Interview with Stuart Anderson

Born June 1979 in Brisbane, Queensland in Australia, Stuart Anderson began hurdling at the age of 13, and went on to become the fifth-fastest 110m hurdler in Australian history, with a personal best of 13.73. During his career the 34-year-old Anderson represented Australia at the East Asian Games (where he competed against Liu Xiang), World University Games, and Goodwill Games. The Goodwill Games race in 2001 featured some of the best hurdlers in history assembled in one race, including Allen Johnson, Anier Garcia, Colin Jackson, and Mark Crear.

Coached throughout his career by sprint/hurdle guru Geoff McKinnon, Anderson has gone on to become an excellent coach himself. Anderson founded AAA Sprints & Hurdles in 2009, and now has a stable of 14 hurdlers under his wing.

While Australia may not have the level of raw talent we see in the United States, it has produced some of the sport’s best technicians, including Anderson himself and 2012 Olympic 100h champion Sally Pearson. Through the magic of modern technology, I had a chance to interview Anderson via email regarding his own career, his approach to coaching the hurdles, and his insights regarding hurdling in Australia. Enjoy!

-Steve McGill, The Hurdle Magazine

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THM: What part of Australia are you from?
Anderson: I’m from Brisbane, Queensland. It’s probably the best weather here for track and field. Definitely a favourite place for sprinters.

 

THM: When did you first begin to participate in athletics?
Anderson: I remember as a kid running a school race at about 8 and running back to my parents with all these blue ribbons. I don’t think they expected me to be a runner, but I distinctly remember watching the Seoul Olympics [in 1988] and thought, “This is it! This sport is for me!”

THM: When did you first begin to run the hurdles?
Anderson: I learned the hurdles at 13. I liked the concept of trying to minimize your time in the air. There was an art form to it that other events didn’t have. I was never the fastest but I sure did like beating the sprinters who had no rhythm!!

THM: How did you do in your first hurdle race?
Anderson: I barely remember it, so it must have been ok. I always say the best races are ones you can’t remember. It means nothing made you stop and think; nothing went too off-plan.

THM: Who and/or what was your inspiration for trying the hurdles?
Anderson: There was a big poster in my school gym of Colin Jackson. I was fascinated with it. I just couldn’t believe the body position he was in, going over this huge barrier that his legs scraped over. So impressive to a kid. Still impressive to me now.

THM: Did you do any other events besides the hurdles as a youngster? What made you decide to stick with the hurdles?
Anderson: For some reason Triple Jumpers seem to make good hurdlers. I was a good triple jumper, but some back issues convinced me to steer towards the sticks instead. I also tried Decathlon for a season. That was the hardest training of my life. I was completely exhausted at the end of that season in 2000. It must have done me good because it was the next year I PB’d in the hurdles.

THM: Explain the Australian schooling system. In the US we have elementary school (kindergarten-5^th grade), middle school (6^th grade-8^th grade), high school (9^th grade-12^th grade), then college/university.
Anderson: So here we have primary school which goes up to grade 6 (or about 11yo), then high-school (now 7 – 12) and then university. Our university system is very different. We don’t have a very strong inter university competition, so the club competition is where the focus is. Ultimately, athletes try to get on the Australian Athletics Tour which is for the top 8. They race in all the capital cities around Australia and then it ends with the Australian Championships in April.

THM: Is athletic participation in Australia school affiliated or club affiliated? Explain how the system works as an athlete moves up through the ranks.
Anderson: Athletes are usually developed through schools. The good ones will also belong to a club and coach with a squad like mine now. After school we see a big drop-off in numbers so the die-hards who still work hard at training and belong to clubs are usually the real deal and trying for qualifications to some sort of representative team or working towards National Championships.

