Coaching the 400 Hurdler
by Steve McGill
Throughout my coaching career, I’ve never, until this year, coached a hurdler who specializes in the 400 meter hurdles. That’s mainly because the bulk of my coaching — whether for a school team, youth club or in my private coaching — has consisted largely of high school athletes. The occasional post-collegians I’ve coached were 110/100 meter hurdle specialists, and the same for the collegians who have come to me for training sessions. At the high school level, almost all hurdlers run both hurdling events, which means the 300 meter distance here in North Carolina for the long hurdles. This past summer, I started coaching an athlete who specializes in the 400 meter hurdles — Tevin Colson, who ran for a DIII school, ran a personal best in the 55.0 range, and is looking to get down to the 50.0 range. Some of the dropping of time will come easily just by getting rid of the stuttering and hesitation that plagued him late in races, but the rest will require some serious work, which he has been putting in. In this article, I want to talk about the challenges and joys that come with coaching a 400 hurdle specialist, and how it differs from coaching 110/100 hurdle specialist, as well as how it differs from coaching athletes who run both hurdle events.
Because of my teaching job and his work schedule, Tevin and I only meet twice a week. I give him running workouts to do on the other days so we can focus on hurdling whenever we’re together. Our mid-week workout is when we focus on drilling and/or negotiating the curve. And our Saturday workout is when we focus on going all-out over hurdles. All the workouts are designed to optimize the quality of the Saturday workout, as we use that as the measurement of our progress.
Ironically, I’ve modeled the Saturday workouts after the sprint workouts I used to watch sprinters like Marion Jones and Justin Gatlin do back when they used to train in Raleigh, NC and I was living in Raleigh, coaching for a youth club squad. What I noticed about their workouts was that they never did interval training. They were all 100 meter runners, and the farthest I ever saw them sprint in practice was 60 meters, maybe 80. Back then, based on how I had come up as an athlete and young coach, this type of training seemed bizarre. What did they do to get in shape? What did they do to build their speed-endurance? I had my kids doing stuff like 8×200, 12×150, etc. These professionals weren’t doing any of that type of training. The cynic in me reasoned that they didn’t have to because they were on juice, which, as it turns out, had to be at least somewhat true. But in looking at their training with an unbiased mindset, what they were doing made sense. They were training the phases of the race, particularly the first two phases — the drive phase, and the top-end phase. They were training body positioning, angles, explosive power. The logic is simple — in order to train the body to go full speed in races, you have to make it go full speed in practice. A whole lot of slower reps at 75-80% of full speed isn’t really preparing the body to do what it has to do on race day. Same with short recovery periods. If every rep is going to be fast, then the recovery periods must be long enough to give the body ample time to recharge so it can go all-out again.
So with Tevin, I’ve taken that concept and applied it to our Saturday workouts. We started with 3×200, clearing the first three hurdles and continuing on to the 200 mark. Then we moved up to 3×200 clearing the first four hurdles, and then we moved up to 3×200 clearing the first five hurdles. We spent about two weeks on each progression, with the goal of 15-stepping all hurdles after the first hurdle. And we wanted it to be a smooth, rhythmic 15, no overstriding to make it, and we wanted the fifteenth stride to be at least a little bit of a cut step so that our momentum was taking us through the hurdle and toward the next one. I don’t feel like a long hurdler’s cut step needs to be as severe as a sprint hurdler’s, but I do feel there needs to be one. With oh t our momentum taking us toward the next hurdle, there’s a good chance we’ll lose ground to our competitors in a race. In the first half of the race, we don’t want any change downs yet. We want 15 strides between the hurdles and we want that to be an automatic thing.
Now we’ve graduated to 300s. Recently we’ve done 2×300 clearing the first six hurdles. And most recently we did 1×300 over the first seven followed by 1×300 over the first six. Though he was able to 15-step through seven, the seventh hurdle was a bit of a stretch, and his trail leg hit the hurdle. Our aim is to build up to 2×300 over the first eight hurdles. But our goal won’t necessarily be to 15-step the whole way, but to find out if that’s the best strategy.
Rest periods are long in these workouts, by the way. He was getting ten minutes between reps with the 200s, and now we’re up to 15 minutes with the 300s over seven hurdles. The rest is an active rest, consisting of walking, dynamic stretching, A-skips, easy short sprints.
Once we master two reps over eight hurdles, we won’t graduate to 400s. The logic is that if we know our strategy for the first eight, and have full confidence in our ability to execute our strategy for the first eight, then the last two is all about competing and asserting our will to win. Also, we’re counting on the other workouts we do throughout the week — especially our 500s, to carry us through the last 100 meters.
Meanwhile, we’re always drilling the weaker lead leg so that we’re ready to use it if/when we need to use it. Though our goal is to get to a point where we can 15-step the whole race, we want to be ready if we can’t. Like 400 hurdle legend Kevin Young likes to say, “You need to be prepared like Smokey the bear”
Although I’m a stickler for technical detail, I find that I’m not spending much time at all on technique with Tevin. I think that’s more because of him and his ability to pick things up quickly than because of a change in philosophy. When we started together in the summer, we worked on technique a lot for the first few sessions. But within three sessions he had grasped the fundamental principles of the downhill style I was teaching him, so there was no reason to belabor the point. Fortunately for me, he’s a true student of the event, appreciates the importance of drilling and of visualizing when away from the track, so his technique improved dramatically in a very short amount of time.
One thing I’ve added to my flow in coaching long hurdlers is the importance of taking big, powerful strides in the first four strides out the blocks, and in the first two strides off of each hurdle. These big strides increase our chance for success when it comes to taking off close enough that we can push through the hurdle. I’m big on the idea that the first two strides off each hurdle determine how things will go at that next hurdle.
Below is video footage of Tevin doing the most recent workout — 1×300 over seven followed by 1×300 over six.
