Learning How to Sprint by Hurdling
by Steve McGill
The one thing I love most about the hurdles is that I learn something new every time I step out on the track. The last weekend in June, I traveled to Richmond, VA, where I conducted a small hurdle camp consisting of three athletes. I had two coaches join me, so we had a 1:1 ratio of athletes to coaches, lol. The reason for the low turnout was that I had scheduled the camp on the same weekend that there were AAU youth qualifying meets in the state, so that obviously was a priority for kids in the area. By the time I realized it, the camp was about a month away, and I didn’t want to cancel it and disappoint the few who had signed up. I’m so glad I didn’t, as it ended up being one of the best camps we’ve ever led.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
The two coaches with me were my main man Kevin Howell, who has worked with me at all but one of my camps, and whom I’ve known for about fifteen years now. Kevin just wrapped up his sixth year of coaching cross country and track at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. At camps, he is my sprint and block-start guru. My other coach was Ayden Thompson, a junior at Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, NC. I was Ayden’s private hurdles coach for two-plus years during his high school career, where he dropped from 17.2 to 14.58 in the time we were together. Ayden has added the javelin and the decathlon to his event repertoire, which is pretty cool and pretty crazy. He’s also a really good dude. Because I was still in comeback mode from health issues discussed in the last two issues of The Hurdle Magazine, I needed someone to go with me and share some of the driving. I texted my former assistant of my school team in May and never heard back from him, so that was an L. Then I texted another guy who had helped with a previous camp and whose wife was pregnant. He said he could go, so I was all set. When I texted him to confirm a few days before camp, he said hold up wait a minute, had to check with his wife to make sure her doctor’s appointment wouldn’t conflict with our date and time of departure. Long story short, he ended up bailing on me. So my options were 1) call Aiden and see if he can come on short notice, 2) ask wifey to come even though I knew she wouldn’t want to go, or 3) suck it up and go by myself and trust that my leg (the one that had had the blood clots) would be okay. Aiden not only agreed to come, but he ended up going way above and beyond the call of duty. We ended up taking his car, and he did all of the driving — all the way there and all the way back — a 4-½ hour drive both ways. He said, “Coach, after all you’ve done for me, that’s the least I could do.” That’s brotherhood right there, bruh. And Kevin, meanwhile, had attended a coaching clinic in Chicago the day before the camp, then flew into Virginia in time to be only an hour late for the beginning of our first session. Again, that’s brotherhood.
So, two of the three athletes were boys, and we had one girl. Of the two boys, Peyton was back for his third Team Steve camp; he attended one of the ones in Frostburg, MD and one in Mercersburg, PA. The other boy, Jonathon, had just completed his freshman year and had been thrown into the hurdles during the spring season. He’d suffered a bad fall, so he had some fear to overcome. But he was big and strong as a bull. Ayden couldn’t believe he was only 14 years old. “We need to see this kid’s birth certificate,” he joked. The girl, Lexi, had just finished her junior year and had run in the low 16’s (100h) and low 49’s (300h).
Of the three, Lexi had the worst running form. Her back-kick was insane. In our first morning session we had the kids do a lot of drills involving sprint mechanics. Peyton looked excellent and only had minor tweaks to make. Jonathon was more raw but he picked up quickly on the things we were teaching him. Lexi, meanwhile, was trying, but struggling. She was making incremental progress, especially in doing the A-marches, but even in the A-skips that heel would start to swing forward as soon it left the ground instead of coming up under the hamstring. And that swinging action led to the back-kick we were trying to correct. Over the hurdles during the afternoon session, she looked fast and aggressive, but her sprint mechanics kept causing her to twist and float.
The next day, I worked with Lexi exclusively. After watching her warm-up sprints looking the exact same as they had the morning before, I said to myself, we can’t have her going back home running like that. So I took her to the infield (a turf field) and decided we were going to figure this out. (This is the beauty of a smaller camp; at a camp with more kids I wouldn’t have been able to give her such one-on-one attention. I also knew that I could trust Kevin and Ayden to work with the two boys and give them everything they needed). I started by having her do 30-yard runs (yards because the field was lined with football markings) nice and easy. Even at half-speed, her feet were still kicking out, or “casting,” as Coach Kevin explained to me is the term for it. So here I was faced with the monumental difficulty of helping an athlete to unlearn a bad ingrained habit. I abandoned the easy sprints and went to the high-knee drill, which we had had some success with the day before.
“Heel under hamstring,” I kept saying, “heel under hamstring.” Doing the high-knees in place, she was getting it, but as soon as she took a step forward, she started casting again. I then instructed her to take itty-bitty steps forward. “Don’t try to cover ground,” I said. “High-knee in place and then you move forward, go at a place that’s almost the same as staying in place.”
That seemed to help. When she moved forward, the heel was still coming up under the hamstring. Okay, we’re getting somewhere.
We were able to speed it up a bit and allow her to cover more ground, but it still wasn’t looking like I wanted it to look. I decided to try the marching popover drill, which I had been avoiding with her because I had assumed that her foot would kick out even more with a hurdle in front of her. But because I had seen good knee action in the high-knee drill, and because I had seen excellent knee action in the A-marches, I thought that maybe the marching popover would reinforce the knee action.
Lo and behold, things started to click. I started with a one orange 24-inch hurdle. I instructed her to march up to it and then push off and the back foot and step over it. Pretty soon I was able to add four more hurdles, about 11 feet apart for a 3-step marching rhythm. Not only was she looking good over the hurdles, but she was looking good between them too. She was maintaining a cycle action all the way through.
After a few reps of that, I decided to replace the 24-inch hurdles with real high school hurdles set at 30”. I started with just one hurdle, concerned that the extra six inches would lead to some kicking and floating. But it didn’t. She marched up to it and stepped over it like was stepping over a bookbag in the hallway. Again, I was able to add one more hurdle, and another, until she was clearing five 30” hurdles spaced 12 feet apart. The cycle action was beautiful.
I then had her graduate to quickstep drilling, which would involve actual running, so I was looking to see if everything would fall apart. It didn’t. Even running now, she was cycling the legs, she wasn’t casting, and there was a fluidity to her motions that hadn’t been there all weekend.
That is as satisfied and as gratified as I’ve ever felt coaching track. For me, it’s not the meets, it’s not the pr’s; it’s the moments of epiphany, when everything clicks for an athlete who has been working hard, enduring frustration, and in Lexi’s case, enduring 90-degree heat. Those magical moments when athlete and coach figure something out together, reach a breakthrough together — those are the moments I live for.
And, I now have something new to add to my toolkit. Hurdle drills can be used to address flaws in sprint mechanics. I had always been of the opinion that sprint mechanics must be addressed first, and separately, before hurdle mechanics can begin to be incorporated. Now, thanks to Lexi, I know that such is not always the case. Like I always say, you gotta coach the individual. And you gotta go with whatever the individual responds to, even if it doesn’t fit your preconceived notions or prior knowledge.
[/am4show]
