Trusting the Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” -Albert Einstein

As coaches and as athletes, we rely upon knowledge to give us direction. We want to know what are the latest training methods, what are the latest technical innovations, what do the experts recommend regarding weight training, diet, etc. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the more you know, the more you grow.

That’s why the above quote from brilliant scientist Albert Einstein seems so contradictory, especially when considering that Einstein is probably the single most recognized person to the modern Western mind as someone who embodies the intelligence that comes with knowledge. In our culture, to be an “Einstein” is to be very smart. So why would he say such a thing?

My answer would be that Einstein recognized the limits of knowledge – that it can lead you to the door of genuine discovery, but it cannot open the door. The quote is not saying that knowledge isn’t important. Knowledge is important. Without knowledge you have no base from which to start. If you’re a writer and you have no knowledge of basic grammar and punctuation rules, then you’re going to break those rules all the time and your writing will look a mess. But if you know all the rules and you have mastered them, now you have the freedom to break those rules creatively when you feel the need to, and the breaking of the rules will actually enhance your writing as opposed to weakening it. In the case of Einstein, if he hadn’t familiarized himself with the principles of Newtonian physics, he wouldn’t have been able to transcend them with the theory of relativity. If he had only mastered Newtonian physics and stopped there, he would have been a Newton clone, and a very well-respected physics professor at a prestigious university, but none of us would’ve ever heard of him.

And that goes for any endeavor. A musician, an artist, a carpenter, a landscaper, a teacher, a surgeon. Whatever. You have to know the rules before you can break the rules. You have to know the standards before you can set your own.

Those who have transcended knowledge and entered the realm of the imagination are the ones who create new standards. A Jimi Hendrix, a Vincent Van Gogh, a Renaldo Nehemiah or Edwin Moses. The point of Einstein’s quote, as I interpret it, is that to merely go with what you already know will lead to the same old results. And in a world of endless possibility, why not explore the unknown. And the logical mind is neither capable nor willing to explore the unknown. Only the imagination is.

For hurdlers, the battleground for this push-and-pull between knowledge and imagination, between the mind’s accumulated knowledge and the body’s intuitive desire to push beyond the boundaries of the known, is the practice track.

The mind sticks to the tried and true. The body responds to feelings. When there is conflict between the two, we most often fall back on the wisdom of the mind. If you think of the seven-stepping issue for example, the mind’s instant reaction is to say, “No, why try something new when the old way is working? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” In a lot of cases, the mind is right. Don’t mess with a good thing. But what happens if your body is constantly telling you that it wants to try seven-stepping, that it feels too crowded eight-stepping, that it can’t gather any speed eight-stepping? That’s when the mind has to relinquish control. That’s when knowledge gets in the way, becomes an impediment to growth. Sometimes you have to trust the body, because the body knows on a more primal level. It’s knowledge is instinctive; it isn’t based on thoughts or information gained from clinics or on conclusions reached through reasoned logic. The body has no agenda, it has no fear of what others will think, of what others might say. Discovery happens in the moment; it happens to you. It cannot be pre-planned or pre-scripted.

That’s why, when it comes to hurdle workouts in particular, I’m always reading my athletes’ body language, trying to minimize the amount of verbal communication that takes place. I’ll give feedback, but I’m always telling them what to feel for, as opposed to just telling them what to do. Once an athlete learns to trust what he or she feels, then he or she can take that trust into a race. The body can become the master, and the mind can become the servant.

I had a boy who was a ninth-grader last year, who began seven-stepping as an eighth-grader. And it wasn’t because I was in mad-scientist mode trying to prove a point. It happened quite organically. He was unusually tall for his age – about 6’2″, with very long legs and a gangly frame. When I started him out on the 39’s, I set up three hurdles and had him approach the first hurdle from a standing start. He kept running up to the hurdle and stopping. I thought he was afraid of the higher height, because he had been running over 33’s in age-group track the previous summer. But I noted that he wasn’t really looking scared, so something else had to be the problem. Against my own rational thinking, I had to admit to myself that it looked like he was getting too close to the first hurdle. And he was too young and naive to know that being able to seven-step was anything special, so I said to him, “Switch your feet at the start, and let’s see how that works.”

