In the Long Hurdles, Do What Works Best for You
by Steve McGill
In the long hurdles, strategy is a major component of the race, and strategy becomes more important the more you improve and the more the competition improves. While it may be okay for beginners to just jump over the hurdles and run as fast as they can between them, such lack of strategy will eventually limit any possible growth. In the 100/110 hurdles, there is little to no stride pattern strategy, as we can all agree to take eight (or in some cases seven) steps to the first hurdle and three strides between the rest. So in that race, it’s all about adapting to one’s own rhythm as one’s flat speed and technique improve, but there is no question about how many steps to take. Such is not the case in the long hurdles.
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Long hurdlers have to go through a process of figuring out what their ideal stride pattern is, and the difficulty lies in the fact that “ideal” is not set in stone for an entire career or even an entire season. Improved speed and improved speed-endurance and even improved technique can lead to the need to alter one’s stride pattern. Sydney McLaughlin, for example, used to be a 15-stepper for most of the race before switching to 16 at the end of the race. Now she goes 14 most of the way and switches to 15 for the last three hurdles. Femke Bol followed the same progression. Alison Dos Santos used to go 13 the whole way but now he takes 12 strides for two hurdles on the backstretch before switching back to 12. So even professionals who are winning gold medals are making adaptations to their stride pattern.
The question of alternating is actually what I want to focus on for this article. My attitude towards alternating has evolved over the years, and continues to with each athlete I coach. In my own competitive days, I never learned to alternate. I focused primarily on the 110s so I didn’t want to devote time to learning to lead with the non-dominant leg. In the 400 hurdles, I would go 15 for as long as I could, and then go 17 the rest of the way. Ironically, I ran my personal best when I was experimenting one meet with going 17 the whole way. It blew my mind that I ran faster going 17 all the way around than I had ever going 15 for the first five. What I later figured out was that taking 17 early actually allowed me to conserve energy because I could go 17 with minimal effort, whereas 15 strides meant giving it all I had. So, by the end of the race, even my 17 was slower and felt like I was bounding more than sprinting. Obviously, as someone who focused on the 110s and who devoted a huge chunk of my training time to improving in the 110s, I never got into the kind of shape that a 400 hurdler needs to be in. Still, the point is, I figured out that what worked best for me was going 17 the whole way, so that’s what I did for the rest of that season.
Throughout most of my coaching career, I’ve always said, if you can alternate, let’s do it when we need to do it. If you can’t do it, let’s develop the ability to do it by doing drills and then workouts that help to grow confidence in alternating. But what I’ve come to understand more recently is that just because you can alternate doesn’t mean that you should. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t either, but we’ve gotta figure out what works best.
“What works best” includes a lot of factors. What works best in terms of maintaining an ideal take-off distance into each hurdle? What works best in terms of staying on balance upon landing (especially on the curve)? What works best in terms of maintaining speed through each hurdle? What works best in terms of maximizing your ability to finish strong?
One of the girls I coach this year in my private coaching, Raelle Brown, told me when I first started working with her last summer that the 300 hurdles was her better race. However, we spent a lot of time working on her 100h race because her technique was so bad. We drilled and drilled and drilled. She had a good indoor season in the 55/60m hurdles and even qualified for nationals (although she didn’t go because she just barely made it). Once we turned our focus to the 300 hurdles in early March, it became clear to me that despite the fact she had run 48-low the year before, she had no idea what she was doing in that event. She was just running and jumping. She was taking something like 26 strides to the first hurdle, and a smorgasbord of 18 or 19 or 17 or 20 strides between the rest. She was just doing whatever.
Because she could alternate (I had even considered switching lead legs in the 100m hurdles early on in our time together), it seems logical to me to take advantage of that ability. So we worked on developing a stride pattern one hurdle at a time. We got her first hurdle down to 24 strides — where it belonged. Then we went 17 to hurdle two and again to hurdle three. With the fourth hurdle being entirely on the curve, 17 became a reach, so we decided to go 18 there. But because her left leg was her dominant lead leg, going 18 at hurdle four meant leading with the right leg — the outside leg, which we’d rather avoid if we could. But that was the strategy we went with for the early part of her season.
In looking at her videos (I wasn’t able to attend many of her meets because of coaching my own school team), I saw that although she was dropping time down into the 47-lows, we were leaving a lot of meat on the bone. Though she was able to alternate at hurdle four, her arms were swinging and she was landing off balance, causing her to 19-step the fifth hurdle, keeping her on her right leg — her weaker lead leg. The whole point of alternating is to do so twice in a row so that you get back on your stronger leg. By the end of the race she was taking 20-21 strides between the hurdles, which I considered to be a disaster, even though her times were pretty good. Her goal, as she stated in the beginning of the year, was to get down under 45-flat. We weren’t trending in that direction.
So I decided to scrap the alternating at hurdle four. “Let’s stick with 17 through hurdle three,” I said, “then at hurdle four let’s go 19, and let’s keep the 19 the rest of the way.” That’s the strategy she executed in her regional meet the following week, and she ran a huge personal best of 45.21, putting her in position to have a shot of going under 45 at her state meet, which will be this weekend. By staying on her stronger lead leg at hurdle four, she was indeed able to maintain 19 strides through the rest of the race. Because there was no 20-stepping or 21-stepping, the last part of her race was a lot faster than it had been previously. So, in this case, eliminating the alternating and taking two extra strides at hurdle four instead of one extra stride led to a breakthrough.
That’s why I say that less strides doesn’t always equal faster times, and that alternating, even if you’re able to do so fairly efficiently, isn’t always the best strategy. If you were to ask me now I would say, don’t alternate unless you have as much confidence in the non-dominant leg as you do in the dominant leg. It’s kind of like 7-stepping in the 100/110s. Don’t seven-step unless you can generate enough power and cover enough ground that it actually benefits you. If you can get to the hurdle in seven steps but can’t push through the hurdle in seven steps, you’re better off taking eight steps.
In the long hurdles, the push off the trail leg is as important as leading with the lead leg when it comes to alternating. The leg that is used to being the lead leg is not accustomed to pushing off. Getting that leg used to pushing off requires a lot of drilling, and then a lot of full speed work over hurdles. Having success in drills can be fool’s gold. Only at full speed will you find out if you trust the leg enough to use it in a race, and if you have the ability to use it effectively in a race, so that it benefits you rather than hindering you.
In the second of the two videos in the Instagram post below, you’ll see Raelle running her 45.21 race:
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