Excerpt #2 from The Spiritual Dimensions of Hurdling
by Steve McGill

When an athlete experiences frustration during a practice session, or because of a bad race, one of the remarks I use to pick up their spirits is, “Hey, there’s a reason not everybody does this.” And the reason is simple: hurdling is hard. Hurdling can be humiliating, embarrassing at times. There are plenty of athletes in other events and other sports who could be good hurdlers if they were to choose that path, but they don’t choose that path. When most athletes see hurdlers racing or practicing, they think I would never do that and Why would anyone want to do that? They find it entertaining when hurdlers are clang-clanging hurdles all the way down the track, bouncing hurdles off the ground. They find it especially entertaining when a hurdle falls. They look at hurdling as spectacle, not as art form. And most significantly, they find hurdling to be scary. Anyone who sees hurdlers hurdle and wants to try it is a different breed. 

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Hurdlers are a unique group. A bunch of weirdos, you could say. Hurdlers are people who not only don’t mind sprinting full speed over barriers that could send them toppling to the ground, but actually embrace it. The only people who can understand the trials and tribulations of a hurdler are other hurdlers. That’s why if a hurdler were to take a tumble in a practice rep, only the other hurdlers are allowed to laugh. If you don’t run the hurdles, if you can’t do what we do, then  you have no right to laugh when we make a mistake. When a hurdler laughs, we’re laughing with you, because we get it, we’ve been there before ourselves, and will most likely be there again. But when a non-hurdler laughs, they’re laughing at us, and that’s not cool. 

When I refer to hurdling as a calling, I’m not trying to get religious or mystical with it. Any chosen art form is a calling in the sense that it has the potential to become a means by which you bring beauty into the world and thereby inspire others to do the same. An art form, by my definition, is any endeavor that involves a process, that requires a journey, that pushes you out of your comfort zone and into a world unknown. I’m not saying that hurdlers are more special than anyone else, or that hurdling itself is more demanding than any other endeavor. All artistic endeavors, including the ones that disguise themselves as strictly athletic endeavors, come with a unique set of demands that not everyone can meet. So, any endeavor that has the potential to inspire others, any endeavor that compels us to go deep within ourselves in order to bring out the best in ourselves, is a calling. And to me, you have to look at it that way. Or else you won’t take it seriously enough. Or you’ll take it seriously only in the context of what you can get out of it. 

Of course, it doesn’t start out as a calling. Or, it doesn’t feel that way. Athletes who end up specializing in the hurdling events usually cannot to a specific moment when they knew they were destined to be a hurdler. In many cases, hurdlers begin hurdling relatively late in their athletic careers, after they’ve participated in other events and/or other sports. In youth track, the youngest age for hurdling is 11 years old, whereas sprinters can start as young as six years old. In high school, an athlete who has had some success in the sprints or the jumps might try the hurdles just to see if they can be good at it. More often than not, a coach serves as the impetus. A coach like me is always hunting for potential hurdlers. But your regular head coach who is most knowledgeable in the distance events or sprints might ask a kid to hurdle in order to potentially earn some points for the team. A lot of hurdlers are converted sprinters who weren’t fast enough to sprint with the big dogs but have other qualities – flexibility, height, muscle strength, etc. – that would make them a good fit for the hurdles. 

I didn’t start hurdling until my sophomore year of high school. I was a decent sprinter, but not nearly as fast as the football players who joined the team. My coach saw my height – the same 5-11 ½ that I would be for the rest of my life, and suggested I give the hurdles a shot. I did, and I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the fact that I was instantly the second-best hurdler on the team, whereas I had been like the fifth-best sprinter. I remember feeling a smug delight in the fact that sprinters who could blast me in the 100 and 200 meter dashes couldn’t beat me in a hurdle race. 

