Zoom Chat with Renaldo Nehemiah
by Steve McGill
On Sunday April 11, I conducted a Zoom interview with hurdling legend Renaldo Nehemiah. Also on the call were his high school coach Jean Poquette and high school teammate Joe Guty. The call was the first in a series that we will do to draw attention to the book about Renaldo’s life that he and I are collaborating on, which I’m hoping to get done by August of this year. For this Zoom session, we focused on the training methods that Poquette used in helping Renaldo to become the first (and only) high school hurdler to run under 13.0 (hand-timed). I had set up the Zoom call to last 90 minutes, but we ended up going for almost a full two hours. I had originally planned to also review some of Renaldo’s collegiate and professional races and break down his technique and rhythm in those, but we didn’t quite make it that far. We’ll cover that stuff on the next one! I plan to upload the Zoom call to my YouTube channel, but I’ll need to do some editing first. In this article, I’ll identify and elaborate upon my key takeaways from my Q&A session with Renaldo and Coach Poquette.
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HURDLING IS A RHYTHM EVENT
This is something that Renaldo said on more than one occasion in describing his technique and in talking about hurdling as an art form. The overall point he was making with this remark is that hurdling cannot be approached as a power event, as you can’t overpower the obstacles. Instead, he said, hurdling requires more “finesse” — a word that often comes with some negative connotations because many falsely assume that “finessing” the hurdles means taking a more tentative, less aggressive approach. But what Renaldo was talking about was the need to be able to make micro-adjustments during the course of a race, being flexible enough to put your body into the necessary positions, being efficient with the movements, and distributing energy throughout the entire race instead of just focusing solely on being fast over the first part of a race. Coach Poquette, meanwhile, used the word “cadence” in the same way that Renaldo used the word “rhythm.” Both of them were making the same point — that getting faster for an elite-level hurdler is always a matter of quickening the tempo between the hurdles, which is something that excellent technique helps to maximize.
STRENGTH TRAINING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SPEED TRAINING
This point is one that Renaldo and Poquette agree on 100%, as it is the philosophy and approach that enabled Renaldo to become the greatest high school hurdler ever, and arguably the greatest hurdler ever period. The argument they both made on the Zoom call is that speed training is overemphasized by most collegiate and professional coaches in the modern era, which leads to hurdlers not being able to finish races as strongly as they should. Often, Renaldo said, hurdlers’ indoor times indicate that they’re capable of running times outdoors that they have yet to run. The reason, he argued, is because their second half of the race isn’t as strong because of the overemphasis on speed in their training. I would add here that I think part of the reason for that is the increased emphasis on the indoor season as a whole. Back in the day, the indoor season was preparation for outdoor season, whereas now the indoor season is a part of the year that athletes train for specifically. Training specifically for a 5-hurdle race means it’s not going to be able to build solid hurdle-endurance in the spring and summer, as base work is reserved for the fall and winter.
For Poquette, the “strength” in strength training is not weight room strength, but muscle endurance, flexibility, and the type of speed-endurance that develops from high-volume workouts involving at least two miles worth of running. Some workouts involve sets of 200’s, or 400’s, or 600’s. In high school, Renaldo often trained with the quarter-milers and half-milers. Three sets of 3×600. Four sets of 4×200. These types of workouts were the norm. Poquette’s philosophy was that once an athlete was strong, he would be free to unleash his speed without worrying about fatigue. This proved to be the case with many of his athletes across the event spectrum throughout his career, and it especially proved to be the case with Renaldo. As he mentioned on the Zoom call, Renaldo ran his first two outdoor world records as a collegian at the University of Maryland based off of zero speed work. He ran 13.16 and 13.00 in back-to-back races early in the outdoor 1979 season because of his strength and his will to win.
THE BACK & FORTH WORKOUT WAS FOR TECHNIQUE DEVELOPMENT, NOT JUST FOR HURDLE ENDURANCE
The workout that Poquette is probably most well-known for in regards to his training of Renaldo is the back & forth workout, where he’d set up five hurdles one way, and five hurdles next to them facing the other way, spaced 12 yards apart for an easy five-step rhythm. The athlete would clear the first flight of five, turn around, and then complete the second flight of five. As Renaldo pointed out, back and forth one time added up to about 120 yards worth of running. So, not only did the amount of hurdles add up quickly, so did the amount of running.
The first two steps off each hurdle were “recovery” strides, and were followed with three quick strides, mimicking the race rhythm. Renaldo built up to a point where he was able to do 300 hurdles worth of back & forths in three sets of 10 reps. It was an extremely demanding workout. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a workout that I stopped using with my athletes because I just wasn’t getting the quality from it that I wanted, which is why I switched to the quickstep drill as my go-to endurance hurdling workout. Maybe I gave up on it too quickly because, as Poquette mentioned, Renaldo didn’t start at 300 hurdles; he built up to it. Volume for volume’s sake was a no-no. If his technique started to deteriorate, Poquette would stop the workout right there. Of all the things that I’ve learned from Coach Poquette that I’ve incorporated into my own coaching style, this might be the most important of them all. Never allow an athlete to ingrain bad habits; never value quantity over quality.
GETTING BETTER CREATES BUY-IN
One of the more amusing things that came out of the Zoom call was that Renaldo said more than once that he hated Coach Poquette’s workouts because they were so painful and because he was often grouped with the middle-distance runners. “But the workouts made me better,” he said, and that was why he kept doing them, and that was why he placed his faith in his coach. He would go to meets and see other hurdlers’ sloppy technique and see how they had trouble finishing races strongly, and he knew that he could go into any race at any meet feeling certain that he was the best-conditioned athlete in the field.
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So those were my main takeaways from the call. It was informative and fun, and as my friend, colleague, and former athlete Hector Cotto said, when you get a chance to talk with the G.O.A.T., you want to make sure you don’t miss it. The full Zoom call is below. Carve out some time to watch it.
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