Trust Your Speed
Trust your speed. That’s a phrase I hear myself saying more and more often when working with young hurdlers. Trust your speed. A lot of hurdlers don’t trust their speed. Especially those who don’t hurdle often in practice, even if they’ve been competing in the hurdles for years. Hurdlers who don’t have a lot of drill reps under their belts can often be the most tentative hurdlers on the track, and they don’t even realize that they’re being tentative.
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Over this past spring and now into the summer, I have worked with several hurdlers, from 8th graders to a college sophomore, who all suffer, to one degree or another, from the same ailment: when it comes time to let loose and just run, they become fixated on the hurdles. This fixation causes them to run more slowly and thereby create (or exacerbate) problems in rhythm and technique.
I recently started working with a girl who just finished her freshman year of high school, and she said she’s been hurdling since the fourth grade. Prior to our first session, her mom sent me a video of her running in the 100 meter hurdles. The girl five-stepped the whole race, so I figured I had a major project on my hands. But when she arrived for practice and I put her through basic warm-up drills, I found that she had a lot of bounce in her stride. Sure, there were plenty of things in her mechanics that needed to be fixed, but she was certainly athletic. At the end of the warm-up, I had her do a few 50 meter sprints, and she looked plenty fast.
So why was she five-stepping in that video? Maybe I had been looking at the wrong girl?
When I asked her, she explained that she didn’t know how many steps she was taking. “I know I stutter a lot,” she said. Tell me about it.
I spent the majority of the session teaching her the ABC’s of sprint mechanics, starting with A-marches, then A-skips, teaching her to flex her ankles so that each stride landed on the ball of the foot, teaching her to get her knees and tuck the heel under the hamstring. I had her do dozens of marches and skips, and she improved enough that I felt comfortable moving on to some basic walk-over hurdle drills, focusing on the same things. From there, we moved toward a quick three-step with the hurdles nice and close together – sixteen feet apart. She kept expressing confusing in regards to approaching the first hurdle, so my old ass had to show her.
We made progress, I explaining to her the importance of grasping the rhythm of each drill, and how once she grasped the rhythm, we could focus on correcting technical flaws. We worked on everything – keeping the arms tight, leaning forward, timing the lean properly, keeping the trail leg tight. I threw a lot at her in a short amount of time. And although she was struggling, she was soaking it up.
After a good hour or so of such drilling, I had her put on her spikes and clear the first hurdle at full speed from a standing start. I kept the hurdle at 30 inches – the same height I had been using for the drills – so that she could focus on being aggressive instead of fixating on the hurdle. Before her first full-speed rep, I told her, “Forget everything I’ve been telling you for the last hour and just run as fast as you can over that hurdle.”
She looked at me like I was crazy, and that’s when I explained to her that of the three elements of hurdling – speed, rhythm, and technique – speed comes first. If you’re not moving fast, you’re not beating anyone. Speed can mask flaws in technique, but excellent technique can’t make up for a lack of speed. “Speed and aggression are synonyms,” I told her, “when it comes to the hurdles. Be aggressive. From step one.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I wanted to start with just one hurdle first so we could establish the aggressive mindset. Then, we could add a second hurdle and address the issue of five-stepping. The reason I didn’t tell her that was because I didn’t want her thinking about that. That’s something coaches often have to do – make decisions regarding what to say out loud and what to think to yourself.
Her first rep was outstanding. Yes, the technical flaws were there, but like I told her, “We’ll come back to those.” I’ve learned not to be a perfectionist. As long as we’re making progress, we’re headed toward mastery. What I liked about the first rep was that she sprinted to and through the hurdle. I added a second hurdle immediately, moved in two feet.
“Same thing,” I told her. She looked scared. “You’re gonna wanna stutter,” I said, “because you’re used to stuttering. But don’t worry about that. Just do what you just did. Just keep sprinting. Don’t over-think the technique part. If you trust your speed, your speed will carry you through.”
And sure enough, in her very first rep over two, she three-stepped the second hurdle. I had her do two more reps before concluding the workout.
This past weekend I had a group of four hurdlers – an eighth grade girl, a tenth grade girl, a tenth grade boy, and an eleventh grade boy – travel from Ohio to train with me for two days. The process went very similarly. Three of the four of them took nine steps to the first hurdle when I first had them do a full-speed rep. The eighth grader was only 5’0” tall, so I didn’t mess with her. But I told the 10th grade girl and the 10th grade boy to switch their feet at the start and to really sprint to the first hurdle. In both cases, they were able to eight-step the first hurdle on the first try without any reaching or stretching. I then put up a second hurdle, and both of them were able to three-step the second hurdle easily, despite numerous technical flaws.
These four kids from Ohio, just like the other girl, had been hurdling for a good while, but had no background in doing hurdle drills. A lack of a foundation in drills puts a hurdler at a distinct disadvantage and stunts his or her growth. Through drills, a hurdler learns to adapt, to react, to make subtle adjustments on the fly, to maintain body angles, to rotate the hips, to lift the knees, to push off the back leg, etc., etc. Everything in hurdling is learned through drills. Then, when it comes time to put down the blocks and enter into attack mode, all you have to do is speed things up. You don’t have to do anything different; just speed it up.
Hurdlers who don’t drill never learn how to hurdle. The hurdle is always approached as a barrier, as an obstacle. They can never get to the point where the hurdle is part of the rhythm, part of the dance. So even when it’s time to go full speed, they hold back. Hurdlers must drill a lot when they are first beginning, and hurdle workouts should always end with some full-speed hurdling so that they understand what all that drilling was for – how it all connects to the bigger picture of putting together a well-executed race.
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