How Hurdling & Writing Go Hand in Hand
by Steve McGill
If you’ve been subscribed to The Hurdle Magazine for a while now, you know I like to compare hurdling to other arenas of life, whether it be other sports or other endeavors altogether. I like to make connections between hurdling and walks of life that seem to have no obvious connection to hurdling. In last month’s issue I wrote about what hurdlers can learn from NBA basketball star Steph Curry, who recently set a new record for three-point shots made in a career — a record he continues to build upon every game. In other past articles, I’ve made connections between hurdling and the Taoist principle of Wu Wei, between hurdling and jazz music, and I’ve compared hurdling to bowling, and to poetry. In this article, I will be comparing hurdling (and running in general) to writing, with the purpose of arguing that all hurdlers could benefit from adopting the habit of writing on a regular basis, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves “good writers” or if they ever plan to share their writings with other people.
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The idea of writing and running being like-minded activities first surfaced into my life when, while in college, I read the book Running & Being by George Sheehan, which was published in 1978. It’s a philosophical memoir that details how Sheehan, a medical doctor, got heavily into distance running during his forties. In the book, he discusses how running is about more than just competition, but is a way for him to feel a sense of unity with himself and the natural world, as well as with other people. I don’t have a copy of the book anymore because I let someone borrow it a long time ago and never got it back (happens a lot), but one of the parts I remember was quoted in Ken Doherty’s Track & Field Omnibook, where Sheehan addresses the philosophical question of why people run. He says that there are several answers that could be given, some practical, some health-related, some competition-related. But he ends by saying that if you were to ask “Why do you run?” to someone who has dedicated his or life to running, that person wouldn’t answer with words, but would simply start running. Because that’s the only answer. People run because they do. I would say that the same applies to hurdling. Ask hurdlers why they hurdle, and they’ll give the obvious reasons — because it’s more fun than just sprinting with nothing in your way, or because they love the challenge of it, or the thrill of it, etc. But really, the only satisfactory way to answer the question as to why you hurdle is to hurdle.
Since Sheehan was a writer who ran, and I, at the time, was a hurdler who loved to read and who looked upon writing as an enjoyable hobby, reading his book led me to think more deeply about the relationship between running and writing, or, in my specific case, hurdling and writing. Somewhere in the book, Sheehan actually mentioned that many of his running partners were also writers, which I found intriguing. That was around the time I started doing a lot more writing on my own, outside of the classroom. I wrote poetry, I kept a journal, I wrote stories. Interestingly, I found that after sitting down and writing for an hour or so, I felt the same way that I often felt after hurdling for an hour or so. I felt rejuvenated; I felt cleansed. I felt like I had embarked on a journey and had arrived somewhere new.
What I discovered, and what still stands as true, is that a hurdle workout is like a blank page when writing. In writing, “fear of the blank page” is a real thing. It’s the fear that what I write on this page will be small and meaningless and far inferior to the vision in my mind of what I want to say, and how I want to say it. So a writer will stare at the blank page and write nothing out of fear of writing something that doesn’t meet his or her expectations. Hurdlers, too, in their own way, must face the fear of the blank page. Each training session presents the potential for regression. Every race could be a bad race. Every attempt to clear a hurdle could lead to a face-plant. In your mind you see yourself running a personal best and finishing in first place. You’re visualizing it all week. But once the gun goes off, there’s no telling what might happen. That’s fear of the blank page. Writing regularly can be a way for hurdlers to deal with that fear and to learn to overcome it. Writing serves as good practice for quieting the mind and learning to trust one’s instincts. Writing instincts and hurdling instincts are the same thing. Developing the habit of moving past the fear and entering into the zone is a mental endeavor, not a physical one.
Having been an English teacher for as long as I’ve been a hurdles coach, I have always been aware of the relationship between writing and hurdling throughout my adult life, and I’m reminded of it every time I step into the classroom or onto the track. Techniques that I use in the classroom to help my students become better writers mirror techniques that I use on the track to help my hurdlers become better hurdlers. Just like a lot of people assume that they can either write or they can’t, a lot of people assume that they can either hurdle or they can’t. My argument is that you can get better at both, no matter where your starting point is. Writing and hurdling are all about technique. Understanding the relationship between verb choice and adjective choice is like understanding the relationship between lead leg and trail leg. Any flaws in lead leg mechanics will cause flaws in trail leg mechanics, and vice versa. Similarly, weak verb choice will lead to dry, dull writing that leaves the reader feeling listless. Generally, if your verbs are plain and generic, your adjectives will be too. So, in that sense, being particular and meticulous with word choice in writing mirrors the need to be particular and meticulous with your body movements in hurdling. That’s why, when Coach Hector Cotto and I conduct our hurdling academies, we nit-pick every detail of sprinting mechanics and hurdling technique. Every mistake, every flaw, has a domino effect. Similarly, in the classroom, when editing a student’s rough draft, I’ll nit-pick every detail regarding word choice, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. Hurdling and writing are all about being detail-oriented.
My favorite class to teach is AP Language & Composition. This course emphasizes writing much more than literature, so it provides me more opportunity to really “coach” my students in regards to how to write a clear, concise, convincing argument. Just like I tell my hurdlers that they must be in attack mode from the gun to the finish line, I tell my student writers that they have to be assertive and confident in their position. Even if they don’t feel confident, they have to write as if they have no doubt that their position is the proper one. There should be no “I think” or “In my opinion” or any such language that hedges. State your opinion as fact. Make your claim. The same goes for hurdling. You don’t know how a race is going to turn out until you run it. But you have to enter the starting blocks with the mindset of “I’m the baddest bad-ass out here” because, otherwise, you’ll hold back, you will run with inhibitions.
Had a coach once who told me, in regards to setting goals, “You don’t know what you can do until you do it.” As we used to say back in the 90’s, word up. Or as the kids say today, facts. Or, no cap. You don’t know what you can do until you do it. In that sense, hurdling and writing are both methods of self-discovery. You find out what you’re capable of by leaving the safety of your comfort zone. So many times when I sit down to write, what I end up writing strays far from my original plan, and I find myself going in unexpected directions that lead me further and further into myself. The process of writing teaches me things about myself that I wouldn’t be able to learn if I were to stay on the surface of my life, where emotional ups and downs reign supreme. A hurdling session is a similar experience. Hurdle workouts are inner journeys. You’re finding things out. You’re learning. And again, it’s a process. The process of running a series of reps enables you to discover things about yourself — as a hurdler and as a person — that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to discover. There are going to be “ohhh” moments, when you realize that you’re gaining more clarity on what it means, and what it feels like, to hurdle efficiently. You thought you knew, but now you know. And that keeps happening. Every time you face the fear of the blank page, the fear of the bad rep or of the bad race, you come out a new writer, a new hurdler, a new person, on the other side.
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