Over-Distance Workout for Long Hurdlers
by Steve McGill

For hurdlers who specialize in the 400 meter hurdles (or 300 meter hurdles for high school athletes in most states), doing workouts that enable them to maintain their speed for the whole race is of paramount importance. While many of the workouts I use for long hurdlers involve some hurdling, there are also workouts that don’t involve any hurdling at all. Especially when I’m working with hurdlers who have established their stride pattern for the whole race, or at least through the first 7 hurdles (for 400m hurdlers) or the first 5 (for 300m hurdlers), training with the quarter-milers is often the best way to go, as that’s the best way to build speed-endurance. That way, when we do work specifically on stride pattern, we can trust that what we see in the stride-pattern workout represents what we should be able to do in terms of stride pattern in a race, without significant fall-off in the last 100 meters (or last three hurdles).

Here’s a simple but effective workout I’ve used with that purpose in mind:

A downhill ladder of 1×600, 1×500, 1×400, 1×150.

Because this is a workout that emphasizes quality over quantity, and because its purpose is to race prep, not to build conditioning,  I’ll keep the rest period pretty high. It’ll look something like this:

6 minutes rest after the 600 and 500, and 8 minutes after the 400.

The reason the rest period increases after the 400 is because I want the last 150 to be all-out. In races, the 150 mark is where long hurdlers and quarter-milers tend to start slowing down. Instead, I want the 150 mark to be the spot where we kick it into another gear. Ending this workout, and similar workouts, with a 150 rep is as important psychologically as it is physically. Even if the athlete cannot literally pick up speed at the 150 mark of a 400h race, the athlete will slow down less than an athlete who hasn’t trained the body and the brain to accelerate when fatigued. 

For 300m hurdlers, there is no real need to run 600 meters at top speed, so the ladder would look like this instead:

1×500, 1×400, 1×300, 1×150.

The rest periods can stay the same, even though the distances are shorter, because, again, the emphasis is on quality. Every rep should be at or near race pace. 

This is a workout that should be done early in the week. And it’s best to do it on a week where the team doesn’t compete until the weekend. If the team has a meet during the week, then it makes the most sense to do this workout on a Monday, and it should be followed by a light day, as this is a workout that the athletes will need to recover from. 

As suggested earlier in this article, long hurdlers should do this workout with quarter-milers in order to get the maximum benefit out of it, as quarter-milers will push the hurdlers to improve their flat speed in ways and to degrees that other hurdlers can’t. Also, hurdlers who have a tendency to stutter as they approach hurdles will be able to ingrain some muscle memory that reminds them of what it means to sprint aggressively, free of caution.