Visions of the Future
by Steve McGill
As someone who is always looking beyond the known and into the unknown, I have two hurdling-related ideas I want to share with you. I believe that the first idea can lead to times in the 12.6 or even 12.5 range in the men’s 110 race, and I think the second idea can lead to times in the 12.3 range. I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out.
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For idea #1, I’ll start by explaining a dream I had about 10 years ago, when Liu Xiang was still in his prime. In the dream, I’m sitting alone in the lobby of a hotel when I look out the window and see someone walking toward the building. It looks like Liu Xiang, and as he comes closer, I realize that yes, it’s him, Liu Xiang! I introduce myself and we talk hurdles for a while, and then he asks me to stand up because he wants to show me something. So I stand up, and he stands facing me. He then proceeds to start jumping up and down frantically. But then I realize he’s not frantic; instead, he’s doing the entire motion of clearing a hurdle, over and over again. He stops and instructs me to move closer toward him. I do so, and he does the jumping up and down thing again. He instructs me to move even closer. I do so, and he jumps up and down again in front of me, and I’m amazed that he’s able to perform the entire hurdle motion like that without touching me. He then instructs me to come even closer. I do so, and now we’re almost face to face, and again he’s able to perform the entire hurdle motion without touching me. I’m absolutely astounded, and that’s where the dream ends.
For years I tried to make sense of this dream. When studying Liu’s style, it became evident to me that he didn’t hurdle the way that he was showing me in the dream. I then came to the conclusion that this was more of a vision than a dream. I decided that the reason it was Liu who appeared to me in the dream was because he was the hurdler whom I most respected and admired from a technical standpoint. But really it wasn’t Liu who appeared to me in the dream, but a projection of my own subconscious thoughts about where hurdling could possibly go.
I put the dream in the back of my mind for a while, but I kept trying to decipher its meaning. I realized two important things about it that were unconventional. 1) He was telling me to come closer, although traditional wisdom says you want to take off far enough away from the hurdle to avoid contact with it, and to execute as much of the hurdling motion as possible in front of the crossbar. He was telling me, in essence, “Don’t be afraid of getting too close; with this style, you can come as close as you want and you still won’t hit the hurdle.” 2) After a lot of contemplating and meditating on the dream, I realized that his arms, when he was doing the jumping up and down motion, were cycling the same as the legs. They were in constant motion, which is what made the motion look so frenetic. The trail arm was not pausing on the hip and then punching back up. The lead arm was cycling the same as the lead leg instead of punching up and down. This constant motion of the arms was what made what he was doing look so chaotic, but it was also what made it so efficient and controlled.
Away from the dream, I was continuing my progress in the process of seeking out a fluid style that consisted of absolutely no pauses in the motion. Finding such a style became a quest of mine in my late 20’s, when I first started studying Taoism and the concept of Wu Wei – effortless effort. So many hurdlers, I observed, put so much effort into getting over the hurdle. How do we learn to flow over a hurdle like water flows over a rock? That’s the question that was on my mind. In the mid to late 2000’s — the years that I was coaching Johnny Dutch and Wayne Davis – two highly intelligent hurdlers – I was able to develop the concept of cycling the lead arm with the lead leg. Instead of punching the hand straight up and straight down, open the elbow slightly as the arm descends, then pull it back under, just like the lead leg opens and then pulls back under the hip.
But what about the trail arm? That’s the part that got me. How do you keep the trail arm from pausing? I then remembered an old high school teammate of mine who ran the 100 and 200. His arms moved like a choo choo train. He punched them out, kind of. It was jerky, not fluid, but he won all the time, even though everyone laughed at how he looked. In recalling his sprinting style, I realized that the choo choo train motion served to propel his torso forward, so he was always tilted forward, forcing faster turnover. Reflecting on his style of running led to an epiphany: in order to keep the trail arm from pausing, you would need to cycle both arms like you cycle both legs – not just over the hurdles, but in every stride.
That’s when it hit me that, in normal sprinting, the legs and arms aren’t in sync. The arms have two motions – punch up and punch down, while the legs have three motions – up (with the knee), extend the foot as you attack the track, then pull the heel back under the hip. So I started experimenting, just in slow marches, with synchronizing the arms with the legs. I instructed my arms to let my legs lead the way, to just follow what the legs do. Then I sped it up a little bit, then did a side-drill trail leg drill over a low hurdle, and lo and behold, the trail arm didn’t pause! It cycled just like the lead arm, giving me, in effect, two lead arms.