Sure enough, he seven-stepped with ease. In another workout later in the week we put the blocks down and tried it again, and he similarly had little trouble. He’s been seven-stepping ever since. Had I allowed knowledge to get in the way, I would have never had him switch his feet; I would’ve forced him to make the eight-step approach work, and would have blamed him if it hadn’t. Instead, I observed what was happening naturally, and adapted to it. Honestly, not to get side-tracked on the seven-step thing too much, but I feel that the main reason it’s hard for a lot of hurdlers to seven-step is because they’ve been eight-stepping for so long, not because seven-stepping is inherently drastically more difficult.

I can say with certainty that any success I’ve had a coach has been more a result of my imagination and my willingness to adapt to whatever the moment brings than of my intellectual knowledge. I know what I know, and I’m able to communicate my knowledge effectively to my athletes, but there are a lot of things I don’t know. People have told me I’m one of the best hurdle coaches around. And while I appreciate such a compliment, I’m not sure what it means. If “best” equals most knowledgeable, that’s not me. For the most part, I’m an artist, a dreamer, a visionary. Get me in a conversation about the scientific aspects of hurdling and I can follow it so far before I need to ask you to slow down. But when an idea comes to me, I’ll try it. Or I’ll explain it to an athlete whom I feel will be capable of making sense of it better than I can. A lot of times, things don’t make sense in words, but make sense on the track. And I have found that because I am willing to trust my imagination, my athletes are willing to trust theirs. They come up with ideas for drills, for changes in the warm-up, for tweaks in their technique. And I have found that even the “mistakes,” – the things that don’t work, often lead to new discoveries that we wouldn’t have stumbled upon otherwise.

One time this past spring I set up a workout for one of my female hurdlers to do some starts over the first four hurdles, with the hurdles moved in a foot. I placed the hurdles on the track, but forgot to raise them to race height. They were at 30 inches. The girl thought that I kept them at that height intentionally. A little background: this girl, a ninth-grader, always struggled to 3-step in practice, although she 3-stepped fairly consistently in meets, with the adrenaline pumping. Usually it’s the other way around – hurdlers can do it in practice but get too nervous in meets.  Neither of us could figure out what the problem was, but both of us agreed that her sub-par practices were keeping her from progressing more in races. So anyway, she did three reps over the four hurdles and she looked great, 3-stepping with ease. I was like, “Wow, you’re doing awesome today. What’d you have for lunch?” She looked at me and said, “The hurdles are lower, Coach.”

From that day on, we lowered the hurdles for her early reps every practice. We found that it helped her to focus on her speed, on being fast between the hurdles, and staying aggressive. Then, later in the workout we’d raise up to race height and the speed would carry over and it was hard to tell the hurdles had been raised.

Now this is what I mean about not letting the mind get in the way. And, I guess, not letting the ego get in the way. Since I hadn’t thought of lowering the hurdles, my initial reaction was to hurry and raise them back up. The first thing my mind thought when the girl pointed out to me that the hurdles were lower was that I had been fooling myself by believing she had improved. No, she hadn’t improved. She just looked better because the hurdles were lower. But then I realized that we had stumbled onto the exact solution for her problem, so I went with it. And in subsequent workouts, whenever she felt like she was losing her speed and aggressiveness, she would lower the hurdles herself for a rep or two, then raise them back up. You understand what I’m saying? My mind didn’t come up with this idea. We didn’t plan out this strategy.

 

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In these times, when so much information is available to us at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen, the idea of relying on dreams or intuitive insights as sources of understanding or means of problem-solving has become rather foreign to most of us. But anyone who takes an artistic approach to life knows that there is no such thing as “just” a dream and no such thing as “just” a hunch.

Weirdo that I am, I’ve had several dreams that involve hurdling. A couple have given me ideas for workouts, there was one that helped me figure out how to help an athlete of mine whose arms swung across his body, and there were two dreams that involved 2004 Olympic champion Liu Xiang. Let me talk about those.

First, let me state that, to this day, I consider Liu Xiang the greatest technical master of the hurdles I’ve ever seen. I don’t care if his world record in 2006 was broken by Dayron Robles in 2008, then shattered by Aries Merritt in 2012. I don’t care if his career has been crippled by injuries since 2006. I’d rather watch a broke-down, busted-ankles Liu Xiang run the hurdles than just about anybody else because I know for a fact I’m going to learn something that had never before occurred to me.

