Seeing, Hearing, Feeling
by Steve McGill
There are three ways to know if you’re running fast and hurdling efficiently: see it, hear it, feel it. Because you can’t see yourself running, you need a coach to serve as your eyes. You hear it by listening to your foot strikes, even if you do so subconsciously. You feel it by learning to listen to your body and what it’s telling you. Of these three ways, I would observe that most athletes rely on the first one — seeing. While that can be in the form of a coach’s feedback, it also heavily includes watching film — between reps during a training session, immediately after a race, or at home chillin. Often it involves watching videos of other hurdlers as well and taking notes on their tendencies. Ironically, seeing is the least efficient of the three. You can hear the rhythm while you’re running. You can feel your speed and your balance and your technique while you’re moving. Learning to hear your cadence and to feel your body movements can allow you to make corrections on the spot, instantly — during a rep or during a race. A coach cannot give you feedback until the rep or race is over. Same with looking at film.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
Had a bit of a revelation recently, while going back and forth via text messages with a high school hurdler who found me online and was asking for tips. He doesn’t have a hurdle coach, and has been basically winging it for the bulk of his high school career, which has gotten into the 15-low range in the 110s and under 40.00 in the 300s. The revelation came when he sent me a couple videos of practice reps and asked me to critique them. He knew that one rep was better than the other because he was hitting hurdles on one rep while the other rep was clean. Before answering his question, I asked him if he could point out what he did better on the good rep. He responded that he couldn’t. That’s when I explained to him that he was coming out of his lean too soon in the rep where he was hitting hurdles. That’s what was causing the contact with the hurdle.
The revelation I had was that this kid was the norm, not the exception. Why couldn’t he feel that he was coming out of his lean too soon? The answer was simple: he didn’t know what to feel for. Why couldn’t he see it when looking at the video? He didn’t know what to look for. As I thought about it, I realized that very few hurdlers that I’ve ever coached had this ability to feel what they were doing while they were doing it. Like this kid, even when looking at video, many hurdlers can’t see for themselves what they could be doing better until it’s pointed out to them.
I remember, about seven years ago, getting angry with one of my hurdlers who wanted to look at the video for about five minutes after every rep. I loved the fact that he was a student of the game, but we weren’t getting as many reps in as I would’ve liked, and he wasn’t developing any instincts. This kid was a really good hurdler; he was a sub-14 kid on his way to a successful collegiate career, but he could not feel or hear what he was doing. He relied totally on viewing the film. It baffled me and annoyed me.
Not until the text message back-and-forth with the kid who found me online did it hit me that the ability to feel is a rare skill. When I was hurdling throughout my college years without a hurdle coach, in an era before visual aids were available, I had no choice but to listen to my body’s cues. All of my decisions regarding technical adjustments were based on how things felt — how my lead leg felt, how my trail leg felt, how my hurdle clearance felt, how my speed between the hurdles felt. Did it feel floaty? Did it feel quick? Did I feel like I was taking off too close? Did I feel my trail leg groin straining slightly? Did I feel my hips twisting slightly? Whatever felt fluid and fast, I aimed to duplicate — not duplicate the action, but duplicate the feeling. Whatever felt off, I tried to fix by experimenting with various ideas that came to mind.
I’m just now realizing that not everybody can do what I did. The hurdlers I’ve coached who have this ability — dudes like Johnny Dutch and Wayne Davis — started hurdling when they were ten years old, so their instincts were off the charts. They were masters at making subtle adjustments on the fly. Allen Johnson had that ability, and I remember him talking about it in an interview once.
I developed it because I had too. That’s the thing about technology — it can be so helpful and so detrimental at the same time. Thing is, when it comes to hurdling, being able to feel what you’re doing while you’re doing it is an essential skill to have for the simple fact that races are all about reacting and adjusting and correcting while moving at hyper speeds. You have to be able to react in a race; you have to be able to listen to the feedback your body is giving to you and make the necessary adaptations it is telling you you need to make.
This might sound far-fetched at first, but hear me out: I think the reason I was able to feel my body’s cues so well was because I was a big reader from a very young age. I didn’t watch a ton of TV growing up, I wasn’t a big movie buff, and YouTube didn’t exist yet. I read novels and biographies for pleasure. The thing about reading is it forces you to use your imagination. It forces (or allows) you to create pictures in your mind. With movies, television shows, and videos, no imagination is required; the images are there in front of you. But when reading, you have to create your own images — of what a landscape looks like, of what a character looks like, of what a building looks like, etc. That’s one of the reasons why watching a movie version of a novel I’ve read is always a disappointing experience. I’ve already created images in my mind of what the people and places look like, and then along comes this movie basically telling me what these people and places look like. But to my point, reading a lot made me a natural at being able to “see” things that I couldn’t literally see. So when I was hurdling without a hurdle coach all those years, I was unconsciously creating images in my mind of what I looked like based on how I felt each rep. Feeling and sight were one and the same in that sense.
Meanwhile, this modern generation of hurdlers that has grown up with not only movies and television, but also with YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, has never needed to create images in their minds because they’re constantly being inundated with images in all forms of entertainment and education. So when they’re hurdling, of course they need to see the video footage before they can know what they’re doing right and what they need to improve upon.
So, to conclude, I would say that young hurdlers today need to read more in order to develop their hurdling instincts. They need to read more because doing so will enhance their ability to create pictures in their minds, which will enable them to feel more attuned to their body’s cues. That way, after a rep, they won’t need to view the film to know if the rep they just ran was good or not; they’ll be able to feel it. And like I always say, if you can feel it, you can fix it.
[/am4show]
