Some Thoughts on 400 Hurdle Off-Season Training
Let me start this article by saying that even though I like to create and innovate when it comes to hurdling styles and training ideas, I’m still old school in a lot of ways. When I was a young hurdler in high school, the norm was to either run cross country in the fall, or to do some distance running on one’s own to build a base. Track workouts didn’t really start in the winter, and even though we had an indoor season, we called it winter track, not indoor track, because our practices took place outside unless there was snow on the ground, and the purpose of the indoor season was primarily to prepare for the outdoor season.
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These days, the indoor season has a full schedule that begins in December and ends in March, overlapping with the start of the outdoor season. There are many prestigious meets throughout January and February that the best high school athletes can attend, time and money permitting. This means less time to train, less time to address technical flaws, more pressure to perform, less time for a coach to teach, less time for an athlete to learn.
But I don’t want to get into all that right now. For this article, I want to focus on the 400 hurdler, who has no specialty event to compete in during the indoor season, and who therefore actually can train for the outdoor season. The question I want to address in this article has to do with the age-old question of how training for the event should be approached. Is the old school model of building a cardio base still an effective way to train in the off-season, or does that type of running lead to bad running form? Should 400 hurdlers train like sprinters? Middle-distance runners? What types of workouts should they be doing in the winter months? What events should they compete in during the indoor season? Do they even need to compete at all in the indoor season?
The reason this question is all the more relevant has to do with the downturn we’ve seen in recent years, in the men’s event in particular. Honestly, it’s not a hyped event. In 2014, no one broke 48 seconds, and in 2015, only Nicholas Bett of Kenya broke the mark, running 47.79 to win the World Championships gold medal. In past years, and past decades for that matter, breaking 48.00 was considered pretty routine for the world’s best. Starting with John Aki Bua, then Edwin Moses, the best hurdlers in the world usually ran well under 48. I can’t think of any other event experiencing such a fall-off in the performance level of the top athletes. To think that guys who ran 30 years ago (Moses, Danny Harris, Andre Phillips, Harald Schmid) would most likely dominate modern hurdlers is difficult to fathom.
In other events, old schoolers would have to use the “all things being equal” argument. All things being equal, Renaldo Nehemiah would beat David Oliver and Aries Merritt, even though Oliver and Merritt have faster pr’s. All things being equal, Carl Lewis would’ve at least given Usain Bolt a run for his money. With modern day synthetic surfaces, modern day training facilities, modern day training methods, modern day weight training, heck yeah Nehemiah would have run 12.7 or 12.6.
But for the 400 hurdles, old schoolers are clearly better. Why has the event not progressed? Why has it regressed in recent years?
This is where I’m old school. While speed, strength, and technique all matter in the long hurdles, it seems to me that endurance is the factor that has been neglected by modern 400 hurdlers. If not neglected, at least underestimated. Aki Bua and Moses placed a heavy emphasis on endurance in the off-season, and neither of them had any issues with distance running having a negative effect on their sprinting mechanics. I think that the distance base prepares the body for the rigors of the repeats on the track, and it gives you the foundation you need to run a whole race.
Most of today’s 400 hurdlers can’t run the whole race well. There are some who start off like gangbusters but then fade at the end. There are some who start off slow then make a late dash for it at the end. There are plenty who are inconsistent with their stride pattern. There’s a lot of sloppiness going on out there.
Nicholas Bett comes from a country known for its distance runners. Like Aki Bua, he tried the 110’s first but found it to be too much of a speed event. But when he made the switch to the 400 hurdles, he thrived. In an article that appeared on the IAAF website after the World Championship final, his agent was quoted as saying that “I’ve been following his training, and my feeling right now is that he could run 1:43 for 800 meters.”
Wow. That’s quite a statement. And it implies that his training involves plenty of workouts designed for 800 and 1500 meter runners. It makes me wonder if the true measure of a 400 hurdler’s potential is not his open 400 time, but his open 800 time. It makes me wonder if speed work is really as valuable for the 400 hurdler as we assume it to be.
If you use 1996 200m and 400m gold medalist Michael Johnson as an example, you could say that his 200 time was so fast because he trained as a quarter miler. So coming down to the 200 was easy because fatigue would not be a factor in the shorter race. Similarly, a 400 hurdler who trains as an 800 meter runner has the cardio base necessary to execute a race strategy for an entire race. Maybe, as coaches, when looking for our potential long hurdlers, we should look not among our sprint group, but among our middle distance group.
Getting back to my point early in the article, I feel that the 400 hurdler should train like a half-miler, with the half-milers, in the indoor season, and should compete in over-distance events – 500, 600, 800 – whatever is available. While there also needs to be days reserved for working on the start to the first hurdle and on stride pattern and technique, and while speed work should not be abandoned, I do feel that the emphasis in the indoor season should be on preparing the body for the rigorous endurance demands of the event.
That way, with the cardio base in place, with a lot of workouts consisting of over-distance repeats with short recovery periods, the 400 hurdler can enter the outdoor season ready to increase the speed and decrease the volume in workouts, and get more race-specific with the workouts.
In conclusion, my argument would be that 400 hurdlers have to make sure they’re putting enough emphasis on the endurance aspect of their event. Yes it’s a sprint, but it’s a long sprint, and to put together all phases of the race, to be able to execute a race plan and a stride pattern with consistency, you first have to have the cardio base needed to do so.
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