The Season of Falon
by Steve McGill
One of the most enjoyable things about coaching is connecting with new athletes and building relationships with them that have the potential to last a lifetime. As a private coach it can be even more special because of the one-on-one nature of the relationship. Last year, that new athlete who stood out for me was Matt Garrett. After starting with me in the fall of last year, Matt went on to develop to the point where he finished second in the youth age group 100m hurdles, and the kid who beat him, Alex Nunley, was another athlete that I coach. Unfortunately, in his first year over the 39’s, Matt suffered a serious hip injury this past March that effectively ended his outdoor season, so we’ll have to pick up where we left off when the upcoming fall season arrives. Meanwhile, another new hurdler who fell into my lap this year is a young girl in the youth age group named Falon Spearman.
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If you subscribe to my YouTube channel or follow me on Instagram (my Instagram moniker is @mcgill.steve), you’ve seen the short training videos I’ve put up of Falon throughout the year. Her progression has been quite remarkable, and serves to me as yet another example of what can happen when a coach and athlete trust each other and are willing to put in the work together.
Falon warms up prior to a workout session at last month’s Team Steve Speed & Hurdle Camp III.
I first started with Falon in the winter of this past indoor season, as her father had found out about me through Matt’s parents and the parents of another athlete I was coaching. He was looking for Falon to receive more specialized instruction to help improve her technique, her speed, and her start. “Well you came to the right place,” I told him, and so we began.
What stood out to me the most about Falon from the very start was her maturity level. Quiet and polite, she listened very closely to instruction and applied everything I told her immediately. Her demeanor was that of an athlete who was focused and eager to improve but without being tense or anxious about it. From the beginning, she was remarkably easy to coach.
For the most part, we met once a week, and sometimes we met twice a week, working primarily on technique and rhythm, as the temperatures were still too cold to do any significant speed work without risking injury. I took her through the gamut of drills that put all my hurdlers through, and she responded positively, showing visible improvement each session.
We started with the marching pop-over drill to establish the importance of pushing off the back leg with force and keeping the knee of the lead leg bent while attacking each hurdle. This drill also taught her the importance of maintaining forward lean off of each hurdle in order to maintain forward momentum. Because she was so mature and so coachable, I didn’t feel the need to simplify my instructions when coaching her. With everything we did, I explained to her why we were doing it, and she never had any trouble grasping the more intricate concepts.
In the above video from this past February, Falon does marching pop-overs, cycle drill, and quick-step drill prior to doing one three-point start over two hurdles.
The marching pop-overs led to the cycle drill, which led to the quick-step drill, which I largely relied upon throughout the winter and spring to expose, address, and correct all of her flaws. Her arms tended to swing too high in her sprinting, causing her lead arm to raise way above her head and her trail arm to lock at the elbow during hurdle clearance. Sometimes her lead leg knee would lock out. Sometimes her trail leg opened up too widely and wasn’t getting all the way to the front by the time she landed. Using the quick-step drill, we’d work on these issues, emphasizing the arms first, then the legs, and I would point out to her how it all related.
Finally, we worked on lowering her hurdle clearance, making sure that she skimmed the hurdles but without allowing the lead leg to lock. One of the principles I explained to her that is specific to our style is that the key to judging whether or not you are staying low over the hurdles is too look at how close the heel is to the crossbar. If you judge by where the hamstring clears the hurdle, you’re going to look too high. We’re not trying to line-drive horizontally over the hurdle; we want to create that downhill angle – the angle that will cause acceleration off the hurdle, reducing the amount of effort we have to put into being fast between the hurdles. This is a pretty high-level concept that contradicts much traditional logic amongst coaches, but Falon had no problem picking up on it and applying it.
In the above video, from late February 2018, Falon works on her block start, applying the lessons learned from the drilling.
As the weather allowed, we also did some block work so that she would understand how all the drilling applied to the race model. However, not until late spring did the emphasis move from technique and rhythm to speed. And that’s the way I like to do it – once all the technical flaws have been corrected and the rhythm has been ingrained, all we need to do is speed things up. That’s where I was with Falon by May. Once the school year ended and summer track was in full swing, we were able to meet more often than our usual once per week. As a result, I was able to implement speed work, speed-endurance work, and an emphasis on speed between the hurdles in our hurdle workouts. In the girls’ race, especially, improved flat speed means improved speed over the hurdles. It’s not like the boys’ race, where improved speed doesn’t always translate into faster hurdle times, due to the height of the hurdles.
For speed, I’d have her do something like three sets of 30m/40m/50m from a three-point start. For speed-endurance, I’d have her do three sets of 90m/100m/110m from three-point start. Another speed-endurance workout was 4×200 at 29 seconds, with the goal being to negative-split (meaning, we wanted the second 100 of each rep to be faster than the first 100) in order to establish the habit of finishing strong and reducing late-race deceleration.
To get the sprint speed to translate to hurdling, we’d sometimes do workouts where she would do a sprint rep followed by a hurdle rep. Something like, a 40m sprint followed by a rep over the first four hurdles. With an athlete like Falon I can be creative like that without fear of overwhelming her.
In hurdle workouts, we did everything out of the blocks, full speed ahead. Because we had put in all the technique work and rhythm work in the colder months, I instructed her to not think about anything technical, but to instead trust her body to perform the movements, and to focus on being fast and aggressive to hurdle one and staying fast and aggressive between the hurdles. The only technical instruction was to keep punching down that lead arm, as the punch-down is what triggers the speed off the hurdle.
In the above video from May, we are speeding things up and tightening up the arm action.
Most recently, I’ve incorporated the workout that is described in this month’s workout article, combining sprinting over hurdles with sprinting hurdle-free within each rep.
With the progression we’ve made throughout the course of this season, the most important thing is that the progression has been natural. We didn’t rush anything; we didn’t skip steps. To Falon’s credit, she’s not only a hard worker, but a very efficient worker. Throughout this entire year, I think she may have had maybe two bad reps. Her mind doesn’t drift; she doesn’t lose focus. As a result, she’s not wearing her body down during the learning process. When I give her a piece of instruction, I see the improvement in the very next rep. With many athletes, I won’t see the improvement for another four or five reps. Then fatigue sets in, so the amount of quality reps is minimized. With Falon, every rep is a quality rep.
Falon’s personal best in the 100m hurdles has dropped from 14.99 when we first started together to 14.05. With Junior Olympic Nationals on the horizon, I’m expecting it will drop even further as she competes for a national championship. I’ve never had an athlete whom I have enjoyed coaching more.
By the above workout in June, we are working almost exclusively on speed, trusting the technique to be on point without focusing on it.
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