A Return to the Essence
by Steve McGill
This coronavirus lockdown period has had a strange effect upon all of us. This unprecedented period in the biography of all of our lives has forced us to make swift and drastic changes to our daily routines, to our relationships with others, and to our very outlook on life. Many of us are going through various forms of crises–health-related, financial, emotional, existential. I know that first and foremost in my mind is I do not want to catch this damn virus. If it means staying in the house all day and washing my hands obsessively, then that’s what I’ll do. I’m fortunate that my profession–teaching–allows me to work from home. My school has just concluded its school year, and we conducted classes online for the last two months of the year. It went surprisingly well. Kids showed up for the online sessions and turned in their work on time. My coaching life, meanwhile, has been turned upside down. And I’m mildly surprised to discover that I don’t mind.
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When the NBA put its season on pause on March 11, that was the end of everything. All the other major sports leagues followed suit, and I had no choice but to cancel my Team Steve camp that was scheduled for March 21-22. Meanwhile, I had a good half-dozen or so athletes I was coaching privately on a regular basis, including one who had qualified for New Balance Nationals, and had actually flown to New York right before the event was cancelled.
Initially, I felt distraught. I was upset for my athlete who wouldn’t have a chance to shine on a national stage, I was disappointed in having to cancel my camp, and I felt the gut punch of the financial hit that came with refunding the parents of all the athletes who had signed up for the camp. All the profits I had accumulated over the past three years of doing camps was gone in an instant. Thank God for the day job.
But as the first few weeks went by, I found that I wasn’t missing my coaching life nearly as much as I had thought I would. And as the weeks have continued to go on, I’ve come to realize that this crisis has afforded me an opportunity to reevaluate my relationship with the hurdles, and to gain some clarity as to how I would prefer to move forward regarding not only my track and field life, but my life as a whole.
When I first started hurdling in tenth grade, it captured my imagination like nothing else ever had. It fascinated me that there could be a race where so many factors played a role in success. It wasn’t just about raw speed and power. It was about flexibility and reactive capacities. And the feeling of running over hurdles at full speed was thrilling. I loved the physical and mental challenge of it, and I loved the feeling that engulfed me when something I was working on in my technique finally clicked. When I fell ill with aplastic anemia in the fall of my twelfth grade year, that’s when hurdling took on a sacred role in my life. My desire to return to hurdling was my primary motivation for fighting the disease, and I credit my love for the hurdles as one of the essential reasons that I was able to make a full recovery in a very short period of time. Since that time, hurdling gained a spiritual dimension in my life that it didn’t have before.
I didn’t really plan to get into coaching when I first started teaching, but teaching and coaching kind of went hand in hand, as almost all teachers at the school where I started helped out with a sports team or led another extracurricular activity. My ability to explain technical matters and to simplify complex concepts made me a natural as a coach. More importantly, from my own perspective, coaching allowed me to continue my relationship with the hurdles. I wasn’t anywhere near good enough to continue racing professionally, so coaching was the next best thing to competing. And coaching also gave me plenty of time to do my own hurdle workouts, which I treasured, as it allowed me to continue to learn more about this magical, wondrous art form.
Success breeds a lot of things. It breeds confidence, it breeds popularity, it breeds envy. It also breeds obligation. Once you get real good at something, you can’t escape it. It consumes your identity. I’ve been coaching for 25 years, and somewhere between then and now, it became an obligation. For about the last ten years, I’ve come to realize, I’ve no longer been coaching out of a love for the hurdles, but out of a sense of duty, and a fear of letting people down. Young coaches need guidance. Young hurdlers need instruction. People from everywhere know my name; they know the names of many athletes I’ve coached. As a result, I can’t get away from Coach McGill. I can never just be Steve.
My personality differs from most coaches, which is another thing that I’ve come to realize in a big way the past few weeks. As inferred above, the art of hurdling is what fascinates me and excites me, not fast times, not state records or national records, not rankings, nor any of the external rewards that come with running well. When I see coaches, in person and on social media, bragging about their athletes’ exploits or discussing rankings and all-time lists, I feel discouraged and disheartened. On social media, coaches are always congratulating their athletes, which is a thinly disguised way of congratulating themselves. All of that obsessive competitiveness takes away from the art form, takes away from the purity of the sport. It’s a huge turn-off for me. I don’t relate to these coaches at all. I feel like I have nothing in common with them.
So I deleted my Instagram account a few weeks ago. I had over 300 posts worth of hurdle workout videos, featuring athletes of mine. I put them up there to help people see the types of workouts my athletes do, and, in that sense, to be a resource for those athletes and coaches out there who need help. But I deleted the account. All the videos are gone. And it’s no big deal. Everything ends. Those coaches and athletes who followed me will follow someone else and life will go on. There was a time not too long ago when Instagram didn’t exist, when YouTube didn’t exist, when all these social media platforms didn’t exist. There was a time when we couldn’t record practice videos on our phones. While many people look back on those times as being archaic, I look back on them nostalgically. Social media is not a good place for the person who values his privacy. For me, likes and follows aren’t nearly as gratifying as a truly meaningful relationship, and having people in my life who know me as a full person, not just as a coach. I don’t feel comfortable being accessible to so many people. Though I love to help people and I value being a mentor whom others can turn to for advice and guidance, it gets to be too much. I’m still answering the same questions I’ve been answering for the past 25 years. It gets old after a while.
About twelve years ago, I came up with the cycle-arms technique that I’ve written about in previous issues of this magazine, and that I’ve done a few videos about, and that I discussed the details of in my book, The Art of Hurdling. The style allows the lead arm and the trail arm to stay in continuous motion during hurdle clearance, with no pauses whatsoever in the hurdling action. Twelve years later, I’ve yet to have an athlete who has mastered the style to the point where he or she could execute it in a race. Pre-coronavirus, I was teaching it to the male hurdler I coach who qualified for Indoor Nationals. “Don’t use it at nationals,” I told him, because we hadn’t worked on it enough, “but when you come back, we’ll put it back in so that you master it in time for Outdoor Nationals.” So much for that.
Yet, at the same time, a continuation of that process with that athlete is what motivates me to want to return to the track. I haven’t conducted any workouts with any athletes since the lockdown began. Tomorrow, however, I will be meeting that athlete at a nearby park where we can keep our social distance and get re-acclimated to the cycle arms style. When I first came up with the style way back when, it was the next step in the evolutionary process of figuring out how to eliminate all pauses. But because the style requires the athletes to reconstruct their arm action with or without the presence of hurdles, finding the right athlete to master it, and with whom I have the time to develop it, has proven more difficult than I had anticipated. For me, teaching things I’ve taught before feels very restricting, and, ultimately, boring. I fell in love with hurdling because it captured my imagination, and no amount of success can compensate for the feeling that I’m stagnating.
As I move forward, my plan is to return to the journey I was on before I came “famous”–the never-ending journey of mastering the art form, of pushing the art form to new heights. And I want to do it in a low-key manner. Just me, an athlete, a lane of hurdles. The hurdles helped to save my life, so I’ve dedicated my life to returning the favor. I can do without everything else that comes with it.
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