Early Season Meets
by Steve McGill
Now that the indoor season is underway and many athletes have a few meets under their belt, I felt that this would be a good time to discuss the mental approach that athletes and coaches should take when it comes to competing this time of year. My observation has been that many athletes and coaches place a heavy emphasis on competing well during the indoor season, often to the detriment of their own progress. There is a balance that needs to be struck, which is what I want to talk about in this article.
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In my years of coaching, since the mid-90’s, one of the most significant ways in which the sport has evolved is that the indoor season has become much more competitive and intense. Back in the day, the indoor season was considered preparation for outdoors, and nothing more. You ran a few races to get in shape, but no one cared too much about who the indoor champions were, especially because of the funky distances and the various shapes of the tracks.
But now, indoor track is taken very seriously. There are two national championship meets, most states have a state championship meet, and college recruiting is heavily influenced by indoor performances. Back in 2008, I was coaching a very talented but very underachieving athlete who, going into his senior year, had minimal scholarship opportunities simply because, despite his enormous talent, he hadn’t run the kinds of times that would indicate he was Division I material. He’d been “dabbling” in track throughout high school. Then, realizing that he had no future in football and that all opportunities to compete athletically in college were slipping away, he started to take track seriously during the fall and winter of his senior year, and ended up running one of the fastest times in the nation in the 55m hurdles at a local meet. Before even competing at nationals, he was receiving scholarship offers from colleges that had previously told him they had run out of money. One race changed his whole future.
Yet, scholarship opportunities aside, I still view the indoor season as a time to prepare for the outdoor season. For hurdlers in particular, sprint hurdlers are only running half the distance of their outdoor race, clearing half the amount of hurdles that they will clear in outdoor races. And for long hurdlers, there is no event that directly prepares them for their outdoor event. But what I am coming to realize is that the nature of the sport has changed enough that I can no longer brush off the importance of competing well indoors. Back in the day, many of the best athletes at any given school were playing basketball or wrestling or swimming during the indoor season. In those days, being a three-sport athlete was considered the greatest proof of being a true stud. But as time has moved on, just about every serious athlete trains year-round in his or her specialty sport, and not doing so means being in danger of falling behind the competition. If you have dreams of being a collegiate hurdler, you can’t be in the gym shooting hoops all winter.
As I was saying to the parent of one of my athletes recently, there are only three months out of the year in which hurdlers don’t compete: August, September, and October. I’m talking about the youth and high school levels. Winter meets begin as early as November and go through March for those who qualify for nationals (bleeding into the spring season). Then the outdoor season lasts until May or June, depending on what state you’re in (bleeding into the summer season). Then the summer season (Junior Olympics and/or AAU) goes all the way to the end of July for those who qualify for nationals. So, the question I ask is, with all this competing, basically all year round, when do you find time to develop? If an athlete is just learning how to hurdle, when is there time to teach him or her the basics? If a more experienced hurdler has flaws that need to be addressed, when is there time to address them without compromising his or her chances of competing at his or her best? To me, as a hurdling purist, it’s a real dilemma. I don’t like sending someone out there to compete when I know he or she still needs a lot of work before he or she is really ready to compete. But when all the other athletes from other teams are competing, and your kid is waiting, it’s hard for your kid not to get antsy, not to feel like he or she is falling behind, even if that’s not really the case.
The best-case scenario I’ve ever had was when I was first started coaching Keni Harrison. She came to me in the fall of her junior year. In her sophomore year, she had finished second in the 300m hurdles at the state meet, and didn’t race in the 100m hurdles at all. So, no one was expecting her to run the 100h, not even her school coach. Therefore, we had time to build a foundation, add in the details, and put the speed behind it before she even raced a 100h race. So, we had October, November, December, January, February, and March to get her right before she ran her first 100h race in April, and she exploded onto the scene. Everyone was shocked, but I knew it was coming. By not rushing to race, we were able to put a finished product, so to speak, onto the track once the time did come to race.