THM: Can athletes in Australia stay with the same coach from their youth and all the way up through the professional ranks? Was that the case for you? Explain how that works.
Anderson: Yes absolutely, Sally Pearson is a good example of this. She had a club coach in her early teens who took her all the way to the Olympic Gold.
I had a great coach in Geoff McKinnon from 14 also. He was a very methodical and inquisitive coach. He had a great eye for the event and loved hurdles more than anyone I have known. We connected well though our love of the event. He taught me a great deal. In the latter years of my career I would travel overseas and try to learn as much as possible in the UK and Germany. I would come back every year with a handful of new drills and exercises I’d seen. Life was a bit harder without YouTube back then and we had to go searching for other athletes and coaches!

THM: You are one of the most technically precise hurdlers the event has ever seen. Is this technical precision typical of Australian hurdlers? (Based on what we’ve seen of Sally Pearson, that would seem to be the case).
Anderson: Thank you! I think I had one of the best flight times in the world. It had to be, because my sprinting was so bad! I had an official PB of 13.73 (although I have run a 13.60elec/13.4m but the timing failed.) but my 100m PB was only 10.86. To me, hurdlers of any level should be aiming to get to that 3.00 second conversion between 100m and 110H times. Flight times of around 0.32 or 0.33 are ideal.
Typically, Australia is not blessed with an abundance of low 10sec sprinters, so technique becomes the best way to make up time and compete on the international scene.

 

THM: How much of your development of technique was guided by a coach, and how much of it came from experimenting and studying on your own?
Anderson: I would say 50/50. One of the major things I learned from overseas and experimentation was how much more some hurdlers lean forward. This is crucial for fast lead leg movement and control through the hurdle motion.
One of the biggest changes in technique which came from my old coach who was searching for a more efficient arm action over the hurdles. He’s written a paper on the topic if you’d like a read.

http://www.kineticcontrol.com/document/Page/McKinnon%20-%20Comerford%20Hurdles%202012%20Arm%20tech%20.pdf

Editor’s Note: If the above link leads to a page full of gobbledy-goo as it did for me, copy and paste the cache’d version below into the address bar of your web browser. McKinnon’s article is long and detailed but extremely informative and worth every second of your time.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Wfe-KBwiNY8J:www.kineticcontrol.com/document/Page/McKinnon%2520-%2520Comerford%2520Hurdles%25202012%2520Arm%2520tech%2520.pdf+geoff+mckinnon+hurdles&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

THM: In your teenage years, were you a star hurdler or did it take you a while to develop?
Anderson: Not at all, in fact, I never even won an inter-school championship in 5 years. I was a late bloomer, and as the hurdles went up, it forced me into better technique and I seemed to be faster and stronger. I never made a junior representative team. I wasn’t even on the radar for funding or institute support until I was nearly 22 and qualified for the World University Games in Beijing.

THM: Was there a particular race in your formative years that convinced you that you had the ability to compete at the national (and international) level? Explain.
Anderson: I think running the 2000 Sydney Olympic trials in the newly built 110,000 seat stadium was my first season at the full height. I really surprised myself that day and ran a huge PB. I beat the national champion [Kyle Vander-Kuyp] to the 2^nd hurdle and I realized then if I worked a little harder I was actually a chance to go much further than I had ever imagined in the event.
A year later I took a huge chunk off my best and ran 13.73 at the Australian Championships. That would have been good enough to win most years but I remember that race clearly. The hurdles were coming at me so quickly I was merely reacting to these barriers coming at me. It was a strange and exciting feeling to be running almost like I was running on an out of control treadmill! That is the feeling hurdlers train their whole lives to experience.

THM: In the US, elite for the men’s 110m hurdles is considered low-13’s; what is considered elite in Australia?
Anderson: I think anyone who can break 14 seconds consistently in Australia is considered elite. That puts them in the top 15 all-time Australians. The reality is that most of the world’s hurdlers sit between, 13.8 and 14.4. To run under 13.8 you are realistically in the top 100 in the world, but to run under 13.5 you are suddenly looking at Olympic Semi or even finals potential.

