A Simple Trust

Everything it is what it is. Yet everything is so much more than what it appears to be.

The same can be said for people. People are worlds. Universes. With layers upon layers of complexity.

To everything in life there is a rhythm. Life is a constant movement, an endless river flowing into an endless sea. An endless cycle of birth falling into death rising into rebirth falling back into death rising back into rebirth. It never ends. It never began.

To live wisely is to perceive this eternal rhythm, to harmonize with it, to become one with it. This is what being a hurdler has taught me.

[am4show not_have=’g5;’]

[/am4show][am4guest]

[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]

When I first started hurdling as a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore, hurdling was just something to do in the spring. A way to escape the drudgery of playing basketball all twelve months of the year. It was fun, and I was pretty good.

By junior year, when being a scrub on the basketball team had become unbearable, hurdling became an escape into a new life – as an athlete who could be taken seriously. I vowed to devote myself to mastering this craft, to finding out how good I could be. I quit the basketball team. No bench in track. I’d always get a chance to show what I could do.

Then in November of my senior year – a month spent in The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, diagnosed with a potentially fatal blood disease called aplastic anemia, suffering the severest of side effects, battling through bouts of depression – the desire to hurdle again was my only motivation for wanting to live. To get back on that track. To feel the wind on my face as I attack the barrier. To feel that rhythm, to be that rhythm….

When you’re dying, you find out what really matters. Not what matters because people say it does, or because you think it should. When you’re dying, there are no shoulds. The real rises to the surface, and all else slips into the void.

That hospital stay was a beginning. It was the beginning of hurdling as more than a footrace. It was the beginning of hurdling as a calling, as an art form, as a means of expressing my truest self through my athletic endeavors.

I loved hurdling. I liked track practice in general because the coaches were supportive and my teammates were my best friends. But hurdle days were special. Sprinting over three hurdles, four hurdles, five hurdles, rep after rep after rep, was so thrilling, so invigorating, that I couldn’t imagine what people who didn’t hurdle did to achieve the same high.

A lot of people had criticized me when I quit the basketball team. My family, my coaches, my teammates, my classmates. I’d been playing basketball since the third grade. Why would I want to quit now? Stick with it, they said, things will work out. You can’t quit just because times are hard.

They thought I was making a huge mistake. And their logic made sense. But I’d lost my love for basketball. Practices were too long, the coaches yelled too much, and the game itself had grown too complicated. Plus, nothing in basketball compared to the feeling of running over a flight of hurdles. That was the part I couldn’t make anyone else understand.

Through hurdling, I rediscovered what it meant to be a kid again, to do what I did for the pure enjoyment of it, not because I didn’t want to disappoint my dad, not because I wanted to prove something to my coaches, not because I was desperate to beat out my teammates for playing time.

I loved the intellectual challenge that hurdling presented. On hurdle days, my mind was fully engaged. Figuring out how to clear the hurdles more efficiently was fun in the same way that solving crossword puzzles and crypto-quotes in the newspapers was fun. Between reps, I’d decide what I needed to work on for the next rep. Lead leg, trail leg, lead arm, trail arm, lean, hips. Prior to each rep, I’d remind myself of something specific regarding my technique , and I’d focus on that one thing. Usually, after several frustrating reps, the thing I was working on would suddenly “click,” and I’d say to myself, Okay, that’s how it’s supposed to feel! Correcting a technical flaw in practice was more gratifying than winning races.

In my last high school race, I first encountered the spiritual dimension of being a hurdler. It was May of 1984. Six months earlier I had been dying of a disease that had appeared from out of the blue and blown through my life like a tornado. Now here I was, after nothing short of a miraculous recovery, not only healthy, not only competing, but vying for a conference championship.

I felt nervous as I paced back and forth in my lane prior to the race. I wanted to win so badly. I wanted the fairytale ending to my fairytale story. I wanted to cross the finish line and raise my arms in victory. I wanted to be the aplastic anemia survivor who came back to win a conference title.

Right before the race started, standing in front of my starting blocks, gazing down my lane of hurdles, a strange calm washed over me. Instead of blocking out my surroundings and concentrating on my lane, I took in all that appeared in my peripheral vision. The opponents to the left and right of me, the coaches, teammates, and fans in the bleachers, the athletes warming up in the infield. It was all part of the landscape, part of the story.

