Excerpt #1 from The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling
by Steve McGill
I’m writing another book. Made a lot of progress on it over June and July, so I’ll begin to publish excerpts from it here in The Hurdle Magazine. The book, which I’ve tentatively titled The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling, delves into the dimension of hurdling that allows for the feeling of bliss and harmony that a hurdler experiences when sprinting over hurdles at full speed. So, it’s not an instructional manual in the strictest sense, although there are plenty of passages that provide hurdling instruction and coaching philosophies. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter. Keep in mind that this is still a draft and that I may make minor changes prior to publishing the book. My plan is to self-publish on Amazon.
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Excerpt from Chapter One
Though I’ve always taken an artistic approach to hurdling, I was winning enough in high school that I never had to dig deep within myself to appreciate the value of that approach. But in college I had no choice but to become very introspective and self-evaluative simply because I was losing a lot. I wasn’t used to that, and I felt desperate to figure out how to run faster.
My freshman year of college, 1984-85, I was attending Franklin & Marshall College – a small liberal arts school in Lancaster, PA that competed at the DIII level. Our team had four good hurdlers – two freshmen, a sophomore, and a junior. I was the fourth-best on our team. Being the fourth-best hurdler on a team with four good hurdlers is not the move. So at the conference meet, only three per team could compete in each event, so being fourth best on our team meant I couldn’t compete at the conference meet, even though I had run faster than the automatic qualifying time. My season was over in early May, before it had even gotten warm outside. Determined to redeem myself and prove to myself that I could do better the following year, I started training on my own in the summer and continued to do so in the fall. I got myself into the best shape of my life. Back in those days, the most-commonly held philosophy was that distance training was the way to build a foundational base. I started by running three miles a day. By October of my sophomore year – the fall of 1985 – I was able to run three miles in 18 minutes. I did that on the track at school. After that, I started doing all kinds of sprint workouts. I would do 16×150 by myself at 10 o’clock at night, under the moonlight and street lamps headlights from cars, because there was no there were no lights in the stadium. With those 150’s, I’d do one, turn around, jog back and go again. No sets. One set of 16. I would do 12×200 the same way. One of my friends and I would go to the weight room together and work out. I got stronger, putting on about five pounds of muscle. My hard work paid off, because I went from fourth-best hurdler on our team to the best hurdler on our team. All due to my work ethic and my determination to get better. And I learned how to become a student of the game. We didn’t have YouTube or Instagram or TikTok back in the day, so I studied the technique of hurdlers in photographs track magazines like Track & Field News. I read up on the type of training that Renaldo Nehemiah did in high school. I copied a lot of those training methods and started developing my own workout ideas based on those workouts. We didn’t have a hurdle coach, so our head coach kind of let me plan the workouts on hurdle days, since I was always nagging him to do so.
Heading into the indoor season of my sophomore year, I mainly focused on figuring out how to stop clobbering hurdles. I was, as my coach called me, a “timber toppler,” as the crossbars back in those days were made of wood. My freshman year, I was smacking hurdles left and right. The knee of my trail leg developed a soft, mushy spot that grew numb from making contact with hurdles so often. And it was slowing me down. Big time. In high school, my trail leg had been lazy as well. It didn’t really drive to the front, with the knee high and tight. It kind of just dropped to the front. But I rarely hit hurdles in high school, and my lead leg was so quick – because I worked on my lead leg snapdown a lot – that the trail leg was never really a concern. But in college, over the 42’s, everything changed. Being only 5-11-½, I didn’t have much margin for error over the 42’s.
At the end of my freshman year, in watching the hurdles at the conference meet, there was this dude from Susquehanna University named Jeff Walden – strong, tall black dude, had to be about 6-3. He could roll. He ran about 14.4, which was flying, especially for DIII back then. I noticed something different about Walden. He seemed to hurdle differently than everybody else. Instead of kicking his lead leg straight out, horizontally, and then snapping it down, he seemed to extend his lead leg at more of a downward angle, like someone running down a hill. It seemed so easy for him, and he seemed to be in no danger whatsoever of hitting hurdles – not just because he was so tall, but because of how he hurdled. I found myself wondering how he did that, and thinking that if I could learn to do that, my issues with timber toppling would be solved.