THM: When was the first time you competed against Americans and other internationally, and what was that experience like?
Anderson: Osaka  2001 stands out at the East Asian Games. I raced Liu Xiang for the first time at just 16. He was incredible. Even at that age he was the most precise athlete I had seen. I ran third to him in the final in ankle deep rain. I knew I had to step it up a notch to compete at that level.

THM: Which parts of Australia are strongest in athletics, and in the hurdles in particular?
Anderson: The thing about Australia is, everywhere is good for running. Hurdles is becoming more popular in Queensland now. Sally Pearson trains at the Gold Coast which is 50min drive from Brisbane, where I am from. Those two cities are quickly becoming the home for hurdles now.
Australia has now become the place for Northern Hemisphere hurdlers to come to train and prepare early on the Australian Athletics Tour. Just next week we have David Oliver and Joel Brown racing in Sydney and Melbourne to kick off their 2014 seasons. Felix Sanchez is already here, as is Lashawn Merritt.

THM: Talk about the 2001 Goodwill Games in Brisbane. What was it like competing against that level of competition, in front of such a supportive crowd?
Anderson: The Goodwill Games was undoubtedly the highlight of my career. The concept of the Goodwill Games was fantastic. Top 8 in the world plus host nation. $100,000 to the winner and sponsorship money towards goodwill. On paper, the men’s 110m Hurdles was the fastest race ever assembled. Just about everyone in the field had won a medal at either a WC, Olympics or Commonwealth Games. Johnson, Garcia, Jackson, Trammell, Wade, Wallace, Crear, Dorrival. Incredible. 60,000 people cheering for you on your home track. I was well outclassed in that kind of field, but to me it felt like an Olympic Final. Electric.

THM: Educate us a bit on some of the most successful hurdlers Australia has produced. In the US we are only familiar with Sally Pearson, and some of us remember Debbie Flintoff-King. Can you mention names of any other prominent Australian hurdlers over the years?
Anderson: Shirley Strickland was a Gold medalist at the Olympics in the 50s. Kyle Vander-Kuyp was our most famed Aboriginal hurdler or recent years. His 13.29 is still the Australian Record. Jana Pittman was also a World Champion 400m Hurdler who recently competed at Sochi in Bobsleigh.

THM: When did you get into coaching? Were you still competing at the time? What made you realize you wanted to be a coach?
Anderson: I have always dabbled a bit in coaching throughout my running career and because I am very much a technical coach, I just love explaining aspects of hurdling. I hope I am better at coaching than I was as an athlete, but having hurdled myself, I think it helps to explain the “feel” of hurdling. That never leaves you.
When a former training partner of mine, John Burstow was looking for some assistance in qualifying for the Olympics a few years ago, I took some extra time out for him. Word got out that I was coaching and I had another talented Open male hurdler Jack Conway ask to join in. Their times dropped significantly and now they are looking at Australian team representation. From there it just grew to the biggest hurdle squad in the country.
Being a coach to me provides stability to athletes and helps them stay on the path to their long term goals. I like being in a position to help athletes see the bigger picture of their development, not just the next race or session.
This sport is brutal really. There’s no hiding from the stopwatch and some days athletes are just not going to feel great running. Coaching to me is as much about teaching the mental processes as it is physical, but having said that, injury prevention remains our first priority.

 