Usually, before races, I would give myself one or two things to focus on, the same as I would prior to practice reps. In the prelims, my trail leg had been a bit lazy, causing me to hit a few hurdles. I was planning to focus on whipping that trail leg to the front, not letting it lag.

But when the calm washed over me, the idea of giving myself instructions seemed silly. All I had to do, I realized, was run my race. I didn’t need to think about anything.

When the gun went off, I took the first step and kept running. The hurdles didn’t feel like obstacles. Instead, they were part of the rhythm. Through practice, I’d developed the habit of extending my leg every fourth step. In the race, it just happened naturally. There was no effort, no force, no expenditure of energy. I ran over the hurdles the same as I ran between them. That’s how it felt.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I had hit upon something very profound, something that lies at the core of being a hurdler. The union of the physical with the spiritual, the marriage of body and soul. Hurdling, I would later come to understand, is an endeavor of the three-part self – body, mind, and soul. The body performs the movements, the mind continually gains and applies more knowledge so that the body can master the movements, and once the mind has done its work, it can then move out of the way and put total trust in the body. When the mind is still, when the mind is silent, that is when a spiritual experience occurs – a feeling so thrilling, yet so peaceful, that it creates a shift upward in one’s perception of reality. The desire to experience that feeling again becomes the primary motivation to continue training and competing.

But in my case, I didn’t realize what was happening. I thought that my desire to continue hurdling in college was based on my belief that I could still be great, that I could one day become an Olympian. Although my personal best in the 110 hurdles in high school was only 14.7 hand-timed, and although I wouldn’t be getting any scholarship money to compete at the next level, I told myself that if I hadn’t gotten sick and missed so much time, I would’ve run much faster. I probably could’ve even run under 14.0, which would’ve put me among the best high school hurdlers in the country. In college I’d get a chance to prove it. One day I’d be on television and I’d be telling my story about how I went from nearly dying of aplastic anemia to becoming one of the greatest hurdlers in the world.

I needed to be great to validate the fact that I was still alive. I didn’t survive a life-threatening illness to be pretty good. I couldn’t be mediocre and still call myself a hurdler That was why I struggled when I started losing on a regular basis in college. Not only was I not the best in the conference, but  I wasn’t even the best on my team. Even at a Division III school, I was nowhere close to qualifying for nationals. The hurdles were three inches higher than they had been in high school, and for a 5-11 guy like me, those three inches made all the difference in the world.

Losing took its toll on me. It made me hate my life. It made me hate myself. I felt like hurdlers who beat me were somehow better people than me. They beat me because they wanted it more, because they trained harder, because they did the little things that I neglected to do. By taking losing so personally, I was sucking all the joy out of hurdling.

The constant losing forced me to re-evaluate my relationship with the hurdles. It forced me to focus on learning the art form, on finding that feeling again. My sophomore year, I bought a copy of The Hurdler’s Bible by hurdle guru Wilbur Ross and The Track & Field Omnibook by coach Ken Doherty. I read both religiously and especially soaked up the sections on my hurdling hero, world record holder Renaldo Nehemiah. Since I didn’t have a hurdle coach, I started planning my own hurdle workouts based on the ones I found in these pages. In one interview, Nehemiah talked about the feeling of his legs being in the sprint motion, even over the hurdles. He said that once he felt that feeling during a race, that’s when he became a hurdler. It sounded exactly like the feeling I had experienced at the end of my high school career. But I had yet to feel it over the higher, 42-inch hurdles.

I began to make another connection: this “feeling,” for lack of a better term, was what being a hurdler was really all about. Even if I didn’t have the physical gifts necessary to be a champion, I could still feel like one if I could correct the flaws in my technique and break free of the habit of hitting so many hurdles in races. Being a hurdler, I gradually came to understand, was not a matter of winning, but a matter of dedicating myself to mastering the art form. So that’s what I set out to do.

