Surfing like a Hurdler
by Steve McGill & Garrison Rountree
“The more I’ve acclimated to surfing, the more I’ve realized that the tools I learned as a hurdler have benefited me in the water. The sports are more similar than I ever imagined.”
The quote above comes from a former athlete of mine, Garrison Rountree, who graduated high school around 2012 or 2013. He was mainly a quarter-miler throughout his first two years of high school before switching to the 300 hurdles in his junior year. He ran a personal best of 54.35 in the 400 hurdles during a Junior Olympic meet the summer after his senior year. He did not receive any scholarship offers for college, as he ran fast too late, so he found other ways to stay in shape and stay active throughout his college years. Upon graduating college, he embarked on a path to become a Navy officer, and his most recent employment involved working on a submarine on the coast of Hawaii. Garrison usually spent the little free time he had pursuing his hobby of surfing, which quickly became much more than a hobby. Recently, Garrison came home to North Carolina, and we met up for dinner one night and talked for a while. During our conversation, he talked at length about his surfing exploits, and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between surfing and hurdling. When I mentioned that, he wholeheartedly agreed that the two endeavors are indeed very similar.
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In listening to Garrison talk, I came to understand that surfing requires many of the same essential skills that hurdling requires — an ability to adapt to weather patterns and windy conditions, an ability to trust one’s instincts, an ability to stay calm and focused under pressure. The key is to retain a sense of control even as you feel you are losing control. In hurdling, the speed of the hurdles coming at you can create a panic, while in surfing, it’s the feeling that the wave is taking you much faster than you wish to go that can create the panic. In both cases, you have to trust your technique and your training.
In an email that he sent to me for this article, Garrison made the following comments:
“Observe the wave rolling in towards you, turn, paddle to match the speed of the wave, and then, once you’ve successfully matched the speed of the wave … it happens. The ocean lifts the back of your surfboard and your nose begins to glide down the smooth makeshift ramp that nature has created. At this point, your heart wants to rush while your instincts tell you to slow down, hesitate, and lean back. However, you must override this reflex. You must value riding the wave more than you value feeling comfortable. Riding the wave means you lean forward even more, paddle more aggressively, and press even more weight downward to gain speed and stick onto the wave. Once you are in a smooth glide, that’s when you lean back, pop up, and begin to shred.” (Note: To “shred” means to cut up the clean water on the wave, using the surfboard)
Hurdlers, like surfers, have to be even more aggressive when their instincts are telling them to slow down. The reason it’s harder to continue to drop time beyond the initial stages of learning technique and rhythm is because the hurdle feels too close and there’s a fear of not being able to negotiate the space. Even world-class hurdlers will subtly, and even unconsciously, back off a little bit to avoid crashing. Garrison said “You must value riding the wave more than you value feeling comfortable.” Put that in hurdling terms, and it’s “You must value attacking the hurdle more than you value feeling comfortable.” In both cases, the fear is very real, and very valid. Nobody wants to crash. But staying in attack mode when attack mode feels foolish is the only way to keep dropping time. A comfortable race is a slow race, as I always say. So there’s always the need to push beyond the comfort level, to embrace entering the danger zone. In practice reps and drills, you’ll always want to play with the spacing so that the hurdler is forced to run at a cadence that is slightly quicker than his or her race cadence. That way, when the athlete goes back to full-speed hurdling out of the blocks, he or she can try to match the quicker tempo from the drill, thus creating the feeling that there is more space.
More from Garrison’s email:
“All of the movements leading up to this point are aggressive and done with a high level of self-assurance. Any hesitation or doubt will cause more problems than solutions. For example, you could nose dive, get ‘thrown over the falls,’ or the wave rolls under you and you miss it. Every movement requires complete commitment. Once you’ve decided to go for a wave, you don’t back down and you must be comfortable with the potential of failing. Yet, just like in the hurdles, it contains an element of poetic grace and control. No flailing, losing form, or straining.”
Whether you’re a beginner learning how to overcome the fear of the obstacles, or a seasoned vet who has reached a plateau in regards to your progression, Garrison’s words apply to hurdling. In the hurdles, hesitation and doubt will usually lead to a more upright body posture, which makes it harder to drive with the knee and to avoid increasing your air time over the hurdles. As Garrison said, “Every movement requires complete commitment.”
Garrison concluded his email by repeating a mantra of mine: “The sport is 15% success and 85% failure.” When you accept that failure (I say “frustration” instead of failure, and “breakthrough” instead of success, but they both amount to the same thing) is an integral part of the equation, you stop hoping that every rep will be the best rep ever, and you stop getting down on yourself when you make mistakes. You learn to ride the wave of emotions and to stay steady through the storms of self-doubt. Like I told the girl on my school team who just started hurdling and recently suffered her first fall, “If hurdling were easy, everybody would do it.” There’s a reason why a lot of sprinters — even big, muscular, bad-ass sprinters — don’t want to even entertain the idea of trying the hurdles. They don’t want to end up on the ground.
On that note, let’s end this article with another quote from Garrison:
“Every hurdler and surfer has accepted that they will fall, and have agreed that they will get back up after they fall.”
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