Learning How to Hurdle, Even when You’re already Good
by Steve McGill
Sometimes even the best hurdlers have to learn how to hurdle, because they’ve been relying on their athleticism, work ethic, and refuse-to-lose mentality to reach the level of success they’ve achieved so far. That’s what it was like the first time I worked with Tessa and Nyles in March. In the 300 hurdles, Tessa had a pb in the 45-low range, and Nyles had a pb in the 38-high range. In the meet where I saw them run, Tessa looked like a beast and blew everyone away, while Nyles also looked like a beast and was also blowing everyone away until he crashed into the seventh hurdle. With Nyles, I knew what caused the crash: he had been 15-stepping the whole race, then he 17-stepped the sixth hurdle, and fought to get his 15-step back to hurdle seven. But he couldn’t quite make it, and he was going too fast to fit in 17 strides by the time he realized he wouldn’t make it in 15. And he wasn’t able to alternate, so yeah, he crashed.
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So Nyles’ dad had Nyles talk to me about setting up some sessions, and we had our first one a couple days after that meet, and Tessa came with him. I went into the session thinking I’d just need to help them figure out their stride patterns in order to eliminate any guess work and develop a race plan. As I told Tessa, who is familiar with the present greats in the long hurdles, athletes like Sydney McLaughlin and Femke Bol and Ana Cockrell have a race plan. They don’t go into a race guessing, or leading with whichever leg comes up. They know what they want to do, they know when/where/why they will change their stride pattern, and they have a backup plan in case anything happens to sabotage the preferred plan.
But we never got to dive into stride pattern work in that first session. I had both of them sprint a full-speed rep over the first hurdle, from a block start, so we could settle in on the amount of strides to take to the first hurdle. In both cases, I loved their approach — their speed, aggression, and acceleration — but both of them looked terrible clearing the hurdle. In both cases, the lead leg kicked out and locked at the knee as the trail leg hung in the back, hanging in the air. They both landed off-balance and stumbled when they landed. I thought they were just tired and didn’t worry about it. I had them do it again and the same thing happened. I looked to another athlete — Raelle Brown, who was helping me coach them after finishing her workout — and I said to Raelle, my surprise clear by the tone of my voice, “They don’t know how to hurdle.”
I then said to Tessa and Nyles, “Time to go back to the other side of the track. I have to teach y’all how to hurdle.”
So even though I had had no intention of starting from the bottom up, it was obvious that I needed to do so. I started them off with marching popovers, using my yellow practice hurdles at their lowest setting of 21 inches. The session ended up lasting a full two hours, as I basically took them from the pre-kindergarten level to about the 5th-grade level. It took a while for them to get the hang of pushing off the back leg with the popovers, so we stayed at just one hurdle for a good while. Once it started to click, I was able to raise the hurdle and add more. Nyles really got the hang of the drill, and looked like a polished veteran by the end of the session.
Tessa came by herself the following week, and we worked on the drill some more, and she started to get the hang of it. By the end of the session she had mastered it and was beginning to personalize it.
In the ensuing weeks, we continued drilling—not just popovers, but also quicksteps, doing the kind of stuff I like to do in the offseason when working with new athletes. So I was squeezing in this technique stuff midseason instead, with the intention of returning to 300h work once the technique for both of them was good enough to where they weren’t floating over hurdles, landing sideways, and stumbling for the first step or two off the hurdles.
When we did return to the other side of the track to work on the 300s, the technique was good enough that we could begin to put some stride pattern work in place. What I discovered in my most recent session with them was that they could both go 22 strides to the first hurdle. We had to do some experimenting when adding hurdles. Eventually, with Nyles, we settled on 22-15-15-15-15 through five hurdles. All of his past issues had been due to 17-stepping randomly and trying to get the 15 back. With Tessa, we settled on 22-15-16-16-17 through five hurdles, as she has the ability to alternate lead legs.
This is where we are right now, and this is what we’ll go with for now. With Nyles, we’ll probably stick with it for the rest of the season, as he ran a season’s best in his next meet—something like 38.75. With Tessa it’s still a work in progress. We’ll probably want to go 15 for at least one more hurdle, and we’ll want to maintain the 16 longer, perhaps eliminating all 17-stepping before the season ends.
I haven’t seen either of them in a couple weeks due to their spring break, but plan to continue with them now that they’re back in school. The plan is to continue with technical work while primarily focusing on ingraining stride pattern. I also need to do some curve hurdling work with them so they can learn how to negotiate the curve without swinging the arms and losing balance, which is another issue.
Below is a clip from my most recent workout with Nyles and Tessa, in which we worked on stride pattern. Tessa’s best rep was aborted because a dude mowing the grass had moved one of her hurdles out of the way, not realizing she was using it for her workout. So that rep is not in the clip.
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