So in the first of the two dreams, which I had back in January of 2008, I walk into a room that’s sort of a commons area or lobby, maybe a den, with carpeted floors, couches, and a TV in the corner. I recognize the place as Liu Xiang’s training headquarters, and I think to myself how cool it would be to meet Liu in person. Lo and behold, as soon as I walk into the room, I see Liu sitting on a couch by himself, looking out the window. Kind of bored, maybe waiting for someone to show up. I walk over to him and introduce myself, and we immediately start talking about hurdles.

I don’t remember any actual words being spoken, but either he can speak English or I can speak Chinese, because we have no problem communicating with each other. I am asking him questions about his technique, and he is responding. He seems excited to have somebody to talk to about this stuff.

Suddenly Liu is no longer sitting on the couch, but is standing up showing me something about his technique. I’m standing directly in front of him, about ten feet away, and he motions to me to come closer. I do, and he motions to me to come even closer. I do, until I’m standing right in front of him. Then he proceeds to mimic the hurdle motion – his arms and legs are driving up and down in a wild but controlled rhythm, but he’s not touching me! I can’t believe that he is able to do his full range of hurdle motion, with me standing virtually nose-to-nose with him, and he’s not even touching me. That’s where the dream ends.

The dream lasted all of twenty seconds, but when I woke up from it, I knew that it was big.

At that point in my coaching career, I was feeling edgy, like I had run out of ideas. I felt like I had maxed out in terms of what my athletes could achieve using the traditional style that emphasized a quick lead leg snap-down and a trail leg that catches up by whipping to the front. I’d been feeling that there was something about that style that lacked fluidity because of the kick of the lead leg, the pause on top, then the descent. I remembered seeing video of Jack Pierce from the early-mid 1990s and noticing that he was doing something different than everybody else, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was.

Then this dream came along.

The first part of the dream shows me as a wanderer on a quest, searching for something that I cannot yet define. But I’ll know what it is once I find it. Liu’s enthusiastic reaction to my line of questioning symbolizes the basic spiritual principle that that which you are looking for is also looking for you. You don’t “find” it, but open yourself to it so that it can find you. That’s how the imagination works. When thinking back to the very beginning of the dream, it seems as if Liu was sitting there waiting for me to come. Like he’d been expecting me.

In the coming days and weeks, as I meditated upon the dream, I found within it a treasure trove of practical information that I could use.

Firstly, Liu was trying to show me that most of the hurdle motion has to take place before getting to the hurdle. This was not something I didn’t know already, but it was something I had never emphasized in my coaching. Like a lot of coaches, I believed in letting the lead leg get very long as it extended past the hurdle before snapping it down. But Liu’s air-hurdling showed me that the more you can hurdle in front of the hurdle, the faster you’ll run. The more you hurdle on top of the hurdle and beyond the hurdle, the slower you’ll run. By the time you get on top of the hurdle, you should already be running again.

Secondly, Liu was showing me that “jump” is not the four-letter word I had always assumed it to be, and that I had always preached it to be. “Hurdler’s don’t jump” was a mantra of mine. “It’s an elongated sprinting stride.” But in this dream, as I was standing directly in front of him, Liu was definitely jumping. He was getting up in the air. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. When you’re sprinting at full speed and you’re barely lifting your feet off the ground, then suddenly you have a 42-inch barrier to clear, you must jump to get up over it. It’s not a subtle motion. It’s a very forceful, powerful, even violent motion. But it looks fluid. Because the hips are driving forward. So it’s not a jump up, not a vertical jump, but a jump forward, to the other side of the hurdle. Hurdlers who don’t jump into hurdling position have to compensate by tilting to the lead-leg side, or they just have to be okay with hitting a lot of hurdles and just powering through them.

