Speed First
by Steve McGill

One thing I’ve learned about coaching over the years is that it’s always important and even necessary to be adaptable. That doesn’t mean just changing methods from how you were coached, but from your own previous methods. I first learned this lesson long ago, about 6 years into my career, back in 2002, when I was coaching a kid named Joe Coe. Joe, a safety on the football team, was new to hurdling in his junior year of high school. He decided to try the hurdles after seeing another of my hurdlers, Cameron Akers, rise to the level of being one of the best 110 hurdlers in the nation a year earlier. 

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With Cameron, the drill/workout I used most often to improve his technique and his cadence between the hurdles was the quickstep drill, which I still use regularly to this day. Back then, I used it more as a hurdle-endurance workout, whereas now I use it more as go-between drill bridging the slower marching popover drill and full-speed workouts from a three-point start or block start. It involves clearing 5-10 hurdles spaced 21-24 feet apart (females) or 24-27 feet apart (males). The rep really begins after clearing the first hurdle. Back in Cameron’s and Joe’s days, I instructed hurdlers to get over the first hurdle and then  maintain a 3-step rhythm, getting quicker as you go down the line. Now, I have the athletes take a six-step approach to the first hurdle, which is something I needed to add when I started doing camps back in 2017. Anyway, Cameron loved the quickstep drill, looked forward to it to the point where he would request it every time we had a practice after a non-hurdling day. So, because that drill had led him to such great success, and because Joe admired Cameron like an older brother and had seen Cameron do it, I assumed that Joe would love the drill the same as Cameron did.

Joe hated the quickstep drill. He did it when I asked him to, but he never asked to do it. One time we were talking and I said something about how I noticed he had better workouts when we did full-speed stuff out of the blocks than he did when doing drills. I mentioned that that seemed odd, because most people struggle when they go faster. That’s when Joe mentioned that he didn’t like the quickstep drill. Of course, I was surprised and hurt when he said that, because it was my  drill; I had created it as an adaptation of Jean Poquette’s back-and-forth drill, which I had been using for years prior to Cameron. The quickstep drill, unlike the back-and-forth drill, allowed for recovery time, which, I felt, led to more quality in each rep, and for the workout as a whole. 

But once I got out of my feelings and thought about it some more, I decided to stop using the quickstep drill with Joe, and to just go full speed ahead with him in hurdle workouts. As a safety on the football team, his athletic instincts responded to going hard, to short bursts of speed. So why not take advantage of his natural instincts instead of trying to impose my ideals upon an athlete who wasn’t responding to the quickstep drill the way I wanted him to? We never had a conversation about it, and we didn’t need to. We changed things up, and he went on to become a state champion. That confirmed for me that there’s more than one way to get a hurdler to reach their potential.

From about 2010-2024, I had a method of developing hurdlers that worked for me, but that I’ve started to stray from in the past two years. The idea was to start in the fall if possible, or in the winter at the latest, and drill heavily — marching popovers, cycle drill, quickstep drill — in order to develop technique, rhythm, and hurdle endurance. Then, in the spring, once we had established a solid foundation in those areas, we’d work on speed, focusing on the start, accelerating, and being fast and aggressive. Because the athletes had ingrained good technique, adding in speed and aggression simply meant speeding up what they were already doing. They didn’t have to think about technique or work on technical flaws because we’d already addressed those before going faster. That method helped future world record holder Keni Harrison to become a state champion and national champion as a high school junior, one year after focusing on soccer as her main sport. 

So why have I strayed from that approach? As much out of necessity as anything else. Times have changed, so I’ve had to change with the times. The biggest change has been the heavier emphasis on indoor track as a competitive focus. Indoor track has been around for a long time, obviously, but when I was in high school and throughout most of my coaching career, only the elite athletes with the potential to qualify for nationals geared their training toward peaking indoors. Now, the indoor season has more meets than the outdoor season, and it has become a sport unto itself. That means that I don’t have the time I used to have to develop hurdlers in a gradual, step-by-step manner. Training for races is totally different from training to work on things, with no meets in the way. When you’re training for races, races take precedent. 

The other factor is that so many athletes these days are participating in multiple sports, and, in a lot of cases, year-round. Janie Coble, a girl I coached the past two years and is now a freshman in college, came to me her junior year as a full-time gymnast. In previous years, I would’ve said just go ahead and do your gymnastics thing, but our school team had zero hurdlers, our conference was weak in the hurdles, and Janie was a good athlete, so I decided to try to make it work. We met once a week, starting in the fall. Once a week is a whole lot less than two times a week, so I had to make the most of our time with each session. Not to mention, her body was banged up from gymnastics-related aches, pains, and injuries, so even once a week wasn’t guaranteed.

So, with Janie, we worked on the start from the start. First things first: establish the three-step rhythm, and then address technical flaws as we go, constantly making decisions in regard to which ones to address. Similarly, a girl I started working with last year and still work with now, Raelle Brown, a senior, does cheerleading in the fall and in the winter. So, similar to Janie, her body is often banged up, and the time we have together is limited. Fortunately, with her, we were able to start in the summer before her junior year. Still, we spent the summer addressing a whole lot of bad habits, because unlike Keni, who had never run the 100 hurdles before, Raelle had been hurdling for two years before we ever met. So by the time we had fixed the worst of the problems, the indoor season was underway.

What I have discovered in the past couple years is that developing speed and aggression first can work. I would say that it’s important to find out early if a new hurdler, especially, is willing to attack the hurdles before they really know what they’re doing, before I’ve taught them a significant amount. Looking back, I can think of more than one hurdler I’ve coached in the past who had mastered the basics of technique but ran tentatively when it was time to go full speed. And it was my fault. They had grown so accustomed to running at a slower, safer speed that they were intimidated by the minimized reaction time required at full speed. So now, even if I do a lot of drilling in the offseason, we’ll do speed work on non-hurdling days, and we’ll end hurdle drilling workouts with a handful of full-speed reps over 1-3 hurdles.

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