The idea that hurdling could be something to capture my imagination, worthy of deep exploration, didn’t come to me until the fall of my junior year, when I happened to walk into the office of my coach, Mr. McAlpin, after school one day. When I entered the room, he had his back to the door. watching a tape of Renaldo Nehemiah’s world record race. It was November of 1983, and Nehemiah had run the race in August of 1981. But this was my first time seeing it. In this race, Nehemiah became the first hurdler to run under 13.00 in the 110 hurdles, finishing in 12.93. This marked his third time setting a new world record, making him a supernova in a sport with many stars. His rival, Greg Foster, ran 13.03, which was good for the second-fastest hurdle race ever at the time. 

But I didn’t know any of that when I walked into Mr. McAlpin’s office. I didn’t even know who Renaldo Nehemiah was. I didn’t really follow track. I was a basketball guy. I grew up in a basketball family. All three of my older siblings played basketball. I still looked upon track as something to do in the spring as a break from basketball. 

“You need to sit down and watch this, Steve,” Mr. McAlpin said, not taking his eyes off the screen. So I sat down and watched, forgetting whatever it was I had come in there for. And what I saw blew my mind. This hurdler on the screen was running the same event that I ran, but what he was doing was totally different from anything I had done. This dude was rolling. The ease, the grace, the speed, the pure energy, the controlled chaos, the way he just stepped over the hurdles…. I was stunned into silence. What had I just watched? Two thoughts entered my mind: 1) How does anyone get to be that good at what they do? and 2) I want to learn how to do that.

Until that moment, I didn’t know it was possible to be moved like that. I didn’t know it was possible to have such an emotional reaction to a sporting event – a reaction elicited not because I cared about who won or lost, but because it was so beautiful to watch. I didn’t know that anything in sports could have that kind of power. I was a huge Philadelphia 76ers fan, and I had seen Julius “Dr. J” Erving make many incredible plays – windmill dunks over 7-0 centers and stuff like that. So that was the only frame of reference for anything I had seen before that compared to this. When Dr. J dunked, you didn’t care what the score was, you didn’t care if we ended up winning the game or not. It was like space and time lost all relevance. But this race I was watching on Mr. McAlpin’s TV elicited a different reaction. The reaction to a Dr. J dunk was to jump up and run all around the house screaming with glee. The reaction to Renaldo hurdling was to just sit there with my mouth open.

I decided to quit the basketball team a month later in order to make hurdling my sole athletic endeavor. Watching that race wasn’t the only factor that led to my decision, as I was struggling on the basketball team, but it did open me to a whole new world of possibility. A world of hurdling.

***

So, I had already hurdled for a whole track season before I gained the sense that pursuing excellence in this event could represent a higher calling. With the Nehemiah race as inspiration, I saw hurdling in a totally new light. I think that’s a basic pattern for most hurdlers. The initial decision to try the hurdles is based on something very ordinary and explicable – a coach asking you to try, or it looks cool and interesting – but then something happens along the way that leads to the realization that this is more than just cool, this is more than just about trying a different event. What that “something” is will vary from hurdler to hurdler, but I would venture to say that every hurdler who has gone all-in on the hurdles for a period of their athletic lives can recall a moment when they knew that hurdling was their “thing,” even if they continued to do other things.

If you ask me, I’d say that the qualities that make a hurdler a hurdler, as opposed to just someone who runs the hurdles, are inner qualities. I’m speaking in general terms, but based on my observations of athletes I’ve coached over the years, hurdlers are thinkers (sometimes over-thinkers) who take a cerebral approach to everything they do. Hurdlers also often tend to be highly self-critical, so it’s always important for a coach to do and say things to boost their self-esteem and to keep their confidence level high. Hurdlers are very good at focusing in on one thing at a time. Though they may be quite capable of multi-tasking in scenarios where that is necessary, they instinctively know how to block out outside distractions and focus on the task at hand. Hurdlers’ personalities off the track can vary. Some can be very extroverted, while others can be very introverted, and some are a combination of both. But overall, hurdlers are not afraid of standing alone. They don’t have to rock with the crowd to feel good about themselves. They’re not afraid to think on their own or act on their own, even if it means going against the crowd. 