Now the hard part would be finding an athlete to teach the style to. About four years ago, one of my former athletes who had had an unsuccessful collegiate career, mainly due to problems outside of track, came back into my life and said he wanted to resuscitate his hurdling career. Because he too was an outside-the-box thinker, I introduced him to the cycle arms idea. He ate it up. During that first year, while he was building his body back up to where he would be ready for competition again, I taught him the basic principles of the style. First we started with walking, then marching, then hurdle drills over cones, and gradually built up to 36” hurdles.
The following fall – I guess it was 2014 – he was beginning to master the style and add his own personal flavor to it. But then, that October, he moved to New York with his girlfriend because he wasn’t making any money in North Carolina, and his girlfriend (whom he eventually married) had found a job in NYC. Though we tried to keep things going, it wasn’t working from long distance, and he got too busy with a new job that he found, so our experiment never materialized into something concrete on the track in a race.
The video below is a long one in which I explain the cycle arms concept:
The video below is a short one of my athlete doing the cycle arms style in a training session over 42” hurdles. He still hadn’t mastered it yet, but you can see how both arms are in constant motion as he clears the hurdle. This is as far as we got in our development of the style.
In experimenting with this athlete, we found that he had tremendous speed coming off of each hurdle (due to the effect of having two lead arms), and we also found that, just like in the dream, we were able to take off closer to each hurdle than is typical for athletes clearing the 42” obstacles. He said that he felt like his arms were pushing him forward, and that even though his speed was constantly increasing, he never felt like he was out of control.
The cycle arms style is the one that I think can bring the world record down into the 12.6 range.
Now for my other idea: two-stepping. Not for the whole race, but for two, maybe three hurdles. It would require an ambidextrous athlete who is equally proficient at leading with either leg. A year after Dutch graduated high school, a post-collegiate athlete moved to NC to train with me. He had like 10.4 100m speed, and had been a great 4×1 relay leg in college, but had always had trouble fitting his speed between the hurdles. I started off by trying to teach him how to shuffle between the hurdles, but it wasn’t working. Shuffling went against his aggressive, sprinter-like mentality. One day, just for the hell of it, just because I’m weird like that, I moved the second hurdle in three feet and told him to two-step the second hurdle. I lowered them to 33”. I just wanted to see if he could do it. He did it easily on the first try.
From there, we did a lot of experimenting with it, working mostly on developing the weaker lead leg. He got to a point where, in one session, he was able to two-step the second hurdle at race height, with the hurdle moved in only one foot. He was 6’2”.
What we came to realize though, was that there was no way he could two-step a whole race. What we figured out was that he would need to three-step until he got too crowded to three-step (at hurdle four, most likely), and then two-step hurdle five, three-step the next two hurdles, then two-step again, and three-step the last two hurdles. Two-stepping just two hurdles, we agreed, would be enough to create huge separation from the pack.
But what stopped us was that his body just couldn’t handle all the work necessary to efficiently clear 42” hurdles with his weaker lead leg. He started developing hip, groin, and lower back issues. We realized that if we were going to really try to make it work, we would need to take at least a year off from competing, and there was no way we had that kind of time, so we put the experiment on pause permanently.
But here’s what I’m thinking:
Let’s say you have one of these freak-of-nature basketball players who are very tall and very coordinated. A Kevin Durant or a Ben Simmons. One of those types. Put somebody like that over the 110’s. He’ll be able to 7-step or even 6-step the first hurdle, and he’ll have no problem two-stepping at least part of the way. This notion that there is such a thing as being “too tall” to hurdle is based on the assumption that everybody must three-step.
A hurdler capable of two-stepping would revolutionize the event. The reason the event is stuck at 12.9-12.8 is because there is no way to truly sprint between the hurdles – hands high, knees high, all out. The ability to two-step, even if for just one hurdle, would mean the ability to sprint for part of the race. Two-stepping would require the athlete to be highly coordinated, highly intelligent, and able to handle making lightning-quick mid-race adjustments. To me, it would just be a condensed version of what 400m hurdlers have to do. As a 400m hurdler, Dutch goes from 13 strides over the first five to 14 over 6-7 to 15 over 8-10. Why couldn’t a 6’6” 110 hurdler go from 3 to 2 and back to 3? It would just be a matter of creating specific drills and specific workouts designed to facilitate a new race model. Maybe that athlete is able to two-step one hurdle in his first year of doing it. Then, after working on it in the off-season, he’s able to come back the following year and two-step two hurdles. Then, after another year or two, he’s able to two-step three hurdles. Do you see where this could go? Put a pair of track spikes on Ben Simmons, give me a year to work with him, and I’m telling you it would happen. We’d be in the 12.3 range and the 110’s would never be the same. It would be considered a tall man’s event. If you’re not at least 6’5”, and you can’t two-step at all, don’t bother to show up.
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