The key was my trail leg. In high school, over the lower hurdles, I could get away with a lazy trail leg. But over these 42-inch obstacles that were as high as my waist, there was no margin for error. In practice and in races, I was clobbering hurdles with the foot, ankle, and knee of my trail leg. In my sophomore year,  I vowed to solve  this problem. I didn’t have a hurdle coach, so I experimented extensively on my own. I tried various alterations to my technique, and whenever something felt faster, I stuck with it and tried to duplicate it.

My experimentations eventually led me to the realization that the key to the trail leg was timing. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t whipping it to the front,  but that I was whipping it to the front too late. My hips would already be twisted, and then I’d try to bring the trail leg around, but the twist in the hips caused the trail leg to be too flat, too low.

In one particular rep during an indoor hurdle workout in January of my sophomore year, I hit upon a breakthrough. As  soon as I felt that my hips were about to twist, I whipped the trail leg forward. To my delight, my hips ended up not twisting, and the knee of the trail leg therefore didn’t flatten out. I didn’t hit the hurdle, and I maintained speed and forward momentum through the hurdle!

It felt so fluid, it felt so easy. It felt so fun. I knew now that all I had to do was duplicate the feeling. That’s what Coach Poquette – Nehemiah’s coach – had emphasized in the articles I’d read about him. Once you know the feeling, it doesn’t take long for your body to internalize it. Then, you don’t have to think about all the technical aspects. You can just focus on duplicating the feeling, and you can trust that the technical aspects will fall into place.

With each rep, that’s what I did. Hurdling over 42’s became easier. My confidence soared. I knew I could negotiate these barriers without sacrificing speed and rhythm, not to mention my knee and ankle.

As a result, my times dropped. I went from being the fourth-best hurdler on our team (out of four) my freshman year to being the best hurdler on our team as a sophomore. I was making the finals in every meet, and even finishing in the top three in some of them.

The joy of being a hurdler returned. I felt like a true athlete, a true artist, and I was beginning to understand that those two words were synonymous. I had to approach the hurdles the same way an artist approached his craft: with a sense of wonder and creativity, always open to new discoveries, new insights.

There was no YouTube back then, no internet, no livestreams of races from across the globe. So my hurdling education came from books, from subscribing to Track & Field News and gobbling up the hurdle-related articles, from watching how my opponents warmed up, from observing the technique of hurdlers who were in heats before and after mine, from exchanging ideas with my teammates.

In this manner, hurdling gradually became my way of connecting with myself, and connecting with others. I began to embrace the essential life lessons that hurdling taught: when facing a tough obstacle, be in attack mode; when you fall down, get back up and finish what you started; when a task seems impossible, trust that you’ll be able to figure out how to tackle it; don’t grow anxious worrying about the big picture, but instead focus on clearing the hurdle in front of you.

As I continued to finish out my collegiate career, then moved into coaching at the high school level a few years later, I grew to understand that hurdling, that being a hurdler, was making me a better person. A more self-aware person. A more compassionate person. A more centered person.

I can remember two separate conversations I had in college, one with a female friend who was an artist, and one with a male friend who was a wrestler. In both conversations, it became clear to me that the life lessons I was learning through hurdling were essentially the same life lessons they were learning through their chosen endeavors. The phrasings differed, but the lessons were essentially the same. That’s when I began to grasp that while hurdling was my thing, everybody had a thing. Everybody had a lens through which they viewed the world. Everybody had a passion that stood at the core of their identity.

Later in life, when I started teaching and coaching, I would look for that “thing” in the students and athletes with whom I interacted on a daily basis. Instead of trying to steer every kid toward running the hurdles, I would encourage them to find something they were good at, something they enjoyed, and pursue it. Similarly, I didn’t take it personally when students in my classes didn’t like to read. Find a subject you do like, I’d tell them, and pursue it as far as it will take you.

In this manner, I developed a reputation as a teacher/coach who could relate to everyone. And the truth was, I could, because the hurdles had taught me how to.

In my early years as a coach, I was more a training partner than a coach. I did all the sprint and hurdle workouts that I designed for my athletes. I ran side by side with them in the sprint workouts, and my hurdlers and I shared a lane for the hurdle workouts. Sometimes, when I was getting my hurdlers ready for big races, I’d be their competition when I had them practice their start. Back then, the most fun part of being a coach was regular access to a track and regular access to hurdles. I could hurdle whenever I wanted to.