Thirdly, with Liu’s air-hurdling, both legs seemed to stay in running position throughout the entire motion. As I stood in front of him, all I saw coming at me was knees, knees, knees. Up to that point, I had always taught the importance of opening the groin of the trail leg. I didn’t mind if the knee hung below the crossbar before the leg whipped to the front, and I didn’t mind if the knee opened up with the groin. But this dream was informing me that my trail leg approach was all wrong. As with the lead leg, the knee of the trail leg must rise up, above the crossbar, and that that motion must begin as soon as the foot of the trail leg leaves the ground. There’s no pause then whip. No. It’s one continuous motion. And when the knee of the trail leg rises, it’s easy to get it to the front by the time the lead leg lands. Not because it’s moving faster, but because it has a shorter distance to travel. So the only difference between the lead leg and trail leg is that the groin of the trail leg has to open up. But other than that, they look the same. They both run over the hurdle.

Fourthly, besides the knees coming at me, his arms were in a continual whirling cycle motion that seemed frenzied and out of control, except the movements were very precise. I could tell that the legs and arms were perfectly synchronized, and that the arms were leading the way. The faster the arms moved, the faster the legs moved, not vice versa. The arms were not pausing at all, neither on the way up nor on the way down.

The fifth thing I learned from that dream was that hurdling is a joy, and that, under no circumstances, should I ever forget that it’s a joy. Seeing Liu jump up and down in front of me like that, with an expression of intense but blissful concentration on his face, I felt all the joy that I had ever felt when hurdling. And I felt that I was being reminded of the fact that if I lose the joy, I lose everything, no matter what I gain.

All that from a 20-second dream.

In the second Liu Xiang dream, in July of 2011, I’m sitting in the bleachers prior to a big race that includes Xiang, Robles, and David Oliver. I’m sitting with one of my high school athletes, and we’re both amped up, ready to see something big happen out here on this track.

The gun goes off and there’s a false start. Back then the first false start was charged on the field, so no one was disqualified. But looking down at the track I can see that Liu is really angry. It seems he thinks that whoever false-started did so intentionally, to make the other athletes freeze in the blocks on the next gun. I can sort of read his mind, and I feel that he’s thinking, damn, I can break the world record today. I know I can break the world record today. He’s goes off by himself down this little lane just beside the track to do some more quick warm-ups.

He gets a couple reps in of a drill where he lifts his lead leg real low off the ground, and then pulls it back behind his hips with force. He believes that if he can master this part of the hurdling motion, he can break the world record. He does it with no hurdles, just running down this lane. It’s on a slight downhill. He raises his leg slowly, and lowly, and then pulls back with force, pulls back with force. With each pull-back, he lands on the ball of his foot and springs forward.

For some reason, I don’t see the actual race. The dream ends with me looking up at the scoreboard to discover that Liu smashed the world record in a wind-legal 12.49. I’m excited, but not entirely surprised. I had seen him doing that drill, so I knew what was coming.

That drill is one that I’ve since used for several athletes who don’t finish their stride at the bottom. Also, that dream took me all the way out of snap-down mode, to the point where I have removed it from my coaching vocabulary. Now it’s all about cycling. The sprinting stride is a cycle, so the hurdling stride should be a cycle. Which means, among other things, finish at the bottom.

So yes, when a hurdling dream comes to me, I pay attention. I mean, what’s the point of watching videos, of attending clinics, of picking other coaches’ brains, if I’m going to ignore my own dreams?

 

***

 

Will there ever be an athlete who takes six steps to the first hurdle? Will there ever be a hurdler who can take two steps between the hurdles, at least for a hurdle or two? Will the prototypical hurdler of the future have the body of an NBA forward? 6’8″, 220? If so, will seven-stepping and two-stepping become commonplace?

The imagination asks questions. It wonders. And if the logical mind and the imagination are in harmony with each other, they move together toward fulfillment of the grand visions that those questions inspire. As long as you don’t say, “no, that’s impossible,” you make it possible. The very openness of your mind makes it possible. Greatness recognizes no boundaries.

The greatest example of imagination leading to fruition that stands out in my mind is that of Kevin Young’s Olympic final in 1992 in Barcelona, when he ran 46.78 – the only sub-47.00 400m hurdle race in history, to this very day. Young, in that race, 12-stepped two hurdles on the backstretch. In previous races, he had felt crowded 13-stepping on the backstretch. So he listened to his body and followed its lead. He didn’t limit himself. He didn’t tell himself what he couldn’t do. Kim Batten’s world championship race in 1995 also comes to mind. She had a dream the night before the final that she had broken the world record, then she went out there the next day and broke the world record.

That is the power of imagination. That is the power of dreams.