Spontaneity isn’t Spontaneous
by Steve McGill
A couple weeks ago I was watching an Instagram reel in which a jazz musician was talking about the nature of improvisation. Can’t remember who the musician was because the reel just popped up on my feed and it wasn’t someone I follow. Anyway, the musician was discussing the fallacy of the assumption that the freedom of improvisation precludes the need to practice, and that you can do whatever you want to do in the moment. The truth, the musician said, is that good improvisation requires lots and lots of practice. The truth, he said, is that the ability to improvise is the result of hours upon hours of practice — by oneself and with other musicians. The reason great jazz musicians are able to respond spontaneously to whatever is happening in the moment is because they have trained themselves to do so. A solo doesn’t just go wherever; it goes where the musician has trained himself to go. So, the lesson is that “living in the moment” is not a catch phrase for having the freedom to do whatever you want, but is in fact a phrase that implies having the discipline and instinctive creativity to do what the moment demands. That is why famous jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk have said that there are no mistakes in jazz, and that there are no wrong notes. Mistakes and wrong notes force the soloist to make the mistake sound right, which can only be done by someone who is highly trained and supremely confident.
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This principle applies to every endeavor, arguably. What must a quarterback in football do when one of his linemen misses a block? Improvise. What must a writer do upon realizing that she has deviated from the plot outline she had written? Improvise. What must a baker do when she realizes she has put in more sugar than the recipe requires? Improvise. The best improvisers don’t panic when things go awry. They adapt to whatever the moment brings.
Which brings us to the hurdles. Many of the hurdlers I see at the high school level are the victim of one of two problems: either they simply haven’t done enough reps to know how to adapt in the moment, or they’ve ingrained bad habits to the point where they can’t adapt in the moment. Back around 2005-2006, when I first started coaching Johnny Dutch, Keare Smith, and Wayne Davis, Johnny was in 10th grade, Keare in 9th, and Wayne in 8th. All of them had been hurdling since the age of ten. So even though they were very young, they had done so many reps that their hurdle instincts were razor sharp. Over the years they had done dozens of lead leg drills, trail leg drills, over-the-top drills, full-speed reps out of the blocks, jammed hurdling, five-step drills, one-step drills. All three had been national age group champions at some point before the age of 13, and they continued to develop naturally as they grew older and the hurdles grew taller and the spacing increased.
I remember one time I did a workout where I set up five hurdles for the 110’s, and each rep I slightly shifted the spacing at one or two of the hurdles so they couldn’t lock into a rhythm. Every rep, there was going to be a shift in the rhythm. They handled that drill so easily that there’s no way someone watching would’ve known that the spacing was different every rep. I remember remarking to my coaching partner at the time how amazed I was at how effortless Johnny made it look. My coaching partner, who had guided Johnny’s development for the first four years of his hurdling career, deadpanned, “He’s been doing this since he was a pup.”
Johnny and Wayne in particular remained dedicated hurdlers who didn’t dabble in other sports or even in other events very much, so they were hurdling masters by the time they graduated high school. There was no challenge I could throw at them that they couldn’t handle. Even when I coached Keni Harrison, with whom I began working in the fall of her junior year of high school, we put in a whole lot of work developing technique and rhythm before she finally entered a race in the latter part of the spring of that school year. So, she never learned any bad habits, and she got in lots of reps doing things right.
When I work with high school hurdlers in my private coaching and at my camps, I find that they’re often either so inexperienced that they don’t even have the vocabulary to understand basic concepts, or they’ve ingrained so many bad habits that they need to unlearn all that they’ve learned before they can learn what they need to learn. Either way, I’m starting from ground zero. Or below ground zero.
For hurdlers to develop the instincts necessary to adapt in the moment, they have to get reps in. Drills and full speed. Drills establish the foundation. Young hurdlers, beginning hurdlers, need to drill a ton. Otherwise, they can never trust themselves to just run spontaneously. They’ll always have to think about something during a race. And I always say that when it comes to races, a thinking hurdler is a slow hurdler. Great hurdlers are like great musicians; they’ve mastered their craft to the point where conscious thought becomes unnecessary, as they are always in control of executing the movements.
The kid I’m coaching now, Ayden Thompson, is a good example of someone who developed the ability to hurdle instinctively. As a senior who started with me in the summer after his sophomore year, he has put in a lot of reps. This past fall, he got up to 200 hurdles worth of the quickstep drill, instilling muscle memory, ingraining proper technique, ingraining the ability to adapt to the rhythm created by the spacing. I say this to say that you’re not screwed if you don’t start hurdling when you’re ten years old. You just need reps. Quality reps that sharpen your skills so you can make spontaneous adjustments when mistakes occur and when your own speed catches you by surprise.
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