Progression of a Hurdler who Started during the Season
by Steve McGill
As discussed in last month’s issue, I recently converted one of the female athletes on my school team into a hurdler, as there are very few hurdlers in our conference, and there have been meets where the winning time was in the 19’s, with nobody three-stepping. So when I brought up the idea to the girls on the team, one of them, Grace Galloway, an 800 meter runner who was having marginal success there, expressed a willingness to try. She has stuck with it, and she has progressed, although there are tons of things that need to be addressed. Really, we’re just laying a foundation for next year, when we’ll have time in the off-season to implement the type of technical precision that I’m accustomed to developing with my hurdlers. In this article, I want to discuss her progression, and the bumps she has faced along the road, and my projections for her as we look ahead to the future. She is currently a 10th-grader, by the way.
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In a previous article, I included a video of Grace doing basic walk-over drills and then marching popovers on the sidewalk by the pond where we train. Because our school does not have a track, lack of practice time on an actual track has been a huge issue for us, and has definitely hindered her progress. Because we can get on a track on Sundays, as I still do with my private coaching, I have been able to get Grace on a track on a few occasions — three to be exact, including this morning (May 15th). At meets, we make it a point to arrive early enough to allow Grace some time for a mini-workout of about 15 minutes as soon as we hop off the bus. That’s something I’ve never done before, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
All of the sessions we’ve done on a track have focused on rhythm development. If you know me, you know I like to work rhythm and technique together, but I simply don’t have the time to put in all the technique work with Grace this year. Beyond the absolute basics of dorsiflexion, running on the balls of the feet, and leading with the knee, we haven’t done any technique work. When we do our rhythm work, I emphasize the need to push the torso forward and to push the hips forward, in order to decrease the amount of time she spends in the air. As I tell her, there are going to be some balance issues upon landing, but if she keeps pushing forward she can minimize them.
When we first started together, her sprint mechanics were poor, so we spent the majority of her first session just getting her to dorsiflex and drive her knees. Progress came rapidly, and her sprint mechanics looked really good as soon as later in the week during sprint workouts. In our first weekday practice after our first Sunday session, Grace’s sprinting looked so good that my assistant coach was stunned. “She’s like a totally different person,” he said.
But the problem with improved sprint mechanics, without having the time to do legit hurdle workouts, was that it messed up her rhythm between the hurdles. She started the season at 21.94, and had worked her way down to 20.61 in our last regular season meet. And with the speed she was showing in practice, I felt confident that she could dip into the 19’s or even 18-high range at the conference meet. At that meet last weekend, we did our usual of getting in a mini-workout upon arrival. And what I saw both excited me and scared me. She was really getting on top of hurdles. When she first started hurdling, she was 5-stepping, so I quickly taught her to 4-step, as the ability to alternate was something I wanted her to have in her toolbox for the 300m hurdles anyway. But now her 4-step was looking crowded, as she was severely shortening her fourth stride and getting so close to the hurdles that she had to jump vertically just to avoid running into them. There was no way I was going to try to get her to 3-step right before a race, so I instructed her to shorten/quicken her strides between the hurdles so that her take-off distance wasn’t so close. In her last two warmup reps over four hurdles, she established a nice rhythm and I said, “Okay, we’ll go with that.”
But in the race, she fell. Over the seventh hurdle. She was running from behind, and was making up ground, and was about to pull even with the girl in the lead. When running from behind, hurdlers often open up their stride too much and forget about the hurdle. That’s what happened to Grace. To her credit, she got right back up and finished the race. She still ran 23-something despite the fall, and it was a bad fall, with scrapes on her elbow and knee and shin. The first time an athlete running the hurdles falls determines whether or not that athlete is a hurdler. So now I know Grace is a hurdler. I was proud of her, and I told her so.
Meanwhile, I was frustrated, and upset with myself. Should I have pushed the 3-step more once I saw the improvements in her sprint mechanics? Man, I’m telling you, if we had regular access to a track, and could’ve worked on hurdles two or three times a week, I definitely would have done so. But as things stood, I simply couldn’t keep up with her progress. As we head into the state meet next week, we will continue to refine the 4-step rhythm. In this morning’s session, that was all we worked on, and now she has ingrained it to the point where she is developing instincts and knows how to negotiate the space. Below is video footage from that workout:
Next year, though, we’ll work on technique throughout the off-season and do all of our drills to a 3-step rhythm. And then we’ll add in the block start and continue to refine her sprint mechanics and explosive power. In short, we’ll do everything we didn’t have time to do this year. So, she’ll be 3-stepping as soon as the outdoor season starts.
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