Even though I did enter myself in a few open meets here and there, hurdling for me was no longer about competing. It was about doing something I loved and being creative while doing it. Whenever I had an idea for a new workout, or for a variation on an old one, I’d try it out on myself first before bringing it to my athletes. Nothing fascinated me more than the fact that every time I stepped on that track to hurdle, I learned something new about the race that I hadn’t previously considered. In the middle of workouts, new realizations would come to me as my body made its own subtle adjustments based on what I was trying to get it to do.

My favorite day to hurdle was Sunday. We didn’t have team practice on Sunday, and most weekend meets were Friday and Saturday. Sunday was always a day off, which meant I could go to the track and hurdle by myself. My favorite workout, the quick-step workout, was a variation of a workout Nehemiah used to do back in the day. With the quick-step workout, I set up as many as ten hurdles, eight yards apart, for a quick-three step rhythm in between. After each rep, I’d jog back to the starting line and go again. Generally I’d divide the workout into three sets, and the most I did in one workout was three sets of eight reps, for a total of 240 hurdles in one session.

Man that workout was so much fun. I’d be exhausted by the end, but the high I felt from all that hurdling would last the next two days. After those workouts, I’d just be in awe of life, in awe of existence. I felt so in tune with nature, so in tune with myself.

By my mid-thirties, all that hurdling had taken its toll on my lower legs. I was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my right tibia, and probably, based on the pain I felt, I also had one in my left tibia (but I never got that one x-rayed). The pain was so severe that I couldn’t do basic warm-up drills without paying a price. Eventually, I transitioned to distance running, but not without putting up a fight that lasted about three years. I resented the fact that my body was betraying me, that it wasn’t allowing me to do the one thing I loved to do, the one thing that I relied upon to relieve stress, to keep me in shape, to help me make sense of my life, to help me make sense of all the madness that went on in this crazy world.

I was also facing a major identity crisis. If I couldn’t hurdle, what would I do? If I wasn’t a hurdler, who was I?

Oddly enough though, not being able to hurdle made me a better coach. I could no longer demonstrate the concepts I was explaining, so I had to explain them more clearly. I had to rely on my more experienced athletes to teach the younger ones through example. I had to gear workouts toward my athletes’ preferences and abilities instead of gearing them toward my own preferences. I had to develop a keener eye. When I was hurdling alongside  my athletes, I could just sense what they were doing wrong. But now I had to really look, and I developed an eye that to this day I trust totally. I don’t need video footage or touchdown times to inform of what the flaw is that an athlete needs to fix. I can see it, because I learned to train my eye to look for it.

Also, what I eventually came to realize was, not being a hurdler on the track did not mean not being a hurdler. My definition of what it meant to be a hurdler continued to expand. Years before, during my collegiate career, when people my age were racing in the Olympics, I had to let go of the idea that being a hurdler meant being a great hurdler. I learned to see that anyone who devoted himself to being the best hurdler he could be was indeed a hurdler, regardless of talent level, regardless of how much he has or has not accomplished.

Then, when my collegiate career, and thus my competitive career, ended, I told myself that I was no longer a hurdler, that that phase of my life had come to an end. But then I wound up coaching, and I continued to train as a hurdler just for the sheer joy of it. That’s when I realized that being a hurdler not only didn’t have anything to do with one’s accomplishments, but really didn’t have anything to do with competing at all. As long as I still hurdled, even if it was only in practice, I was still a hurdler. As long as I was still gaining more knowledge about the event, and passing along that knowledge to others, I was still a hurdler.

Finally, when I stopped clearing hurdles altogether, transformed myself into a distance runner, and competed in 5K’s, 10K’s, half-marathons and even a couple of marathons, I told myself that my hurdler’s identity was a thing of the past. I was still an athlete, but no longer a hurdler. I had channeled the same energy into nothing new.

