This Thing Called Focus
by Steve McGill
Though talent is factor number one when it comes to hurdling success, and work ethic is factor number two, there are other factors that play a role, like the ability to perform under pressure, getting proper amounts of rest, sacrificing comfort foods in favor of foods that can serve as fuel for workouts and as recovery for workouts. In addition, there are a myriad of other intangible factors, like having a strong support group full of people who believe in you and are willing to put your needs before their own, and who will pick you up when you doubt yourself. However, if there is one character trait that all of the best athletes I’ve ever coached have in common, it is that they are efficient in their workouts; they don’t waste time, and they don’t waste energy. They come to practice, they get the work done, conversation is minimal, and the atmosphere nevertheless is quite free of tension.
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With such athletes, there are no wasted reps. There’s no running up to the hurdle and stopping. There’s no running over the first four hurdles and then stopping at the fifth hurdle. There’s no running around hurdles. There are no weak explanations for why they “had” to stop. Some hurdlers are such self-critical perfectionists that they stop when they don’t need to. I tell my hurdlers that when they make a mistake, the first thought that should enter their mind is “recover.” Be ready to recover on the fly. Recover in the very next instant. Don’t spend a millisecond regretting the mistake, or even acknowledging it. Go! Keep sprinting! If you get in the habit of stopping in practice, you will eventually stop in a race. If you’re too self-critical in practice, you’ll eventually cost yourself a race by not recovering from a mistake quickly enough.
The problem with being inefficient in practice is that the more reps you waste, the more reps you have to do. As a result, the legs have to take more pounding to get in the same amount of work that could’ve been done with less pounding. I had a girl I was coaching a few weeks ago who is an older athlete but relatively new to hurdling. Toward the end of the workout I told her, “Let’s get in two more good ones,” as I had her doing three-point starts over the first four hurdles, with the hurdles lowered and the spacing discounted by two feet. She did well on the next rep, and had one more good one to go. Then on the last rep she hit the second hurdle, got frustrated, then jogged through the third and fourth hurdles. Well, we couldn’t go home on that one. “Give me another rep,” I said. The same thing happened. “Can’t go home on that one either,” I said. “Gotta do another rep.” She finally realized that if she didn’t get herself together, she wasn’t ever going home. Finally, on the third attempt at a final rep, she got in a quality rep. “Now can I go home?” she asked. “No,” I said, “you gotta give me two more like that one. You should’ve been running like that all day. You’ve been out here wasting my time. Now, two more good ones like that last one so the good stuff gets ingrained.” Her next two reps were good, which meant we ended the workout with three good reps in a row, which is the number I shoot for when it comes to ingraining good habits. All in all, we ended up doing six more reps than we would have if she had stayed focused to begin with. Those extra reps add up. That’s not only more pounding on the legs, but it’s also more energy exerted to ingrain good habits, to develop the desired muscle memory, to get the confidence level where it needs to be.
I get more upset with an athlete slowing down or getting angry with him/herself after a mistake than I do with the mistake itself. Mistakes are going to happen. Especially late in a workout. So you have to talk yourself through. You have to keep giving yourself cues of what to remember prior to taking off. You have to stay mentally engaged because, once fatigue sets in, you can’t rely on the body to function efficiently on autopilot like it could earlier in the workout, when it was fresh.
One of the athletes I’ve been coaching for what will be the third year this year is a girl named Falon Spearman, who ran a personal best of 13.91 last year in her first year over the 33-inch hurdles, as a freshman. What sets Falon apart from other hurdlers I coach? A lot of things, but one of them is that she never wastes a rep. Even her slower reps or weaker reps teach us something we can apply to the next rep. WIth Falon there is no running around hurdles, no stopping at hurdles, no drifting off mentally between reps. She stays engaged from the beginning of the workout to the end. Meanwhile, she doesn’t go to the other extreme either; she doesn’t over-analyze her reps, spending too much time between reps talking about the previous rep and looking at video of the previous rep. She’ll take a look, we’ll talk about it briefly, decide what to focus on for the next one, then move on. I like hurdlers who are cerebral, who know how to think the event. But when dialogue between reps is breaking up the flow of the workout, that’s a problem. And that does happen with some hurdlers. Again, it comes down to being efficient. Too much dialogue between reps means too much rest, which can sabotage the purpose of the workout.
With Falon, as soon as she arrives for practice, she puts down her track bag and begins to warm up. Throughout each session, she listens to instruction, but also has a mind of her own. We are able to have healthy conversations that often lead to changes in the original plan or that help me to understand how what she’s feeling jibes with what I’m seeing. Keni was the same way when I coached her. Pleasant, fun to be around, but serious and focused. I can’t remember any wasted reps with Keni. Johnny Dutch was that way. No clowning. These athletes, if they were having a bad day off the track, they didn’t bring it to the track. Falon’s demeanor never changes. She’s always pleasant, yet always locked in.
Athletes I’ve coached who don’t progress like Falon has generally aren’t efficient workers like she is. They don’t eliminate distractions and negative mental chatter like she does. Mentally, they take reps off, they just go through the motions for a rep or two. Or they get flustered and quickly lose confidence when they make mistakes. I always tell my athletes, keep
The emotions out of it. If getting upset were to help you to run faster, then I would be telling you to get upset. But all it does is make things worse. Stay practical, stay rooted in your technique, in your rhythm, in your speed. If something is going wrong, let’s figure it out together. I’ve had athletes as talented as Falon or even more talented than her who did not progress like her because of their practice habits. Falon gets more done quality-wise in ten reps than most athletes get done in twenty reps.
Being an efficient hurdler is all about being in tune with your body. And you can’t be in tune with your body if your mind is elsewhere. If you hit a hurdle, you should be able to explain to me why. If you lose balance when landing off a hurdle, you should be able to explain to me why. If I throw out a couple suggestions as to why based on what I saw, you should be able to tell me which suggestion is the correct one. When you can feel things, you can reduce the number of wasted reps. You shouldn’t have to go to the video to find out what went wrong. The video should only confirm what you already felt. When you rely on the video as the primary source of information, you’re setting yourself up to be inefficient. If you can feel mistakes, you can fix them on the fly. If you have to wait to watch the video, you cannot fix them until the next rep, at the earliest. And during a race, which is when it really matters, you have to go by feel, because by the time you see the video, the race is over.
Efficiency is an innate quality is many athletes, but it can be developed, as it is a matter of focus, which we all know can be developed. Focused athletes are efficient athletes.
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