A Fifth Excerpt from The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling
by Steve McGill
Be a better hurdler when you leave the track than you were when you entered the track. That’s it. If you keep doing that, instead of focusing on results, the results will take care of themselves. Results are like analytics in team sports. The analytics serve as indicators. If a basketball team is moving the ball well, they’re going to have a lot of assisted baskets. You shouldn’t look at a low number of assisted baskets and say we need more assists; you should look at the low number of assists and say we need more ball movement, more player movement, we need to set better screens. Chasing numbers doesn’t work; if you’re thinking we need more assists, players will start forcing passes into tight spaces, making bad decisions on fast breaks, etc. Along the same lines, in the hurdles, chasing fast times doesn’t work. If you want to drop .5 from your personal best, you can’t focus on dropping .5 from your personal best. Instead, you need to focus on identifying something in your overall race that you can improve upon. Maybe something in your technique, maybe your start, maybe your take-off distance, etc. Focus on executing the movements. When the mind is focused on the movements, it’s not worrying about the state championship meet coming up in four weeks, it’s not growing anxious about the hurdler from a rival school you haven’t run against yet, but has a faster time than you on Milesplit. By focusing on each rep, the mind is not causing emotional turmoil, and is actually preventing it. It’s like the dog analogy I made earlier. A dog needs something to do, so if you don’t give it something to do, it’s gonna bite the couch cushions and pee on the floor and jump all over people. But if you give it something to do, you won’t see such misbehavior. Likewise, if you give the mind a job to do – help you lock in on how to fix this technical flaw or whatever – it’s not going to do the destructive stuff of worrying about things you can’t control.
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If you have the type of personality that you can’t not set goals, that you need something to shoot for, fair enough, I can still work with you. Obviously, there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with wanting to be a conference champion, or to qualify for nationals, or to make the finals at the state meet, if you have the talent to do such things. Setting the goal helps you to hold yourself accountable so that you don’t take days off and waste your talent. What I’m saying to people like you is that goals should be like clouds; they come and they go. Instead of using goals as the measure of success (or lack thereof), use them as guides on the path. Don’t judge yourself as a person by how you perform in races, like I did for the bulk of my first two years of college. If your goal is to qualify for states and you don’t qualify for states, don’t look upon yourself as a failure. Don’t question your own work ethic, your own will to win. If you’ve been putting in the work, keep putting in the work. Like I always tell my athletes, that hard work always pays off, but not always when we want it to, and not always in the ways we want it to. There are no guarantees in this sport. Track and field is a brutal sport in that regard. No matter how hard you work, you can still fall short of your goals. This sport always comes down to two cold, hard questions: what was your time, and what place did you get. So, to put it bluntly, if you don’t focus on the hurdle in front of you, on the rep in front of you, on the training session in front of you, this sport will eat you alive.
***
One story I’ve told to a few of my most special athletes over the years is the one about the first 300 hurdle race of my senior year of high school, which also happened to be my first meet after my battle with (and recovery from) aplastic anemia. I didn’t know what to expect of myself in the 300 hurdles, as I had stopped running after the third or fourth meet of my junior year. The reason I had stopped running it was because I was feeling so exhausted during races that I barely made it across the finish line. I was feeling exhausted by hurdle three, worth a good 200 meters to go. I didn’t know at the time that I was experiencing a symptom of a weird blood disease that would threaten my life. I just thought I was out of shape.
My best time in the 300 hurdles from my sophomore year was 45.3. Nothing special, but not horrible, considering it had been my first year hurdling and preferred the 110 race anyway.
The first meet of my senior year was a home meet, on our cinder track, which was rock hard on this cold, cloudy March afternoon. I was bundled up in heavy layers of sweat clothes, with ski gloves on my hands. I don’t remember why I didn’t run the 110s that day; it was probably because my coaches were just being cautious with easing me back into competition, and the 300s are always an easier race to run because it allows for greater margin for error.
Four months prior to this meet, I had been discharged from the hospital. Two months prior to this meet, I had started training with my teammates. Both of my coaches agreed that it was a miracle that I was back competing at all, even though I didn’t want to hear that at the time, and didn’t yet appreciate how right they were. They put zero pressure on me – not just in regard to the first meet, but the whole season. My teammates felt the same way. A few of them had visited me in the hospital and seen what I looked like, so they could hardly believe I was back training with them, doing hard workouts like nothing had happened. So as I stood near the 300 hurdle start line about 20 minutes before the start of the race, I decided I would race with my sweats on and just make it through. No one would be disappointed in me. They already saw me as a hero.
But as I warmed up over a couple hurdles, I started changing my mind. I had indeed been training very well, and was feeling strong. I thought back to my time in the hospital, and the moment after the last day of treatment, when I bawled in my bed, resigning myself to the reality that I would probably never hurdle again. I thought back to the months leading up to my hospitalization, as I rapidly felt more and more fatigued, to the point where just walking up a flight of stairs took maximal effort. I had something to give; I couldn’t waste this moment by giving a half-hearted effort. I had to find out where I stood. I had to find out how fast I could run, on this day, in these weather conditions, on this hard cinder track.
A few minutes before the start of the race, as coaches and volunteers were setting up the hurdles around the track, I took off my sweats and did a full-speed rep out of the blocks to the first hurdle. It felt good. Steps felt right. No stuttering, no reaching. Let’s get it.
I don’t remember any details of the race, but I remember that I won, that it felt surprisingly easy, and that my time was 44.5 – a new personal best. It was the first time I had run the race healthy since my sophomore year. I remember thinking as I crossed the finish line, so this is what it feels like to run this race with normal blood counts. My coaches and teammates all gathered round to congratulate me as I walked to the infield. Even Mike Stinson, my hurdling partner who had taken over as our best 300 hurdler the previous year, smiled and hugged me despite naturally feeling disappointed that I had returned to his event and surpassed him in the first meet. He was a good dude; his happiness for my success made me feel like I had made it all the way back.
When I thought about that race later that night and into the next day, I felt more proud about how I had approached the race than I did about the race itself. I didn’t settle for pretty good. I didn’t settle for just making it through. I didn’t settle for just pleasing my coaches and teammates. I knew I had something inside me, and that I had to dig deep and find it, and bring it out. Little did I know that I had found the formula for racing with a Zen-like mindset. The mindset is simple: I’m gonna give everything I got without emotional attachment to results. I wasn’t able to maintain that mindset after that race. Instead, because I had done better than I expected, I proceeded to put pressure on myself to do even better. I started setting goals, planning out how fast I would run by the end of the season. And putting pressure on myself became a habit throughout most of my competitive career, as discussed in a previous chapter. In college, it would take a lot of losing before I broke free from the fear of losing.
As a coach, I teach my athletes to take the approach I took in that 300 hurdle race. All you can do is run as fast as you can. So do that, and leave the rest alone. Results do not determine who you are. You can be an Olympic champion and be a complete asshole. You can be a scrub who has never sniffed an Olympic track and be one of the best people in the world.
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