THM: A bio that I read on you said that you spent extensive time with elite training groups in Germany and the UK. Firstly, when did you spend time with these training groups? Also, can you provide some insights on those experiences and how they helped you to grow as an athlete/coach?
Anderson: I was lucky enough to have a few American training partners in Germany. I had gone there on a whim and finding my way throughout Europe on a very tight budget and my high school German. After racing Aubrey Herring at the Hamburg International, I was convinced to travel by train to Cologne to meet an agent Andre Thompson there who put me up. Poor Andre didn’t know who this kid was who turned up on his doorstep looking for another race and a place to sleep! He took me in and managed my race schedule. He was just starting Athletes First Sportsmanagement then from his kitchen on his laptop and had athletes from America and Africa sleeping in his house. I did a few more trips there over the years, including an indoor tour in 2003. Indoors is just amazing to us Aussies. We don’t have indoor tracks here.
My training partners were American sprinters Marcel Carter, and Leo Settle. Later I trained with hurdler Greg Richardson. These guys were amazing!
Leo could run 20-flat for the 200 and hadn’t ever lifted weights before and Greg was 5ft 9” and could run 13.37 over high hurdles. Incredible. Another level of natural talent I only wished I had.
I also worked with a great training group in Glasgow, Scotland and instantly became friends with Scottish champions, Chris Baillie and Allen Scott. Chris’s brother was Ross Baillie, former training partner of Colin Jackson, who’d died after an anaphylactic reaction to a peanut sandwich the year before. Ross Baillie was a great hurdler who had come to Australia to race with Colin, and his younger brother Chris was just as good. These guys knew hard training. They did everything I did, but they did it faster and with more aggression. They also introduced me to the importance of a strong core and their 30min abdominal sessions on the cold changeroom concrete floors were enough to make me realize I needed to improve in that area. Both guys came to train with me in 2006 in Brisbane for a few months. Chris Baillie ended up winning silver at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games and Allan Scott made the world indoor final.

THM: What does AAA stand for? (sorry for the stupid question)
Anderson: AAA actually is my son’s initials, but I think of it as Anderson’s Athletes Australia.

THM: When did you start AAA Hurdles & Sprints?
Anderson: Five years ago I had the idea that hurdlers from around Australia should have one place to go to share ideas and stay in touch with all things hurdles, so I started a facebook page. I then realized it really should be the name of our training group too because people were not identifying with clubs, rather their training groups instead.

THM: How large is the AAA staff?
Anderson: Its me, with the help of Mepi Faoagali, who looks after all core strength. He invented Pelleres, which are weighted sleeves for core exercises (check out www.pelleres.com). I found it necessary to seek assistance with core work as it is too often forgotten at the end of a session and we needed to formalize core sessions.
Duncan Harvey looks after some of our weights programming. He was my training partner, but now is a two-time Winter Olympian in the 2-man and 4-man bobsleigh. Needless to say, he knows how to move heavy things fast!

THM: What facilities are available for AAA athletes?
Anderson: We train on a few different tracks, but all we need are our spikes and a smile. I try to mix power work in the gym between track sessions. Pre-season consists of a lot of hill work too.

THM: How has AAA grown since its inception?
Anderson: It was originally just 2 athletes, now I have 13 male and female hurdlers ranging from 16-28 and one masters athlete.

THM: What are your goals, or what is your vision for the training group?
Anderson: I’d like to see my senior men qualify for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. They need 13.91 and have both run 14.05 so far. I believe both of them can run 13.6 and qualify for the Olympics.
My girls are showing improvements and I believe can make national finals and representative teams.
Ultimately, I would like for all of them see out their own goals. I think because we all share in each other’s success, we are all happy to see each other do well. A harmonious and positive group of athletes all working towards their goals is more than any coach can ask for.

THM: What effect has Sally Pearson’s success had on the popularity of athletics (and hurdling in particular) in Australia?
Anderson: I wrote Sally a message after her Gold medal and said that what she has done for hurdling in this country is huge. What I have seen is a massive change in the number of young girls and women taking up the sport. We have the Commonwealth Games here in 2018 and you can see what that means to people training for that in 4 years time.

