When in Doubt, be Fast
by Steve McGill
This time of year tends to be the time when many athletes’ sense of urgency cranks up. There are only a handful of meets left before the season ends. Qualifying for districts, states, regionals, nationals, etc. is going to be hard, and time is running out to correct flaws and drop time. Athletes are constantly looking to see where they are ranked, fearful that they won’t reach their goals. For me, this is the time of year when I receive the most emails, text messages, and DMs from athletes desperate to drop time. In this article I want to discuss the type of advice I give to these athletes, and why panicking is not going to solve anything.
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The most important thing to understand is that late in the season is not the time to be addressing technical flaws and attempting to correct them. That’s what the off-season is for, that’s what the indoor season is for, and that’s what the early-to-mid outdoor season is for. But late in the outdoor season, any attempt to correct technical flaws will not be successful, simply because it takes a few weeks (or longer) to ingrain technical corrections to the point where you can execute them in the setting of a race against stiff competition. So, instead of setting yourself up for that frustration, it’s best to just go with the technique you have and do your best to make it work.
How do you make it work? By focusing on speed between the hurdles. As I’ve said before, hurdlers and hurdle coaches often place too much emphasis on the hurdling motion and tend to de-emphasize the sprinting action between the hurdles. What an athlete does between the hurdles is actually more important than the hurdling part, because it sets up the hurdling part. In terms of bang for your buck when it comes to drop time, it’s much easier to drop time by focusing on being more aggressive between the hurdles than it is to try to fix a lazy trail leg or flailing arms.
So, let’s say you constantly land off-balance off the hurdles. Or your hips twist. Or your lead leg swings from the hip. Or your trail arm swings back too far. Trying to correct one of these types of issues in a week or two weeks isn’t going to work. The idea is to stay aggressive while making the technical mistake. Keep pushing forward. If you land off-balance and your trail leg is lagging behind you, vigorously swing your arms when you land to get yourself back sprinting again. To put it plainly, you can’t correct the mistake, so do your best to compensate for the mistake. If you email me in March asking how to fix a technical mistake, I’ll give you some tips and ideas for how to do so. But if you email me in May with the same question, I’ll say what I said in the title of this article: when in doubt, be fast.
The exception to the above mantra would be fatal flaws — flaws that can put you on the ground. For example, a lazy toe with the trail leg can cause you to hit the hurdle and fall face-first. So the coach should cue the athlete to stay dorsiflexed. That’s a simple instruction that should be easy to remember, and it won’t force the mind to work so hard that it distracts the athlete from staying aggressive. In big races, you want to avoid thinking as much as possible. You want to rely on your instincts. You don’t want to be coaching yourself through a race.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the hurdler with the best technique doesn’t always win. Like I always tell my hurdlers, speed can compensate for technical flaws, but technical precision can’t compensate for a lack of speed, or aggression. My prime example for this point goes back to the year 2000, when the Adidas National Championships took place at North Carolina State University, down the road from where I lived at the time. The two best high school 110 hurdlers in the country that year were Josh Walker and Rickey Harris. Walker would go on to win two NCAA championships at the University of Florida, while Harris would go on to be a stand-out 400m hurdler at Florida State. Walker, to this day, remains one of the smoothest, most fluid hurdlers I’ve ever seen. In his semifinal race, I watched in awe as he stepped over each hurdle with ease, surging away from his competitors effortlessly. Watching that race marked the first time the idea of “running over the hurdles” as opposed to “hurdling” entered my consciousness. He didn’t look like he was hurdling; he looked like he was running over the hurdles.
Harris, meanwhile, was a wrecking ball in comparison. In his semifinal race, he was clang-clanging into hurdles, zigzagging in the lane, and basically just powering his way over the hurdles and through the finish line. I was a hurdling purist to an extreme degree at the time, certain that the best hurdler will always beat a faster sprinter in a hurdle race. Therefore, I knew that Walker would blow Harris away in the final.
But he didn’t. Harris won. It was a close race, but the better hurdler didn’t win. The faster sprinter did. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the more aggressive sprinter. While I would still argue that the better hurdler will win over 42-inch barriers, such was not, and is not, not always the case over 39’s, nor for girls/women over 33’s.
At the high school level, especially, it is often evident to me that hurdlers are not sprinting between the hurdles. They’re running hurdle to hurdle. The speed they have when there are no hurdles in the way is not the speed we’re seeing when there are hurdles in their way. That’s why I always say, be fast. A lot of times, hurdlers at the high school level don’t realize that they’re not being fast, that they’re not being aggressive. So, “be fast” is something that I say with a sense of urgency. Stop fixating on the hurdles. Sprint.
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