Figuring it out Together
by Steven McGill
Well, if you were to ask me what I like the most about private coaching (as opposed to coaching for a team), one of the things at the top of the list would be the level of communication that I can have with my athletes when working with them in the one-on-one setting. One thing that has always been true for me as a coach is that my own athletes have been the number one source of new knowledge for me throughout my career. While coaching clinics are useful and picking the brains of other coaches is useful, what I find to be most directly useful is listening to my athletes, keeping the channels of communication open, and always staying aware of their body language during workouts.
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Obviously, this method of coaching doesn’t work with athletes who lack the maturity to engage in dialogue about their strengths and weaknesses, their conditioning level, their technique, etc. But I have found that with private coaching, issues with lack of maturity and/or subpar work habits don’t really appear hardly at all. Nobody is there “to get faster for football” or “to stay in shape during the spring” or any of that crap. They’re there because they want to be better hurdlers, period. And because of that, it’s not difficult to get them to help me in figuring out how to address their flaws, etc.
The basic premise is that track is a sport without timeouts, half-times, and all that. A hurdle race feels as short in duration as the blink of an eye. So a hurdler has to learn to react, react, react, and to adapt, adapt, adapt. The athlete must react to each hurdle, and adapt to his or her own speed. In addition, he or she must be ready to adapt to variable conditions (headwind, tailwind, contact with other hurdlers, etc.). So, a hurdler who doesn’t get in the habit of understanding what he or she is doing between the hurdles and over the hurdles will be at a disadvantage on race day, no matter how athletic or fast he or she may be. The mere presence of the hurdles will neutralize his or her advantages.
Let me go ahead and point to two recent examples of times when effective communication with an athlete led to either a breakthrough or effective use of our time.
The first example involves a high school sophomore I coach named Brandon Johnson. Ever since last year, I noticed that he twists his hips and stands up too tall when landing off of hurdles. We couldn’t address it last year because he missed a chunk of time due to injury, and by the time he came back we had to get race-ready, which meant no time to fix technique; we had to go with what we had and make it work.
This year, we did a lot of drilling throughout the fall and winter trying to correct this balance issue. Of course, when I see an athlete’s hips twist, the first thing I’m looking at is the lead arm. And sure enough, his lead arm was crossing his body during take-off, then swinging back the other way as he descended. An easy fix, right?
Heck no. Even when we focused on punching the lead arm up and punching it down, the twist remained. It wasn’t as pronounced, but it was still there. I wasn’t getting frustrated, but I admit to being a bit baffled. He was still running fast, dropping time in races, and having no problem whatsoever maintaining his three-step rhythm. But dang, I kept telling myself, if we can get rid of that twist, he’ll really be rolling.
Then, in a workout a couple weeks ago, the thought hit me that maybe we were looking at something that was vice versa. Maybe the standing up off the hurdles was the cause of the problem – an ingrained habit – not the symptom of a problem with the arms. When I broached this possibility to him, he immediately said, “Yeah, it’s a habit. I’ve always done that.”
That’s then the light bulb finally came on in my head. We needed to stop focusing on the arms, but focus on the lean – on holding the lean. The arms, I realized, were swinging in order to compensate for the imbalance; they weren’t causing the imbalance. So I instructed him to focus on holding the lean all the way through hurdle clearance on the next rep. We were doing a quickstep drill. And lo and behold, on the next rep, there were no balance issues! He stayed straight down the middle of the lane the whole rep, with the hips pushing forward and the shoulders facing forward the whole time. We had figured it out!
And I can guarantee you, if he hadn’t said “Yeah, it’s a habit,” I’d still be trying to fix those dang arms.
The second example occurred in a 300 hurdle workout this weekend with a sophomore girl named Sofia Rooney. I had set up the first five hurdles, and I didn’t want to waste a lot of reps going over one hurdle and two hurdles because I wanted her legs fresh for the reps over all five. But it was a particularly windy day, with the wind in her face for the backstretch. After she did one practice rep over the first hurdle to get her timing down, I thought we were ready to begin the workout. When I asked her if she was ready or if she wanted to do one more practice rep, she opted for one more practice rep. “The first one didn’t quite feel right,” she said. So, even though I wanted to save her legs, I trusted her, and said go ahead and do another practice rep.
She ended up having an outstanding workout. We did one rep over three hurdles, one rep over four, and two reps over five, all with that headwind blowing all up in her face. She was able to maintain a stride pattern of 24 strides to the first hurdle and 17 between all the rest for every hurdle of every rep. And I know that if I had forced her to begin the workout after the first practice rep, the workout probably wouldn’t have gone so well. After every rep, I asked her input as to whether she wanted to go straight to five hurdles. So that was a win-win. We accomplished what I wanted to get accomplished (two high quality reps over five hurdles), and she had a say in regards to how we got there. To me, that’s what the best coach-athlete relationships are like – mutual trust, mutual investment.
And there are plenty of other examples. I had a girl back in the day who could run 15-low to 14-high in the 100m hurdles, but if she didn’t get at least one full-speed block start over four or five hurdles with the hurdles one click below race height, she would have trouble three-stepping at all in the workout or in that day’s race. She had to get in a rep or two over 30’s to get her speed right and her confidence up. So, instead of fighting with her about it, instead of saying, “Hey, you run 15 flat, what do you need reps over 30’s for?”, I accommodated her, and she always performed well.
So it comes down to coaching the individual. In a team setting, it’s hard to do that because of space issues and time constraints. If you’re coaching a whole group of hurdlers at once, it’s harder to have those individual conversations and to accommodate those individual needs without disrupting the flow of the workout or having athletes feel like you’re favoring certain athletes over others. It can be done, but it’s trickier. I guess I’m at a point in my life where I don’t want to be bothered with people who half-way don’t want to be there, as it saps me of my energy and depletes my joy. And for me, anything hurdle-related should be a joy.
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