often people have asked me why I haven’t sought to coach at the collegiate level or even the professional level. The short answer is I don’t want to. The more the emphasis is on competition, and needing to win in order to keep a job, the less the emphasis can be on the art form. And for me, the art form is sacred; it cannot be compromised. Also, I know my own personality well enough to know that I would never want coaching to consume my entire life. I like balance. I like being a teacher, a coach, a writer. I like getting away from the track so that I can return to it with renewed energy.
Recently I randomly stumbled across a YouTube video that was an instructional hurdle video from 1960. It was about 13 minutes long, featuring footage from a Yale University practice, as well as some footage of hurdling great Elias Gilbert. What I found fascinating was how relevant so much of the instruction still was, 58 years later. Though I saw several things that I didn’t agree with in terms of how I teach hurdles, I saw enough good stuff to make me say, man, plenty of hurdlers out there now could learn something from watching this video.
That video kind of took my mind wandering, kind of got me thinking that all hurdlers, on some level of consciousness, gravitate toward the hurdles because they are seeking a unique type of experience that cannot be found in other athletic endeavors. The rhythm, the dance, the art form that is hurdling is what keeps calling us back, keeps us intrigued, keeps us longing to learn more.
About ten years ago I had a dream in which Liu Xiang showed me a new style of hurdling that, I came to realize much later, featured cycling the arms in sync with cycling the legs, thus eliminating all pauses in the hurdling action. Ten years later, I still have yet to coach an athlete who can bring that style into the world, although I have come close. I also have visions of coaching an athlete who can two-step one or two hurdles through the course of a race. Give me an athlete who is tall enough, fast enough, fearless enough, coordinated enough, and who can learn to lead with either leg, and it will happen.
Such visions for the future of hurdling may or not become a reality in this slow, dull world, where new ideas are always looked upon with scorn. But I put such ideas out there because I feel like I have an obligation to. At some point in time, an instructional video made in 1960 should become irrelevant and outdated. Even if I never coach a two-stepper, maybe another coach will pick up the idea and run with it, even if I’m not here to see it happen. To me, it’s all about pushing the event forward, keeping it new, keeping it invigorating, awe-inspiring.
The hurdles have been an integral part of my life since I was fifteen years old. This journey will continue until I breathe my last breathe, and into the great beyond. It’s an ocean I never will cross.
[/am4show]
