Getting over the Fear
“It’s too high to get over, too low to get under, you’re stuck in the middle, and the pain is thunder.” –Michael Jackson
For hurdlers, fear of the obstacle can be a mental barrier that inhibits potential success, starting at the beginner level and going all the way up to the elite level. For a hurdler, fear of the obstacle can manifest itself in different ways, and it is important for coaches to be able to identify fear when they see it. Otherwise, they will exhaust a lot of energy trying to correct a technical flaw from a technical standpoint when the reality is that a lack of technical awareness is not really the issue. Fear is. This article will discuss the types of fears that a hurdler faces at the three broad-based levels – beginner, experienced, and elite. It will also provide suggestions for how to help athletes to overcome the fear.
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Why Are You Stopping?
The beginner level is where fear of the obstacle is most common, and most obvious. For the beginner, this fear can be a higher hurdle to clear than the hurdle itself. When teaching beginners, it’s very important to emphasize not only technique and rhythm, but aggression as well. If technique is over-emphasized, the hurdler will remain tentative when it’s time to go full speed. Loading up beginners on slower-speed reps over low hurdles spaced closely together, ingraining good technical habits, but without ever having them sprint over the hurdles at full speed, can be a recipe for failure.
I’ve made that mistake. With one beginner I coached – a high school freshman with 100 meter speed in the 13.3 range – I started off by setting up the first hurdle and having her sprint at it from the starting line. Though she claimed that she was really eager to take up hurdling, she kept running up to the hurdle and stopping – my number one pet peeve in the whole wide world. When I asked her if she was afraid of the crossbar she answered, “No, I’m just afraid of hitting it.” Smh.
So I backed off. I had her do walk-over drills, one-step drills, quick three-step drills. All kinds of stuff to get her over hurdles. After more than a month of nothing but technique and rhythm drills, I again had her go over the first hurdle, full speed from the starting line, from a standing start. Over and over again, she ran up to the hurdle and stopped. She had been looking so good and exhibiting so much confidence in the drills that my plan had been to get her going over the first three hurdles, but I couldn’t even get her to clear the first one. Giving into frustration I told her I didn’t care if she jumped ten feet over it, if her lead leg kicked out, if her arms swung across her body. Just get over the hurdle.
I took the top off and rested it against the base so that the crossbar was less than 27 inches high. I had teammates talk to her, give her a pep talk, try to convince her she could do it. Nothing made a difference. She ran up to the hurdle and stopped. Finally I conceded, this isn’t going to work. I realized that if beginners aren’t willing to sprint at the hurdle and get over it before they even have a clue what they are doing, they’re not hurdlers. Lesson learned.
The Puddle Hopper
The above scenario is a worst-case scenario. That girl was the only athlete I’ve ever coached whom I couldn’t push past the initial fear. A more common version of beginner-level fear is that of the puddle hopper. A puddle hopper is someone who runs from hurdle to hurdle instead of running through each hurdle. It’s like they’re hopping over puddles instead of hurdling. In most such cases, the hurdler first successfully three-stepped by extending each stride with the foreleg instead of applying force to the track and getting the knees up.
As a result, whenever they run with hurdles in their way, they demonstrate this inefficient mechanic, even if they run efficiently when there aren’t any hurdles in the way. This too is a form of fear. What I tell puddle hoppers is, “Trust your speed.” They’re afraid that if they don’t extend from the foreleg, they won’t make it to the next hurdle in three steps. Also, they’re comfortable with knowing that this style of running, though inefficient, give them time to prepare for the upcoming hurdle. They fear that if they really sprint, if they keep their momentum pushing forward, they’ll come up on the hurdle too soon. Once the puddle-hopping style is ingrained, it’s a hard habit to break.
Beast Mode
The most common sign of fear at the beginner level is a lack of speed. Pretty simple, I know, but it’s true. When you see athletes who normally run with their knees up and their hands high running on their heels with their hands low between the hurdles, you know they’re fixated on the hurdles, running fearfully instead of aggressively. When you see hurdlers looking up at the first hurdle while in the starting blocks, you know they’re gonna pop up too soon and measure their way to the hurdle with every step they take.
I had a girl I was coaching last year who could consistently run 200 reps in practice in the 28-30 range, but when we set up the first four hurdles on hurdle days, she couldn’t three-step all of them. She was asking me questions about her lead leg locking and her lead arm swinging across her body. I was like, “Just run over the hurdles the way you run your 200’s, and you’ll be three-stepping all day.” It took her a while to get to a point where her speed and aggression were evident in her hurdling. In the early spring she was running in the 16.8 range, puddle hopping most of the hurdles and four-stepping the last two or three. By the state meet in May she was running 15.40 and looking like an athlete who knew she could run.
This athlete was typical of many beginning hurdlers. She assumed that all answers to her rhythm issues could be found in technical flaws. She didn’t even realize that she was running passively. The thing is, when learning how to hurdle, hurdlers are taught to think so much that they forget to turn that voice off in their head when it comes time to just gear up and go. Stop asking all these questions about technique if you’re not running. There’s no point in addressing a technical flaw if you’re not attacking the hurdle first. Hurdlers need to develop a sprinter’s mentality. Just be a beast, just be an animal, technical mistakes be damned. Addressing technical flaws is a never-ending process. If you wait until your technique is perfect before you attack the hurdles, you’ll never attack the hurdles.