THM: What is your approach to coaching hurdling technique? Do you emphasize drills? Do you teach all aspects of technique at once, or do you break it down into parts?
Anderson: Drills are important, but athletes need to understand why they are doing a drill. If they do not see the benefit in it for them, they won’t do them well. I like drills that are done with speed. Too many hurdles drills are done lazily and therefore done as a warmup rather than a skill execution.
There are so many aspects to hurdles technique, but a few I believe are imperative. Fence trail leg drills need to be done daily. Many think that this is for the action of the trail leg (which it is for juniors) but for seniors it is about building up the muscles in the glute to hold the high trail leg independently without compensation in the torso.
I also place a lot of emphasis on high knee drive of the lead leg. A low knee drive can almost always attribute to a poor technique in other areas because it is the first movement.
There are far too many things to think about as a hurdler and there will ALWAYS be something not right. Therefore one technical aspect to work on at a time is best. (Preferably starting at the beginning of the movement, the takeoff.)
The last is forward lean. Many don’t realize the importance of getting forward. This can be a huge contributor to overall time and is under-taught from a young age.

THM: What are your thoughts on the importance of technique in the women’s 100m hurdle race, considering that it’s more of a sprint race than the men’s 110 race.
Anderson: Yes, it is certainly a source of frustration to hurdlers without significant leg speed. The focus sometimes needs to be on force execution and turnover rather than what I call “pretty hurdling”. This shouldn’t excuse bad technique, rather the focus should be placed a little more in favour of leg speed for hurdlers looking to make up significant ground. There are still many areas to improve technically in the women’s event particularly in adopting a more “up and down” lead arm technique as opposed to the traditional “round arm action”.

THM: Do you feel the hurdles should be raised in the women’s race?
Anderson: Yes. Undoubtedly. The event needs to favour the more technically minded athletes as it does in the men’s, not the raw sprinters. Tall female hurdlers are actually disadvantaged on the current height.

THM: You made a comeback in 2012 after being out of competition for six years. What motivated that decision, and how did it work out?
Anderson: Ha! Yes, It was purely for the benefit of my son, who was 5 at the time and never got to see me run a hurdles race. I wanted him to see his dad do a sport and remember it when he was older. Nothing too flashy, but still good enough in my 30s to make top 8 and a Masters Record.

THM: After hurdling for so many years, how has your body held up? What do you do to maintain your fitness?
Anderson: Strength and muscle mass seems to stay with you as you get older. I remember losing strength so quickly as a young man, but now I can still lift heavy weights without training. Speed on the other hand deteriorates a little and in my case probably was directly related to body weight increases after knee reconstruction surgery. I can still hurdle full height though and demonstrate when needed, but I prefer a long run or a rowing machine nowadays!

THM: Are there any young Australian hurdlers we should be looking out for?
Anderson: I have one youngster, Will Wells-Gatnik, who came to me after double hip surgery. I put him on a rigorous stretching routine including a karate stretching machine I bought second-hand from a martial arts student. He is showing great promise and will attempt the full height in a few weeks. He is 6ft 4” so I believe we will be seeing a lot of him in the future. We haven’t seen anyone of his stature in a while and the higher hurdles will be more his event.

THM: How much do you focus on sprint mechanics when coaching hurdlers? Is it a major point of emphasis? Since male hurdlers at the higher levels can’t “sprint,” what do you teach them about the steps in between?
Anderson: This is something we have been trying to develop and something I think is the hardest part of hurdles coaching. Juniors in many cases have some difficulty making the distance so tend to learn to sprint and reach between the hurdles, but as they get older they have to chop their strides, particularly the last stride.
We drill a lot using straight legged bounds and then fast straight leg shuffles. Also we use mini hurdles or hurdles with only about 6 feet apart and force 3 strides between. I try to remind them not to lift completely in the recovery phase and keep the feet low and the drive straight.
I have one athlete who 7 strides to the first hurdle who has to significantly alter stride pattern off the first. It’s a rhythm change and I try to spend a bit of time on rhythm rather than mindless running.

THM: What advice would you give to a young kid who wants to excel in the hurdles?
Anderson: Hurdles is a progressive event. The heights progress, the distances progress, and so will you. The hurdler you are today is not necessarily the hurdler you will always be, so stay with it and the rewards will come.

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