The Further Adventures of a Hurdling Gymnast
by Steve McGill
I continued to work with Janie Coble over the holiday break and into the new year, while Raelle Brown was away on a family trip. This gave me some time to work with Janie individually, and work more specifically on technique. When Raelle is there, I usually have them do block starts together.
Janie texted me on Christmas day. After receiving several “Merry Christmas” texts from family and friends throughout the day, I almost laughed out loud when I saw Janie’s text that evening, reading, “Can we go to the track tomorrow?” No holiday greetings or anything; just straight to the point. That’s one of the many things I love about Janie. No small talk, no pleasantries; let’s get down to business.
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And that’s what we did on the morning the day after Christmas. Weather wasn’t too bad. Temps were in the low 40’s but with very little wind, and the sun came out about halfway through the session. I decided to focus on addressing her lead leg, which isn’t majorly flawed but is flawed enough that we need to fix it if we’re going to get our time down into the 8’s over the 55 hurdles and into the 15’s over the 100m hurdles. She swings a bent leg, which is not as bad as swinging a straight leg that’s locked at the knee. But even a bent leg that swings causes other issues — a flat and delayed trail leg, extended air time, loss of velocity in the air, and sometimes a twisting of the hips.
When I first started with Janie last year, the goal was to win our not-so-competitive state meet, which she did, in 16.56, as she was one of only two girls three-stepping the whole race. Heading into this year, knowing our school would be moving up to 3A from 2A, the goal when we started back up last summer was to win states again at this higher division against tougher competition, which would probably mean dipping under 16.00. But she has been receiving some interest from a few colleges, and she’s excited about that. So, now that the goal is to run in college, it’s like whoa, we need to fix this lead leg. As I told her that morning, “Up to this point, I’ve been coaching you like a gymnast who runs hurdles; now I’m gonna start coaching you like a hurdler.”
I spent time explaining the details of the 1-2-3 action of the lead leg, and explaining how her swing action slows her down. We started the session with some marching popovers, emphasizing the “heel to hamstring” action that I’ve also been emphasizing with Raelle. The logic is, if the heel is moving toward the hurdle instead of moving up under the hamstring, then the foot is leading the way instead of the knee leading the way. The knee must be your steering wheel, because it will direct you forward, and it will enable you to step down off the hurdle instead of hanging in the air and floating down.
That was the other part we worked on — the down part. Don’t lead with the knee and then still extend the foot. Drive the foot down. It’s an A-skip action: drive up with the knee and heel while attacking the hurdle, then attack downward with the foot while descending off the hurdle. Create a downhill angle at take-off and then attack the track at a downhill angle as you’re coming off the hurdle.
Janie, as she always does, picked up on the instructions quickly and made rapid progress. We were able to transition straight from the popovers to sprinting reps from the start line. We started with 27’s and worked up to race height doing that, over two hurdles. Didn’t use blocks because of the cold. Didn’t have her put the spikes on until the last few reps because I wanted to gradually increase the level of challenge.
I left that practice feeling good about where we were headed. I felt confident that once she ingrains this knee-first action, she’ll leave the 16’s (and the 9’s over the 55m hurdles) behind for good. She was looking fluid that day, and like I told her, that was the first day she’d ever looked fluid. In the past she has looked fast, powerful, aggressive. But now that she’s learning to truly lead with the knee and creating a downhill angle, the motion is starting to look fluid, and that was the thing that had me excited. Because, once you’re looking fluid, it’s just a matter of speeding things up and quickening things up. I noticed during that session that her cadence between the hurdles was more rhythmic. Before, she would kind of mini-pause upon landing, and then get going again. That mini-pause was gone. We were getting that bop-bop-bop between the hurdles.
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We met again the following Sunday. We made further progress on her lead-leg knee action. But we had to cut the workout short because she felt a pain in her knee about halfway through the session and had to stop. Before then, we did some quickstepping over 30’s and then over 33’s, making sure to get the knee action we wanted. On a few reps, she had good knee action into the hurdle, but then still extended the leg too far and floated a little bit.
(Her mom said after one rep, “that sounded good.” And I was so proud of her mom for noticing that and pointing it out. How it sounds is a very reliable indicator that you’re doing it right (or doing it wrong). The cadence tells a story. Plenty of long-time coaches don’t really pick up on the importance of sound like that, so it low-key kind of blew my mind that Janie’s mom picked up on it.)
From the quicksteps, we transitioned into block starts. She did a couple reps over one hurdle at race height, and the cycling action looked really good. But on the third rep, right as she pushed off the pedals, she felt a pain in her knee and didn’t continue the rep. The pain wasn’t going away, so we shut it down for the day. In our talk afterwards, I mentioned that with another meet coming up that weekend, we needed to play it safe and not practice again before the meet. I added that if she needed to pull out of the meet, I’d be okay with that.
Being a gymnast, Janie has grown used to pushing through the pain. In track, that’s a foolish way to go about your business, as I explained to her. So we texted back and forth a little bit later that night. The plan was to take off the next two days, get to the track early on Saturday so we could get in some good practice reps, and then see how things go in the race.
Turns out we probably shouldn’t have raced. She did “okay,” running 9.37, which was her slowest time of the year thus far. I was surprised because she looked real good in warmups. In looking at the film that I took on my phone, she got out well, but slowed down considerably over the last two hurdles. I think it’s her knees. She has tendinitis in both of them, and when it kicks in, the pain is real. After the race, she was very upset, crying, angry, frustrated. I talked to her parents for a while and explained that she isn’t going to run but so fast as long as she’s hurdling once a week, and as long as she keeps training through injury. They understood perfectly well, so we’ll see what happens from here. What I do know is that as long as she keeps doing gymnastics full-time, she won’t run the kinds of times in the hurdles that she wants to, for two reasons: 1) She won’t be getting in enough track work — not just hurdle work, but the sprinting work, etc. that comes with being a sprint/hurdler. 2) Her body will never heal enough to allow her to unleash the beast. In addition to her knees, she’s had serious issues with her ankles and her back. Gymnastics is an insane sport when it comes to putting your body on the line. Janie is trying to do both sports, which was fine when track was the sport she did on the side. But now that she’s trying to go somewhere with it, she’s going to have to make a choice. I don’t think she can do track and gymnastics in college.
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