Making Compromises
by Steve McGill
As coaches, we often have grandiose visions of what we want to accomplish and how we want to go about accomplishing it. And in many cases, we have strict parameters regarding our ideas of what works and what doesn’t. What I have found, though, and I’m sure plenty of coaches reading this would agree, is that those visions and plans often have to be adjusted — sometimes slightly, and sometimes on a large scale. Often, we have to choose which battles we’re going to fight vs. the battles where it’s okay to take an L. When it comes to hurdling technique and how I want my hurdlers to look when running over hurdles, I am very specific in what I’m looking for, and equally specific regarding what drills I’ll use to get there.
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But like I always say, you have to coach the athlete who is right there in front of you. That means I can’t always expect each athlete to get with the program; sometimes I have to adapt the program to the athlete. Let me tell a few stories from my coaching career that demonstrate this issue and how I’ve dealt with it.
Back in 2003, I was coaching a kid named Joe Coe, a high school junior who was new to hurdling but who was eager to excel. Two years prior, I had coached Cameron Akers — my first hurdler to make it to the national level. With Cameron, my bread and butter drill had been the quickstep drill. The drill where the athlete goes over 5-10 hurdles that are spaced close together, jogs/walks back to the line and goes again. Usually, a set would consist of 8-10 reps, and I’d give the athletes five minutes rest between sets. We’d get in well over 100 hurdles worth of hurdling in each session. I had created this workout as a hurdle endurance workout after deciding that the back-and-forth workout I had grown up on (designed by Renaldo Nehemiah’s high school coach, Jean Poquette), was so demanding that I wasn’t getting enough out of it. With the quicksteps, the jog between reps gave athletes a chance to recover that they didn’t have with the back-and-forths. So I was proud of this workout because I had designed it myself, and it was still rooted in the same principles of Coach Poquette, whom I considered (and still consider) a mentor. The quickstep workout was the main one I used to get Cameron from the mid-15’s down to 14.21 in the space of a single season.
Joe wasn’t on the team when all of that happened, but, being two years younger, he had seen Cameron’s brilliance. And Cameron was the one who had inspired him to want to try the hurdles to begin with. So it was a no-brainer to me that I’d groom Joe the same way, with the quicksteps being our go-to workout.
But Joe didn’t like the quicksteps. He didn’t respond well to it. And I wasn’t getting the quality in each session that I had been getting from Cameron. And he wasn’t progressing nearly as quickly as Cameron had. At first I wondered if he was just lazy; maybe he didn’t want to go through the grind of hurdle endurance workouts. But then I reminded myself that Joe was a defensive back on our school’s football team. And he was a Brian Dawkins type — aggressive, passionate, a big hitter. I started thinking to myself that maybe the quickstep drill wasn’t working for him because it didn’t fit his personality well enough.
So I switched things up. I abandoned the quickstep drill and we focused on speed work — 30’s, 40’s, 50’s from a flying start. And in our hurdle workouts we worked on block starts over the first hurdle, working our way up to over the first six hurdles. Lo and behold, the beastmode Joe Coe emerged. Oddly, even his technical issues were going away — something that hardly ever happens during full-speed hurdle sessions. By the end of that year I realized that I had been holding him back by trying to make him another Cameron, and that I had made the right choice by switching things up in order to unleash his football-related desire to always stay in attack mode.
More recently, I’ve been working with a girl who hates my favorite drill, the marching popovers. This is another drill that I designed myself, and its purpose is to force the athlete to push off the back leg with force, and to emphasize the knee drive of the lead leg so that the legs are in position to cycle over the hurdle. Well, this girl, Teri, preferred walk-overs to popovers, because she had been introduced to walk-overs before she started coming to me. Now, anybody who knows me knows that I hate, I’m talkin HATE walk-overs, because there’s always one foot on the ground at all times and the timing of the forward lean does not match the timing of the forward lean in real hurdling. To this day I ask why, why, WHY do people still do walk-overs?
But Teri liked them. “They help you get right?” I asked. She responded that they did. “Okay,” I said, here’s the deal. You can do your walk-overs if they help you get right. But we’re also gonna do the popovers so that you actually look like a Steve-coached hurdler. Deal?” She agreed, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
Teri also has some technical flaws that we’ve been working on a lot. Even though she’s very fast and ran under 12.20 in the 100 meter dash last year as a freshman, she tends to rock back on heels or run flat-footed at times. This issue is more pronounced when she’s running between the hurdles, which leads to a lead leg that kicks and a lead arm that swings across the body. While we’ve made significant progress with her sprinting mechanics, and a decent amount of progress with her lead leg, the lead arm still swings across the body. But I noticed something odd when looking at the video of her reps. Although the lead arm was swinging across the body as she attacked the hurdle, it wasn’t swinging back the other way when she descended off the hurdle. Instead, it was punching down. Really? How could that be? And I also noticed that the trail leg was coming through high and tight, with the knee facing the front by the time the lead leg landed? Usually, when an athlete’s lead arm crosses the body, the trail leg flattens out and then just drops down (plops down) on the other side of the hurdle.
So as we watched the video together, I told her, “Okay, I’ll live with the lead arm swinging across like that as long as you’re able to keep it punching down and as long as the trail leg keeps coming to the front.” Of course, the detail-oriented purist in me wants to fix that lead arm. But I also know that there are some world-class female hurdlers whose lead arms do a similar motion, and yet they run very fast times. Female athletes tend to naturally run with their elbows out further than males, so I can’t necessarily look for the same angles when coaching female hurdlers.
Video of the most recent workout with Teri is below:
Keep in mind, such compromises as discussed in this article can only be made with athletes who are putting in the work. If you’re showing me on a regular basis that you’re willing to do what it takes to excel in this sport, then yes, we can have conversations about how to best get you there. But if you’re a part-time athlete who works hard sometimes, then you’re gonna do what I say and you’re gonna do things my way, or else stop taking up space on the track. That’s fair, right?
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