But even that wasn’t true. On my distant runs, I would mimic the hurdle motion when stepping over twigs and rocks and puddles and dog poop. When running uphill, I would flash back to my hurdling days, when I would lead the way on uphill sprints. Of all the workouts that the sprinters did with the sprinters and quarter-milers, the only workout I would dominate would be the uphill sprints. My mindset always was, attack the hill the same as when attacking a hurdle. So I did the same thing on my distance runs. Sometimes, when I’d go on runs with the cross country coach at my school, he’d explain to me that it’s actually best to slow down when running uphill in order to keep a steady heart rate and not exert too much energy. Work too hard on the hills, he explained, and you’ll wear down too quickly.

My attitude was, bump that. I’m a hurdler. Hurdlers don’t slow down at hills; we speed up. We don’t approach obstacles tentatively;  we attack them aggressively.

And I refused to change my ways, though I knew his logic was perfectly sound. I couldn’t. The hurdler in me wouldn’t allow it.

One of the most important life lessons I learned from my competitive hurdling days was to clear one hurdle at a time. I learned this lesson in the moments leading up to my very first race over the 110 meter hurdles as a high school sophomore. When I stood in front of my starting blocks and saw that lane of ten hurdles staring me in the face, I froze. In practice, I had gone over four hurdles at a time, maybe five. And I could always go back and try again if I messed up. But now there were ten. And there would be no do-overs. When that gun went off, I’d have one shot to get it right.

I walked over to where my coach was standing and said, “Uh, coach, I don’t think I’m ready to run the 110’s today.” I had run the 300 meter hurdles in a couple meets up to that point. Although longer and therefore more tiring, that race was safer because there was plenty of space between the hurdles, and therefore a greater margin for error.

My coach, a cigar-chomping, gray-haired man in his late 60’s, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about all ten, Steve. Clear the one in front of you.”

That’s what I’ve been doing for the rest of my life. When I have a stack of thirty papers to grade in one weekend, I don’t think about all thirty. I grade the one in front of me. Because I can only grade one at a time. My whole approach to life reflects my coach’s lesson. I don’t plan for my future, I don’t plan ahead when it comes to anything. I clear the hurdle in front of me. I’ve learned not only to trust the moment, but to trust myself in the moment. That’s what a hurdler has to do.

The other grand life lesson I’ve learned from the hurdles is to get back up when I fall. I fell in my first ever hurdle race, over the 300 meter distance. I scraped my elbows and knees and hip, but I got back up and finished the race. My coach walked up to me after the race, put his arm around me and said, “all hurdlers fall, the good ones get back up, and you got back up.”

And that’s how I’ve been ever since. The hurdler’s resolve is in me. Though quiet and “laid-back” on the outside, I have an inner determination to come out fighting on the other side of hard times. Four years ago, a beloved former athlete of mine committed suicide shortly after spending time in war-torn Afghanistan, working for the DEA. I was devastated by the loss, and blamed myself for not seeing the warning signs that seemed so obvious after the fact.

Then, a year later, I lost my job of nineteen years – the only job I’d ever had out of graduate school – because I got too personally involved in trying to help a student who was suffering from severe depression. In trying to prevent another potential suicide, in my desire to not allow another calamity to occur on my watch, I caused my own demise.

In the eighteen months that passed before I found another job, there were times when I didn’t know if I’d ever return to the teaching profession, or if I was doomed for life. But the hurdler in me wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t stop trying. I had to get back up and finish the race. Ultimately, I did find another position, and I’m back doing what I do best. If it wasn’t for the hurdles, if it weren’t for the fact that I am a hurdler, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to rise out of the depths of despair that I had entered.

Ask me what the hurdles mean to me, and I will tell you, everything. The hurdles are my religion. Some people believe in God, or Allah, or Yahweh, or in multiple gods. Some people believe in money, or power, or control. I believe in the hurdles. And when I use the word “believe,” I’m not referring to a blind faith, to a belief “system” that was passed on to me through family or through cultural conditioning. I’m referring to a trust. A simple trust. I trust the hurdles. To guide me, to strengthen me, to fill my life with a deep, rich joy.

The hurdles are a doorway to the divine – the divine within me, the divine that exists in every human being, the divine that exists throughout the universe.

The hurdles remind me that my body is a spiritual vessel, that life is music, and I am here to dance.

[/am4show]