Translating Training into Races
by Steve McGill
Earlier this month I found myself being reminded of the mantra that I often preach to my athletes and to other coaches: be patient, because it takes a while for what you’re working on in practice to translate into races. The athlete that I’ve been working with, high school senior Brandon Johnson, had his first meet on Saturday November 7. It was the earliest opener ever, as far as I know, and because I only coach Brandon face-to-face once a week, I didn’t even know he had a meet coming up until his dad informed me a few days prior after I had texted him asking what time he wanted to meet for practice on Saturday. So, the amount of speed work we had done up to this point had been minimal; I had just started having him do speed workouts once a week for a total of three weeks, after our October time trial over the 55m hurdles.
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Since May, when I peeped my head out of my house for the first time after staying in quarantine for a couple months, I had been teaching Brandon the cycle-arms action that I had created years ago, and that I had started to teach him right before the quarantine had begun. If you have been subscribing to The Hurdle Magazine regularly, you have followed the progression of the process. Back in May, I had him on grass fields over mini-hurdles, just learning and incorporating the timing aspects of the style, and learning how to avoid pauses in the arms, particularly in the second arm (traditionally called the trail arm). As he mastered the style at slower speeds and lower height, I gradually increased the challenge. We worked up to where he had no problems over race height hurdles doing quick-step drills, with the hurdles spaced 25 feet apart.
Once he could cycle the arms in drills without thinking about it, we put the blocks down and did starts, working up to three hurdles. Then, in the time trial in October, he was able to maintain the arm action for the whole rep for two reps. He didn’t look all that fast between the hurdles, and his times were only decent (7.6 for the faster rep), I wasn’t worried about the times because we were still in fall-training mode. I was excited to see that even when given commands and being timed, he didn’t lose the rhythm and he executed the style effectively.
My plan from there was to do another time trial this month (November), and then another one in early December, assuming that his first race would be just before or after the Christmas holidays. I figured that after three time trials, hopefully having someone to compete against for the last one, he’d be ready to take the cycle arms into a race.
But yeah, he had his first meet on November 7, so all my plans went down the toilet bowl. As it turns out, the week before the meet, Malix Mixon, a junior who has been featured in a past article or two here, came up for a session, and he and Brandon worked out together. In that workout, I had them both practice their start separately, explaining that I didn’t want them in race mode while still refining their approach to the first hurdle. Had Brandon told me that he had a meet coming up the following week, I surely would’ve had him and Malik do at least one or two competitive starts against each other. Even being timed cannot match the adrenaline rush provided by having someone next to you who is good enough to beat you. A rep or two against Malik would’ve exposed any issues that we would need to prepare for prior to the meet. At the end of the day, it’s all good. It’s only November. So the race basically served as a time trial.
The video above provides footage of the race. Brandon is on the far left, wearing all white. As you can see, he ran a clean race, his trail leg was high and tight the whole way, his upper body stayed forward the whole way, so he did a lot of things well. But he did not cycle the arms at all. The arm carriage was a throwback to 2019, pre-pandemic, when you didn’t have to make sure you had a bottle of hand sanitizer in your car and another in your office and another in your bedroom, when you could pack an indoor track facility full of athletes and parents and coaches and officials and fans without worrying about catching anything worse than the sniffles. I had deleted all of the old videos of Brandon using the punch-up/punch-down arm style from my phone, because the phone was telling me to delete old videos to create more storage space. I had no use whatsoever for those vids, so they suffered a mass deletion.
Frankly, I was surprised, when looking at the race footage, that the cycle arms disappeared as if I had never taught the style to him at all. But when we talked about it at our most recent practice, I began to understand. He explained that he had so much adrenaline pumping, that he wasn’t even thinking. Which is what I want, really. He needs to be able to do it without thinking about it all, and we’re simply not at that point yet. He hadn’t raced since last March, so his competitive fire was raging a bit out of control. Also, with the cycle arms, if you forget to cycle the arms at the very beginning of the race, you’re not going to be able to pick it up later in the race. Once your arms are pumping up and down, they’re gonna keep pumping up and down. So he did the right thing and just kept racing.
In our workout this past Saturday, the 14th, the video of which can be seen in the article on this month’s workout, We did some quality starts in which you can see him really humming over the hurdles while doing the cycle arms action expertly. I reminded him to make sure he’s cycling from step one. He can just trust his instincts from there.
So I’m feeling good about where we’re heading. The race told us where we stand and what we need to work on. One thing I told him is to use cycle arms in every drill and every workout, whether there are hurdles involved or not. He’s gotta get it to the point where cycling is all his arms know. We have to eliminate all muscle memory of regular arm action if we’re going to be able to trust the arms to cycle on their own in a high hurdle race.
Meanwhile, the pressure is off in terms of impressing colleges, as he has committed to The University of Cincinnati, where he will be coached by Nadine Faustin-Parker, an old friend of mine from when we both lived in Raleigh and she was still competing professionally.
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