Year One vs. Year Two
by Steve McGill
Instead of including a workout in this month’s issue, I want to talk about coaching hurdlers in year one vs. years two and beyond. This past Sunday, I met with two of my regulars — Raelle Brown and Janie Coble — and both workouts went really well. I’m not at the point yet where they do the same workout, even though I like meeting with them both at the same time. With Raelle, we’re still doing a lot of drilling, whereas with Janie we can go to full-speed hurdling at the beginning of the workout, after just a little bit of drilling that functions as the end of the warmup. With Raelle, the drilling is the main part of the workout.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
I’m realizing something: that in the first year with me, athletes need to drill a ton. After that first year, they need to drill a lot less, and they’ll get to a point where they hardly need to drill at all. When I started with Ayden Thompson the summer after his sophomore year, all we did was drill. His whole junior year, we drilled in every workout, even when the focus of the workout was block starts. By the end of his senior year, training sessions were lasting in the range of 50-60 minutes, including the warmup, because we could go straight to the blocks after the warmup. The drills had served their purpose, so we could focus exclusively on speeding things up to the first hurdle and between hurdles. He dropped from 17.2 to 14.5 in the two years with me, and much of the drop in his senior year was because we could focus so much on speed, as his hurdle mechanics were solid and only needed minor occasional tweaks.
It was a very similar process with Josh Brockman, whom I coached back around 2017. Even though he was already a sub-14 guy when I first met him, I needed to tear down and rebuild his technique, because he wasn’t hurdling efficiently. In his junior year (his first year with me) he didn’t run much faster than he had run his sophomore year. He didn’t really reap the benefits of his hard work and the changes we had made until his senior year, when he had digested the technical lessons and was now able to incorporate them without thinking about them.
So, even though Raelle’s personal best is in the 15.4 range and Janie’s is 16.58, Janie is actually much farther along in doing what we do than Raelle is. Janie was with me last year, so she went through all the drilling then. She’s also a super-quick learner, so once she started to consistently lean forward when attacking hurdles (which didn’t start happening until this summer, after her competitive season was over), she started to look like a hurdler that I coach. For the past three or four sessions, my focus with her has been mainly on getting faster, more aggressive. “Get crowded,” I tell her. “Force yourself to be quick.” I can tell her these things now because I know the technique has been ingrained to the point where she doesn’t need to think about it. Except for the trail leg. But she’s 5-8, so I’m not going to drill heavily to perfect the trail leg motion when she’s already getting power from it anyway. We’ll drill it on occasion to make sure it never causes any balance issues.
With Raelle, we weren’t starting from scratch when we first met this past June; we were starting from below scratch. Because she had super-ingrained some bad habits in her first two years of high school, we’ve had to unlearn the bad habits while implementing the new good habits. And believe me when I tell you, that’s a lot of work. Three months later, we’re just now getting to the point where she’s looking fluid and efficient in the drills. But when we speed things up, I can still see the old habits coming back. So we’ve still got a ways to go. And if the athlete isn’t able to execute our technique at full speed without thinking about it, that means we still have plenty of drilling to do.
So with Janie, I know she’ll be ready to race as soon as the indoor season starts. First of all, she’s a senior, so she’s got no time to waste when it comes to impressing colleges. But she also just looks race-ready. Coach Will, who came to the session last Sunday, remarked to her that she is not a 16.5 hurdler. He told her she looks like she’s ready to run in the 14’s, and I agree. She’s rolling.
View this post on Instagram
With Raelle, we’ll have to wait and see, and we can’t rush things. She’s a junior, so she had more time. She’s not race-ready yet, but hopefully she will be by December, or at least January. But I’m not gonna ask her to race if we’re still in drill mode. We’ll wait till outdoor season to race if we have to. But I do like racing indoors just to help the athlete get race-sharp before the outdoor season arrives. So we’ll see. We have to be patient, but we can’t waste any time. I’m thinking we might try to meet both days of the weekend through the rest of the fall months — Saturday to drill, and Sunday to work on the start and speed between.
View this post on Instagram
[/am4show]
