A Goodbye Song
by Steve McGill
The title of this article refers to the fact that this will be the last issue of The Hurdle Magazine. Yes, it is a sad day, but also an inevitable one. To put it simply, keeping up with the demands of producing a monthly magazine has gotten to be too much work. When I started this magazine back in September of 2013, I had left my teaching job and was hoping to make the magazine something that would grow and grow. Because I had so many people who visited my website, I naively assumed that they would all follow me over to the magazine and that I would have hundreds of subscribers from day one. But I quickly learned that the business side of this endeavor was something I hadn’t properly prepared myself for.
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Still, even with a small subscriber base, I had the time to learn the business side of things, and I was learning it. But the problem was, I soon realized that it would take years to gain enough subscribers to focus exclusively on the magazine, along with my private coaching. So, with a mortgage to pay and a daughter about to enter college, I needed full-time employment, and found a new teaching position. That was back in 2015. Even then, I knew that maintaining the magazine while keeping up with grading papers and planning lessons and attending faculty meetings was going to be very difficult at best. An English teacher’s life consists of 75% grading papers and 25% thinking about grading papers.
But I managed to manage the work load, mainly because writing and hurdling are both passions of mine, and because I knew I could still provide high quality material with all the ideas I had about training and technique, etc. Gradually, however, the grind of doing all of the work for each month’s issue began wearing me down. Writing six articles, plus uploading them all into the magazine, with the necessary photos and videos added, meant working on the magazine during planning periods at school, at home after school, and before and after coaching sessions on the weekends.
Last year, I found two reliable, highly-skilled writers to provide content – Melinda Burris Willms and Teige West. And though their contributions have helped tremendously, I still found myself busy to the point of exhaustion, as I was adding more athletes in my private coaching; during the summer months especially, I spent a lot of time on the track and at meets.
And the kicker, the thing that truly forced me to consider moving on from the magazine, was getting my book about Rodney Milburn published this past September. Even prior to publication, I was spending tons of time putting together the endnotes and the index. Last summer, when I wasn’t on the track coaching, I was on my laptop adding notes. Since publication, I’ve been traveling to book signings and doing other things to market and promote the book. In addition, finally becoming a legit published author has led me to want to write more books. And if I am to pursue such aspirations, the magazine is something that will need to be sacrificed.
Life is all about transitions. Know who you are, be that person, and don’t apologize for it. As you evolve as a person, your outer life should reflect that evolution. When I was in college I had visions of becoming a published author and having a long writing career filled with many books. Because that dream didn’t come true immediately, I let it fade into the background. But now it is back in the foreground. I have ideas for other biographies I would like to write. I have ideas for a collection of short stories I would like to write. And I would eventually like to write at least one full-length novel. I’d like for my voice to expand beyond the hurdles, even if it always remains rooted in the hurdles.
If I have a message to leave you with, it would be a simple one: Do what you love with all your heart and all your soul, without regard for how good you are at it, how far it can take you, how far you can go with it. If you love it, do it. Give your all to it. Without fears, without hopes, without expectations. In my competitive days, I was far from a great hurdler. My personal bests were 15.63 over the 42’s, 58.00 in the 400h. I didn’t qualify for nationals in anything. Or even come close. If you had told me when I was struggling to make conference finals in a Division III conference that I would later become a leading voice in regards to all things hurdle-related, I would’ve taken it as a mean-spirited joke. But I loved the hurdles, so I stuck with them in whatever capacity I could. If I had moved on from hurdling because I wasn’t that good at it, I never would’ve discovered my talents as a coach. That’s my story. You have yours.
For me, hurdling will always be an art form first, a foot race second. If you’ve learned nothing else from having read the many articles I’ve written for this magazine, and for this website as a whole, please take that one lesson with you: hurdling is an art form first, a foot race second. If you focus on mastering the art form, you will win races as a natural consequence, not due to an extraordinary effort. But if you focus on winning races, you will never master the art form, and you will therefore never realize how good you can be.
If there is anything I have grown frustrated with in regards to the direction of the sport, it would be the increased emphasis on racing, on chasing times, and the decreased emphasis on mastering the art form. At the level where I do most of my coaching – high school and youth – there’s a lot of chasing after scholarships, there’s an obsession with keeping up with the performances of opponents on Milesplit. People are racing basically every weekend from December through July. So mastering the craft becomes an afterthought. I often tell people the story of how, when I started coaching Keni Harrison in her junior year of high school, we went from October to April working on technique and rhythm before she even ran one sprint hurdle race. We spent the whole fall, winter, and most of the spring getting everything right so that when she finally competed, she could do so with confidence. That season taught me what a coach/athlete combo is capable of when given the time to really get things right without being in a rush to race. Master the art form first. Be a hurdler. Yes, be an athlete, be a warrior, but don’t neglect being a hurdler.
I want to thank all of you for your support, especially those handful of you who have been with me since the magazine’s inception. I appreciate all of you.
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