So, once the indoor season of my sophomore year got underway, I started experimenting. My experimentations were what led me to start consciously thinking of hurdling as an art form. There were so many components to it, so many elements to master, and to put together. And you had to keep working on them separately and cohesively. Lead leg, trail leg, lead arm, trail arm, forward lean, speed between, staying on the balls of the feet, the block start, the approach to the first hurdle. It just fascinated me, and I loved it.
My head coach, Coach Ianicelli, is in the foreground. That’s me behind him.
The first thing I tried was to simply jump higher. If Walden was 6-3 and I wasn’t quite 6-0, that meant I had to “jump” to get my hips as tall as his were. So I experimented with getting more vertical in my take-off. That helped. I wasn’t hitting hurdles anymore. But there was a trade-off. I was spending too much time in the air, and I wasn’t accelerating through the hurdles. I had to fight harder to maintain my speed. So, simply jumping, I concluded, was not the answer.
But I didn’t stop jumping. Instead, I added a push-down to it. So, I’d jump vertically at take-off, and then immediately exaggerate my forward lean and push my lead leg back to the ground. The combination of the jump and the push-down seemed to fix both problems: it kept me from hitting hurdles so much, and it kept me from sailing in the air too long. This was working! I was able to get a rhythm going that way. But even though my trail leg was no longer hitting hurdles, it still felt like it was lagging behind. It was flattening out so much that I could feel tension in my groin on that side – tension that I knew could become an injury if I kept hurdling this way. Plus, I was still landing a little sideways off of hurdles. My balance was a little off. So I decided to see if I could time the trail leg better. Instead of trying to get rid of the moment of tension in the groin, I tried to feel for it. And as soon as I felt it, I would instantly whip the leg to the front. That worked. The trail leg was now coming through high and tight. The balance issues disappeared. The feeling that I was straining the groin was gone. I was coming off hurdles rolling. And it felt easy. It felt fun. That ended up being the style that I stuck with for the rest of the year. Putting all those things together – jumping vertically, pushing the lead leg down, exaggerating the lean, whipping the trail leg to the front when feeling tension in the groin – took some time. It took a lot of practices, a lot of reps, and several races where my body felt confused between the old way I used to do and the new way I was trying to do. But once I got it, I got it. And that’s something I tell my athletes to this day. I may be throwing a lot at you at once, and it might be a lot to take in, and you feel slower instead of faster at first, but once you get it, you got it, and it’ll just keep getting better and better.
During this period, I was falling in love with the process of becoming a better hurdler. I was falling in love with the exquisitely wonderful feeling of running over hurdles at full speed. I was learning to clear these 42-inch obstacles with the same ease of motion with which I had cleared the 39s in high school. And this was more rewarding because it was more difficult and required more of me.
Somewhere around this time – probably January or February of my sophomore year – I had a conversation with a girl named Margaret Kalas, who was an art student and a very good artist. She specialized in drawing and painting, and I was admiring some of the pieces she had in her room, noting the remarkably detailed nature of her work. In my own mind, I started making the connection to the art she was doing to the art I was doing as a hurdler. I was afraid to voice that thought because I feared it might come off as disrespectful. But I decided to ask her anyway, because I wanted to hear the perspective of an artist, and I wanted to get myself out of my own head a little bit.
I can’t remember exactly how I phrased the question, but I asked her something along the lines of whether or not she felt that what I do in trying to master how to run over hurdles efficiently is similar to what she’s doing in trying to master how to create images out of lines and colors, etc. I do remember summarizing with a basic question: “Do you think hurdlers are artists too?”
She said yes, without the slightest hint of hesitation, as if she had been contemplating the same thought herself. Anything that involves a process, she said, is an art form. Anything that requires you to be creative and use your imagination is an art form. When she put it to me that way, I felt relieved and validated. Relieved because I had been worried that I was making it all up in my head, validated because the thoughts in my head had been corroborated by someone whose viewpoint I respected.
My experimentations with hurdling technique, coupled with my conversation with Margaret, served to open me up to a whole new dimension of hurdling – a dimension that I’d always been subconsciously aware of but had never fully embraced. A spiritual dimension. I was beginning to understand that it was the feeling of running over hurdles itself that was most essential, not finishing in first place or running a personal best. Those things mattered, but they weren’t what was most essential. The feeling was. The feeling was everything. The feeling was the spiritual part – the part that you can never explain to anyone else, the part that you can become aware of by experiencing it.
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