Since that year, I’ve never had a scenario that was anything near similar. When I was coaching Jackie Howell, who is now in her senior year at the University of Kentucky, I saw significant flaws in her technique that I wanted to address, but there were always big meets coming up, so we had to focus on preparing for those meets. She was a senior, she had goals she wanted to accomplish, records she wanted to chase, which I could understand and appreciate. But because we focused so much on competing during the indoor season, we never built the conditioning base necessary to excel outdoors. Sure, she did well outdoors and was one of the best in the nation that year, but we left a lot of meat on the bone, man. She could’ve gone sub-13 if we hadn’t put so much emphasis on indoor competitions.
This year, in my private coaching, one of the kids I’m working with, Matt Garrett, is making the transition from 33’s to 39’s as he enters his first year of high school. Honestly, such a major transition is unfair, and can damage the psyche of a young hurdler. The hurdles are six inches higher, the race is ten meters longer, the distance to the first hurdle is longer, and the distance between hurdles is longer. So, after just beginning to adjust to the new race in September, he’s expected to race by December? He’s had two races so far, and he’s done decently well, but nowhere near as well as he would like. In his mind, coming off a second-place finish at Junior Olympic Nationals in the 100m hurdles six months ago, he should be able to pick up where he left off. But that’s not how it works. You have to start all over again. You have to learn how to hurdle all over again. The things that worked at 33 won’t work at 39. Personally, I’m in no rush. I don’t even have a panic button to press. I know that as he adapts to the demands of the event, and as he gets taller and stronger and faster, he’ll eventually be as good in the 110m race over 39 as he was in the 100m race over 33’s. It won’t be this year. Freshman year ain’t no joke. Everybody is taller and stronger than you are, and they’ve been running over the 39’s for at least one year, if not more. And in high school there are no age group divisions. You’re 15 years old running against 17-18-year-olds.
So I have to constantly remind him, that he’s doing okay, that he’s progressing well, that he’s gonna be fine if he just keeps grinding like he’s been. But of course, it’s natural for the athlete to be impatient, to want to see immediate results. In an ideal setting, he wouldn’t be racing right now. We’d just be drilling, drilling, drilling. We’d work on that first hurdle until the angles became second nature. We’d work on the first three hurdles until that first zone of the race became second nature. He’s racing before he’s ready to race, which means my job involves doing as much psychological damage control as it does getting him used to the 39’s.
Another athlete I’ve just started working with this past fall, Joshua Brockman, is a junior who ran 13.94 to win the 15-16 age group at Junior Olympic Nationals last July. I’ve been teaching him a lot of new things, and he’s been looking excellent in drills, picking things up as soon as I mention them. But when he goes full speed, old habits come back. And in meets, he’s not looking all that different than how he looked in July (although, yes, he is running fast times). To him, this lack of progress has been a bit frustrating and hard to understand. “How come I can’t do it at full speed?” he has asked me on more than one occasion in regard to a particular aspect of technique. “Because you’re still learning it,” is my usual response. What I’ve told him is that the early season meets are preparation for the bigger meets at the end of the indoor season and into the outdoor season. You make your mistakes, you learn from them, and gradually you get to a point where you don’t make them anymore. But it takes a lot of reps, a lot of thinking, a lot of trial and error. I tend to measure progress by how fast a hurdler looks between the hurdles, and how easy the race feels for him or her. I’m looking for fluidity, ease of motion. I don’t focus as much on the time on the watch. I know the times are going to come down if we keep doing things right. I never stress out about times, I never chase times.
To me it’s kind of funny. In the case of Matt it’s like, You’ve been practicing 39’s for three months and you expect to roll over these like you rolled over the 33’s? In the case of Josh it’s like, You’ve learned new drills that were totally foreign to you just a week ago and you expect to be able to incorporate what you learned into a race the next meet? It doesn’t work that way. Hurdling is so, so complicated. So yes, I still use the indoor season as a time to teach. When you have a senior hunting down scholarship offers, that’s different, but I generally don’t care about indoor championships — on the team level nor on the personal level. Our goal is to have everything in place by the big meets in May, and then again in July.
My advice to coaches and athletes is to go ahead and compete indoors, but to do so with the mindset of keeping the bigger picture in mind. Even though the indoor race is only 55 or 60 meters, the outdoor race is longer, so you can’t ignore the importance of conditioning, speed-endurance and technical development.
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