Stomp
The experienced hurdler’s fear is more subtle, and not as easy to identify. The experienced hurdler is not going to run up to the hurdle and stop. He or she is not going to run around the hurdle. If you ask the experienced hurdler if he or she is afraid, the answer will be no. To the untrained eye, there are no indications of fear. But you have to know what to look for.
The last-step stomp that I wrote about in the previous issue can be an indication of fear. If the hurdler runs on the balls of the feet every step except the last step, and stomps that last step, that means the athlete is preparing for the hurdle, trying to ensure that he or she doesn’t hit it or run into it. This hurdler will typically also take off too close to the hurdle, probably a habit he or she developed when first starting out. It’s a way of backing off, of gaining some control over the speed that can cause an out-of-control feeling.
But the last-step stomp is tricky. It could be a technical issue. It could also be a rhythm issue. But if you’ve done troubleshooting regarding the technique and the rhythm, and the problem remains, then fear of the obstacle could be the root cause of the issue.
Slalom Style
Then you have the zig-zaggers. Hurdlers who zig-zag in the lane instead of running in a straight line. Usually this occurs at the start, out of the blocks. Many hurdlers and sprinters have lateral movement in their first few strides. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the hurdler who immediately hugs one edge of the lane when coming out of the blocks, then veers back to the middle of the lane in the last step before the hurdle, then continues to do this all the way down the track. Again, this is fear. If they don’t hug the edge of the lane coming out of the blocks when the hurdles aren’t up, you know it’s fear making them do it. They’re thinking about the hurdle instead of focusing on what they’re doing.
This past weekend I was working with a hurdler who had a tendency to veer to the right edge of the lane in her first steps out of the blocks. She had a good start – powerful, good push, good drive. But she always veered to the right. So I borrowed an old trick I learned from a former athlete. I placed two hurdles, faced sideways, in her lane, a few feet beyond the starting line, effectively narrowing the lane. This way, she wouldn’t be able to veer to the right without running into the hurdles. Of course, she overcompensated on the next rep by veering to the left side of the lane. Next rep, I put up two hurdles on that side of the lane, faced sideways like the other two. Now, the lane was very narrow. She would have to run in a straight line to avoid the hurdles on her left and on her right. And that’s what she did. And it was amazing to see how much more power and speed she had going into that first hurdle. Although she had not been too happy with me narrowing her lane with those hurdles closing in on her, she admitted that it had solved the problem.
Get Up, Stand Up
Another sign of fear among experienced hurdlers can be that they run too erect to the first hurdle and between all the rest. An erect posture – particularly with the upper body – indicates a lack of surety, a lack of confidence. A confident hurdler will not run on the heels, will not lean back while approaching the hurdle. A confident hurdler will run tall, on the balls of the feet, with each step landing under the hip. Now, some hurdlers might just have bad sprint mechanics. So, again, the litmus test is, if their running posture is good when there are no hurdles in the way, then the poor posture must be a sign of fear.
It’s Not Paranoia if the Danger is Real
For the elite hurdler, who run at hyper speeds, who must lower their hands and lower their knees and be super-quick with their steps between the hurdles to avoid crashing, the danger of crashing into hurdles is very, very real. Being an elite level hurdler is like being a NASCAR driver. No matter your level of mastery, you could crash at any time. The more you increase the speed, the more you increase the danger.
Some of the best hurdlers the sport has ever known have famously fallen over hurdles. Gail Devers and Lolo Jones missed out on seemingly certain gold medal opportunities due to late-race crashes. Allen Johnson, one of the greatest technical masters the event has ever known, crashed in a qualifying round and missed out on an Olympic opportunity. Greg Foster, the greatest high hurdler in the world throughout most of the 1980’s, crashed on more than one occasion due to overcrowding. The list goes on. I doubt there are any elite hurdlers, either from back in the day or the here and now, who don’t have a story about getting too close and smacking some hurdles around.
Renaldo Nehemiah once said that he embraced the danger, that the feeling he could crash at any moment was thrilling. He said that was why he was able to run under 13 seconds while other hurdlers couldn’t. A lot of hurdlers, he said, when they enter the danger zone, back off, because it terrifies them.
In talking to David Oliver at a coaches’ clinic last week, he said something similar. Oliver compared running under 13 seconds to an out-of-body experience. Especially in the last part of the race, the hurdles are coming at you so fast that you feel like you’re one-stepping. Elite level hurdlers, therefore, must have the reactive skills of NASCAR drivers. They must not be afraid of crashing, even while knowing they could.
Getting Over the Fear
There’s not much a coach can do to help an athlete get over the fear. All a coach can do is point out the fear so that the athlete can see it, own it, and face it. Maybe simulate in practice the types of situations that create the fear. For that elite athlete, for example, maybe move the hurdles in super close so that he or she gets used to making lightning-quick reactions. With beginners my experience has been that, over time, the fear dissipates. I never know why it does. It’s rarely because of anything I did. I just think that if the athlete is sincere in his or her desire to hurdle well, it’s only a matter of time before he or she grows more aggressive and more confident in his or her abilities. That’s when the big drops in time come. But you can never predict when it will happen, nor whether it will happen gradually or suddenly.
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