The Further Adventures of a Hurdling Gymnast
by Steve McGill

In last month’s issue, I discussed the progress I was making with Janie Coble, a junior on my school team who is also a full-time gymnast. In this article, I want to further discuss her progress and some of the things I’ve learned when it comes to coaching an athlete who trains and competes full-time in another sport. 

One thing I’ve learned is that coaching a competitive gymnast is a much different experience from coaching a former competitive gymnast. I’ve coached plenty of former competitive gymnasts over the year — athletes who used to do gymnastics but then quit and had decided to put their efforts into track. With athletes like them, it has always been a matter of channeling their explosive power into an efficient, streamlined hurdling action, as the one trait common with former gymnasts is that they clear the hurdles too high and spend too much time in the air. But because of their athletic sensibility and their ability to listen to instruction, getting them to hurdle more efficiently was never much of a problem, especially once they learned the basics of sprint mechanics — keeping the ankles dorsiflexed, pushing off the ball of the foot, and maintaining a slightly forward sprinting posture. In such cases, eliminating habits gained from years of ingrained muscle memory did take time, but progress came steadily until the gymnastics-related habits that don’t jibe with hurdling disappeared altogether.

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But coaching someone like Janie, who still competes and trains in gymnastics, is a different story, requiring a much greater level of creativity and compromise on my part. For one thing, as I mentioned in last month’s article, I only meet with her once a week on average, although we might get in two days a week sometimes, and might have to skip a week other times, when she has out-of-town gymnastics competitions on a given weekend. While I’m fine with once a week when it comes to athletes I coach in my private coaching, it’s not satisfactory when coaching someone on my team. With my athletes in my private coaching, I know that they’re getting in plenty of sprinting workouts during the week. But with Janie, she’s not getting in any running during the week because she’s practicing for gymnastics every day.

That means that we have to hurdle every time we meet, as a ten-hurdle race requires a lot of hurdling in practice for someone who doesn’t have a whole lot of experience. So there’s no way to help her improve her conditioning or her speed. We kind of have to go with what we got in those regards. I’ve been having her run the 200 meter dash in meets just to work on her speed-endurance so that she’s stronger for the latter part of the 100h race.

So far, Janie has run a personal best of 16.88. Which is not bad, all things considered. I can say with a high level of confidence that she’d probably be at least a second faster than that if we had more time to train together. The fact that she’s still attending gymnastics practices all week not only means that we don’t train hurdles often; it also means that niggling gymnastics-related aches, paines, and injuries don’t go away, which limits the amount of reps we can get in when we do meet. My goal when we meet is to get over seven hurdles out of the blocks. Usually, with my hurdlers, I like to build up to seven gradually, and then end the workout with two reps over seven. With Janie, we pretty much have to start with five hurdles and then go straight to seven after two or three reps. We might get in a total of six or seven reps total. With that amount of reps, we’re at least able to work on hurdle endurance and speed between the hurdles, but we can’t work on anything that is particularly detail-oriented. 

I sometimes jokingly say to Janie that she has an NFL lineman’s body when it comes to aches and pains, and that she has an NFL lineman’s threshold for pain as well. In our short time together she’s had issues with her knees, her back, her ankle. So we’re trying to get right in the hurdles without breaking down her body. 

Because we’re such a small school and compete in a state meet that includes the smallest private schools in the state, she has a chance to win our state meet this coming weekend (May 17-18), as her 16.88 is the fastest time on the performance list. So I’m just trying to get her there in one piece, counting on her competitive spirit to rise to the surface when the gun goes off. Because we’re certainly not getting in the reps at a level that would make me confident that we got this on lock.

At our conference meet last week, she won in something like 17.2, but she faltered late in the race, hitting hurdle eight and willing herself over the last two hurdles, barely maintaining her 3-step rhythm. I assumed that her late-race breakdown was due to fatigue, so I planned to get in as many reps over seven hurdles as we could in her next workout. But in looking at the film later on, I noticed that she had begun slowing down much earlier than hurdle eight. It was around hurdle four that she began to lose momentum. So it couldn’t be because of fatigue. Looking at the film more closely, I noticed that her lead arm was swinging out (instead of driving up), and that her lead leg was doing the same thing. All that extra air time was slowing her down in a big way. So, for that next training session, instead of focusing on getting over seven, I focused on addressing this lead arm / lead leg action. “Up, not out,” I told her. She grasped what I was telling her and implemented the change instantly in our first rep over three hurdles. We ended up getting over six hurdles by the end of the workout, and she looked faster than she had ever looked. Whether or not the adjustment will stick with her through the state meet remains to be seen.

I’m in a situation, at a small school with few athletes, where I have no choice but to try to make a situation like the one with Janie work. If we had a bigger team with plenty of depth, I’d tell her to just stick with gymnastics, as I’ve never liked to have kids who don’t regularly train with the team to compete as a member of the team. But the thing about Janie is that she’s been a great teammate with a great attitude every time she is at practice, and also at meets. She bring a lot of positive energy to our team, to go along with her talent. So although it has been far from an ideal situation, it has been a beneficial one, for her and for the team.

Do I recommend coaching a competitive gymnast? While I have benefitted from having Janie on my team, my answer from a bigger picture perspective would be no. Even if Janie ends up winning a state championship, I’ll be thinking about how much faster she could’ve run if she were to devote herself to track at least while we’re in season. Plenty of youth athletes and high school athletes these days are year-round athletes in the sport of their choice, which is fine in and of itself. But when two sports hold their competitions during the same time of year, it’s best to choose one and go all-in on it. 

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