Learning to Train at Different Speeds
Because the school where I currently teach and coach does not have a track, our team practices at a middle school about ten minutes down the road (usually fifteen minutes with traffic). So, most days, we are sharing space with the middle school team. When it comes to hurdling, I often have to hurry up and get in my hurdlers’ workout before the middle school team comes out to the track. Or I might have my group work on their 300 hurdles if the middle school hurdlers are using the 100m straightaway.
I’ve observed over the course of the spring that the middle school hurdlers always do basically the same thing every day: sprint full blast over four or five hurdles – sometimes out of blocks, sometimes from a standing start – with the coach giving instructions about lead leg and trail leg, etc. The hurdles are set at race height, at race spacing. But no real teaching of technique, of sprint mechanics takes place. In short, they never drill.
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That observation got me to thinking: the ability to master drills, to train at different speeds and different rhythms, to slow things down and speed things up, is a vital skill that needs to be developed very early on in a hurdler’s career. Hurdlers who only know to go “balls to the wall” every rep find it very difficult – impossible really – to master the art of hurdling later in their career. They learn to compensate for technical flaws with speed and power. And depending on how athletic they are, that can work reasonably well or it may not work at all.
Because I do a fairly good amount of private coaching in addition to coaching for my school team, I often work with kids who already have some background in sprinting and hurdling, and are seeking to improve by training once or twice a week with a true “hurdle coach.”
Over and over again, with athlete after athlete, I’m finding that they have no clue when it comes to doing even the most basic hurdling warm-up drills. I’ll set up five hurdles on the race marks and instruct the athlete to “get your knees up approaching the first one and five-step the rest.” The usual response is that the athlete will just stand there, not sure what he or she is supposed to do. “How many steps should I take to the first one?” is a question I’ll often hear, or “Do you want me to start from the line?”
Then when it comes to five-stepping, they struggle mightily to figure out how fast they need to go fit that stride pattern. They’ll go too fast to the first hurdle, and then stutter to fit in five steps. Or they’ll go too slow into the first hurdle, and wind up taking seven steps between the rest. And in some cases, these are athletes who have been hurdling for two or three years. Finally, I’ll have one of the athletes I’ve been coaching for a while demonstrate how to do it, and that usually helps.
I explain to my hurdlers that there are two basic speeds at which to train: drill speed and race speed. When I say we’re doing this at drill speed, that means slow it down, think more, focus on addressing flaws and figuring out ways to fix them. When I say we’re doing this at race speed, that means speed it up, don’t think at all, don’t worry about flaws, trust your speed to compensate for mistakes.
I’d say that, overall, my hurdlers’ workouts would be 70%/30%, with 70% of hurdle workouts being at drill speed, and 30% being at race speed. In other words, I don’t very often have my hurdlers train at full speed. When we do, it is because we are specifically preparing for an upcoming race. Sometimes, at the end of a long drilling session, I’ll have the athletes do a few reps at full speed, with the hurdles at close to full spacing, just so they can get a feel for how what they learned that session applies to an actual race. But yes, most of our time is spent developing the craft, targeting our weaknesses, correcting them.
When I think back to the time when I was coaching Keni Harrison, she was a junior when I started with her, and had no prior background in the 100m hurdles. So I was able to teach her from scratch, which made things a lot easier. Back when I was coaching Johnny Dutch, Wayne Davis, and Keare Smith, those guys had already been hurdling in age-group track, and they had a good hurdle coach. So by the time I started working with them, they already knew the difference between drill speed and race speed. They already knew the routine of doing a full hurdle warm-up that included five-stepping, quick three-stepping, and some one-step drills. With those guys, we often turned drills into workouts, as they were so creative and so adaptable.
I look back on those days now and realize how spoiled I was. Those guys were hurdlers. They weren’t track athletes, they weren’t potential multi-eventers. Mind body and soul, the hurdles came first for them. If I came up with a new idea to fix a technical flaw, I could share it with them, and together we’d create a new drill, or a variation on an old one, to experiment with the idea.
Hurdlers who do not drill on a regular basis never really learn how to hurdle. They never develop a hurdler’s instincts, a hurdler’s adaptability, a hurdler’s mindset. Technique can only be learned and ingrained at slower speeds, before it is gradually implemented into the hurdler’s overall hurdling action. With Dutch and them, it was understood that anything technical we were working on in practice would take months before they’d be able to do it in a race. They were patient, and persistent in that sense, because they knew the pay-off was coming. Many young hurdlers that I coach now want the pay-off to come instantly. Anything they do well in a drill today, they want to do well in the race tomorrow. That’s simply because they haven’t grown up in a hurdling environment, where drilling is the norm and where the expectation is that the pay-off will come in the big meets at the end of the season. When I was coaching Dutch and them, their styles were always in a state of transition. They were always working on something. They always went into meets a bit confused as to exactly what they were trying to do. Then, when it came time for the big meets, the experimenting ended and our aim was to put everything we’d worked on up to that point into place.
The fact of the matter is, to really learn how to hurdle, you have to do so many repetitions that there’s no way you can do them all at full speed. Your body will break down. So, in your training, you have to do what you can to avoid shin splints, hamstring tears, groin pulls, etc. Drilling is the way to give the body the reps it needs without putting undue stress on the muscles and joints. Even with drilling, it’s important to monitor the volume, and it’s important that the coach be present to troubleshoot problems and give sound advice on the spot.
That way, when it’s time to go full speed, hurdlers will be able to do so with confidence, without being overly self-critical or worried that everything has to go just right. A lot of hurdler anxiety come race day has to do with an awareness that they haven’t done enough hurdle reps in practice. They may be fast, strong, fit, but the hurdling part is what they’re worried about – being able to sustain their technique for ten hurdles. Drilling at various speeds, with various spacings, at various tempos, is the way to alleviate such fear.
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