The Selfish Hurdler
It seems to me that hurdlers, more so than any other athletes in the sport of track and field, are most often accused of being selfish. Usually it’s the head coach making the accusation, or in some cases an assistant or a teammate. But whatever the case, I often find myself listening to hurdlers I coach privately or in club track complaining that they are considered “selfish” because they want to work on their hurdling more often in practice and because they want to focus on their hurdling events in meets.
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While this is an issue that has been evident since God knows when, it recently was brought to my attention once again earlier this week. Currently I’m working in Davidson, NC, about three hours away from my home in the Raleigh, NC area. So while I usually drive back to Raleigh on the weekends and coach my former athletes once a week, the kids that I left behind in Raleigh, I spend the work week in Davidson. Earlier this week I called one of my hurdlers asking how she did at her conference meet, and she said that she had barely qualified for states in the 300 hurdles because she had run the 4×100 relay just minutes before. I’m not sure how it is in other states, but in North Carolina the 300 hurdles comes two events after the 4×100, with only the 400 meter run between them. A senior and a captain on her school team, she was told by her coach that she was being selfish and a bad leader “because I wanted to practice hurdles instead of hand-offs.”
I found myself thinking, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that type of ignorant comment, my wallet would be so fat I wouldn’t be able to close it. To me it just goes back to the basic point I’ve made millions of times: most coaches don’t understand hurdlers and the hurdler’s mindset. What they interpret as selfishness is actually a dedication to mastering one’s craft. What they interpret as an unwillingness to help the team is actually a desire to help the team by doing what one does best.
For the majority of my coaching career over the past twenty years, I’ve been the assistant coach in charge of sprinters and hurdlers, as well as the 4×1 and 4×4, for the school team. And I always made it a habit to use hurdlers in relays. I could count on them to be consistently reliable relay legs in the 4×1, 4×2, and 4×4. But I also always made it a habit to make sure that, for them, their hurdling events were their first priority. My list of do’s and don’t’s went along the following lines:
A hurdler who ran the 110/100 hurdles but not the 300 hurdles would be a candidate for the 4×1, but not the 4×2. The 100/110 hurdles in NC are the second event in the meet, right after the 4×800 relay. The 4×200 comes two events later, after the open 100. So I might’ve used a 100/110 hurdler in the 4×2 if we lacked depth in the sprints, but I would’ve preferred to save that sprint hurdler for the 4×100, which is more in the middle of the order of events.
A hurdler who ran the 300 hurdles but not the sprint hurdles would be an excellent candidate for the 4×200. That relay would serve to get them into the flow of the meet, as it would be their first running event of the day. And there’s plenty of time between the 4×200 and the 300 hurdles, which would mean this athlete will be fully recovered by the time he or she competed in his or her specialty event. But I would not put this athlete in the 4×1 for the obvious reason that I mentioned earlier – the 4×1 and 300 hurdles are too close together. Sure, the 300 hurdler can recover in time to run the 300 hurdles because the 4×1 isn’t too taxing, relatively speaking. But still, the 300 hurdles is too demanding event. And when you’re talking late-season championship meets, it doesn’t take a whole lot of fatigue to do a whole lot of damage to the athlete’s race, particularly the final straight-away. For me, my approach was the same throughout the season, not just for big qualifying meets. If you’re running the 300 hurdles today, you’re not in the 4×1 today. That’s just stupid.
A hurdler who competed in both hurdle events would not compete in either the 4×2 nor the 4×1, unless, again, depth were an issue.
As for the 4×4, since that event came at the end of the meet, all hurdlers would be candidates to take part in this relay. The 4×4 is a warrior’s event, and I like for my hurdlers to be warriors. One year our entire 4×4 squad, including the alternate, was comprised of hurdlers.
Most of the “selfish” accusations, from what I can tell, are 4×1-related. This relay is very technical, just as the hurdles are very technical. This relay requires impeccable timing for maximal success, just as the hurdles require impeccable timing for maximal success. In this relay, the slightest mistake can lead to major disaster, just as in the hurdles the slightest mistake can lead to major disaster. So yes, if you’re a hurdler who is asked to run a leg of the 4×1, you’re going to have a conflict of interest in regards to how you divide your practice time. When I was an assistant on the school team, my head coach would often ask me about putting this hurdler or that hurdler on the 4×1, and I’d always balk, explaining the fatigue factor and the focus factor, and he trusted me, so we never butted heads, and things always ended up working out.
I was a sprint/hurdle coach with a hurdle emphasis, whereas most sprint/hurdle coaches have a sprint emphasis. When one of my hurdlers would want to spend extra time after practice doing trail leg drills, I embraced it and worked with him or her. Most coaches would prefer that extra time be spent working on all-important baton exchanges. When I have hurdlers who run the 4×1, I want them to get the hurdling portion of their workout in first, while their legs are freshest. Coaches with a sprinter mindset would prefer the athlete work on baton exchanges first, for the same reason. For most hurdlers – those who identify themselves as hurdlers first and have put much time and energy into refining all aspects of their race – taking away hurdle time in practice for the sake of working on relay exchanges can be downright infuriating.
The way I often put it is, sprinters are relay people, while hurdlers are hurdle people. Many sprinters enjoy running the 4×1 even more than they enjoy running the open 100 or 200. Same with quarter-milers – many of them prefer the 4×4 over the open 4. Many sprinters and quarter-milers do their best running in the relay setting. I remember my team in college didn’t have one guy make the final of the open 400 at the conference meet, yet we won the 4×4. They were relay dudes. They lived for the relay.
Hurdlers live for the hurdles.
In the example above, our team would’ve earned more points overall if three of those four dudes had scored points in the open 400. Win the relay and that’s 10 points. Get 1-2-3 in the open 400 and that’s 24 points. The very notion that relays are more about the team than individual events is ridiculous. The numbers don’t add up. You don’t want to waste your best athletes in a relay; you want to put them in as many individual events as possible.
The mental aspect is worth mentioning too. I touched on the topic of focus a bit earlier, but let me go into it in a little more detail now. Let’s use the example of my athlete I discussed in the beginning of this article, who had to run the 4×1 before the 300 hurdles. So, speaking strictly on the physical level first, the 4×1 took away her warm-up time for the 300 hurdles. She had to warm up with the 4×1 squad, and basically couldn’t warm up for the hurdles because the wiser thing to do after the 4×1 was sit down and rest to give her legs the best chance to recover. In addition – and to me this is the larger issue – she couldn’t focus on the hurdles until that 4×1 was out of the way. Waking up that morning, driving on the team bus to the meet, arriving at the stadium, all the way through to the end of the 4×1, her hurdle focus was distracted. And lack of focus leads to lack of confidence, which hinders performance. In a technical event like the hurdles, focus and confidence are paramount.
If you are a coach reading this article, please consider how fragile the confidence of a hurdler can be if he or she cannot give his or her full attention to the hurdles. My experience has been that hurdlers will do whatever the team needs from them as long as they know that their individual needs are being taken into account.
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