Going back to the cerebral thing, hurdlers like figuring things out; they like a mental challenge; they’re curious by nature. Not all coaches understand or appreciate this aspect of hurdlers’ personalities. I’ve had several former athletes who, upon entering college, butted heads with their coaches because they asked too many questions, leading the coaches to assume that they were being disrespectful and doubting the coaches’ knowledge. But no, that’s just how hurdlers are. A hurdler’s mindset is, don’t just tell me what to do; tell me why I need to do it; tell me how it’s going to make me better, and tell me what’s the best way to do it. And in asking such questions, they’re not challenging their coach’s authority; that’s just their natural curiosity on display.

While I do still look for physical qualities when seeking out prospective hurdlers – height, speed, etc. – I look for the personal qualities discussed above even more (except for the self-criticism). That’s something I’ve learned to do by making mistakes – by misidentifying potential hurdlers who met the physical criteria while ignoring potential hurdlers who met the personal criteria. My first time making such a mistake occurred in 1995, my very first year of coaching. I was teaching and coaching at a private school in Raleigh, NC after having finished my graduate studies and earning a master’s degree in English from Shippensburg University of PA. I was an assistant coach in charge of the sprinters, hurdlers, and sprint relays.  

Our girls team had two good hurdlers, both sophomores, so I wasn’t looking to add another. But on the first day of practice for the outdoor season (we didn’t have an indoor team at the time), a little 5-2 girl with auburn hair approached me asking to hurdle. I looked at her and laughed. “Do you realize how high the hurdles are?” I asked. She looked at me with not even the slightest hint of self-doubt and said, “Yes. I think I can do it.” I continued to brush her off, telling her to come back the next day, as I needed to continue working with the experienced hurdlers for the rest of that day’s session. 

She came back the next day with the same request. Annoyed, I told her to get with her group (she ran middle distance, and was very good at it) because they were about to hit the road for a long run. She turned toward them, then turned back toward me, then ran off in a huff to join them.

On the third day, she came up to me again asking to hurdle. This time, I relented. We were doing 300 meter hurdle work that day. I gave her no instruction whatsoever, just told her to sprint over the first three so I could see what she looked like. I assumed she would run up to the first hurdle and stop, or go around it. I was anticipating the moment when I’d be able to say “See?” But that moment never came. Not only did she run over all three hurdles cleanly, she was able to alternate lead legs. What in the world? 

From that day forward, never again did she train with the middle-distance runners or compete in any middle-distance races. She joined the hurdling crew, and ran the hurdles. 

That girl, Caroline Pyle, was only in eighth grade at the time. She ran hurdles for me for the next five years. Over that period of time, we developed one of the most meaningful and impactful relationships I’ve had in my entire career. We were kindred spirits. Deep thinkers. Keen observers of life. Highly competitive. Even though her personal bests were only 46.5 in the 300 hurdles and 16.1 in the 100 hurdles, and even though she didn’t go on to run in college, she was one of the best hurdlers I’ve ever coached. I’ve never, before or since, coached a hurdler who could alternate lead legs as fluidly and effortlessly as Caroline could. She was so adept with both legs that you couldn’t tell which one was her dominant leg vs. which one was non-dominant. In the 100 hurdles, because she was so short and didn’t have blazing speed, she couldn’t three-step a whole race. We developed a strategy where she would three-step the first five, and then switch to four-stepping once the three-step became too much of a reach. Now, it takes a high level of calm composure and intellectual IQ to be able to execute such a plan in the heat of the battle. It’s not like a 300 hurdle race, where, if you do alternate, you have plenty of space between hurdles before you have to clear the next one. In the 100 hurdles, those hurdles are coming at you. There is very little time to react. You have to act instinctively. Caroline was able to do it. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal at the time. But over the  years, as I’ve tried to employ a similar strategy with other girls who couldn’t three-step a whole race, I’ve had little to no success. Caroline was one of a kind.

A way-back-in-the-day photo of me with Caroline Pyle. Had to be 1998 or 99.

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