Working with a Talented Newbie
by Steve McGill
In another article for this month’s issue I talked about working with two male hurdlers who came to town during my Thanksgiving break. Another hurdler who came down for the weekend was Milleah Johnson, a high school junior out of West Virginia. I had forgotten she was coming, actually. Her mom and I had agreed two weeks prior that we’d meet, but I had forgotten by then, and hadn’t written it down. So when she showed up on Saturday as I was finishing up with Mason Reed, I asked her, “Do you go to this school (the high school where we were training)?” She responded, “No, I’m from West Virginia.” “Oh,” I said, “what brings you to North Carolina?” She paused and looked at me like I was stupid. “You,” she said.
That’s when I remembered the text message exchange I’d had with her mom. Maybe I need to start putting appointments down in my calendar because I’m not remembering them off the dome!
But we had a real good session. She’s a super-talented athlete. About 5-10, very athletic, with good speed, and good sprinting mechanics. The only flaw I saw in her technique was that her lead leg kicked out and locked at the knee before snapping down. I’m not a fan of the kick-snap motion; I’m all about the cycle action. Keep it fluid, keep it moving, keep it continuous. So we tried to address that issue with full-speed reps from a three-point start. It didn’t work, so I went ahead and introduced her to my go-to drill for establishing the cycle action: the marching popover drill. She picked it up very quickly, and the kicking action went away instantly, replaced by the cycling action I was looking for. And it stayed that way as we progressed to faster drills with the hurdles higher and spaced farther apart. Milleah is a very quick learner to go along with her athletic skills. That’s why I was surprised when she told me her personal best in the 100h is only 15.02. This girl has low-14’s to high-13’s written all over her. But as we worked together more, I came to realize that she does have some confidence issues. Or maybe not confidence issues, but she is highly self-critical, which kind of amounts to the same thing. So I spent a lot of time between reps explaining to her what she was doing right and why it was right. I spent a lot of time explaining to her why I feel she can run a whole second faster than her current personal best. One thing about coaching is that it involves a whole lot more than just knowledge about the sport. It involves masterful knowledge of human psychology, as the barriers that hold talented athletes from reaching their potential are more often mental than physical.
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On day two, I worked Milleah into the workout I had planned for regulars, Raelle and Janie: competitive starts over two-three hurdles. Milleah got smoked in those reps, so I took her out of that realm and worked with her on her start individually. She’s so athletic that I was worried she would smoke them, but the opposite happened. Her start was very tentative. No push, no drive, no aggression. So the first thing I did was adjust her pedals, as they were too close together. From there, we worked on creating a more forward angle in set position, and really pushing back against the pedals while swinging the arms with some vigor. All of that helped a lot, and she looked very good by the end of the session. So, with Milleah, it’s going to be a matter of developing an aggressive mindset while also addressing her relatively minor technical flaws. Anytime an athlete is learning new things, it takes reps to ingrain them.
Milleah also came the next weekend, but just on Saturday. We spent a lot of time working on her start, reaffirming the things we had worked on the previous weekend, and just getting her to be more explosive. She’s so tall and so powerful that she doesn’t need to use a lot of power to get over the hurdles. So we were getting a lot of fool’s gold with her, where she was getting to the hurdle with no problem and she was three-stepping with no problem, but we weren’t not really getting any juice. In the starts the previous week, that was evident when she went up against Raelle and Janie, and got blasted by both of them even though she’s taller and has more natural athleticism than both of them. But Janie and Raelle are dawgs. And they’ve both developed their dawg-ness in the time that we’ve been together. Milleah, meanwhile, is new to me, and I’m new to her, so I was surprised to see that someone so athletic, and with such a high IQ, and who is so coachable, runs rather tentatively.
After we made some progress with her start, we switched over to quickstep drilling to work on her technique some — mainly her lead arm and keeping it moving up and down. Those reps went well, but the same issue was evident — no real juice, no real aggressiveness. In looking at one of the videos after a rep, she noticed it herself. “I’m not really sprinting,” she said. “Yes!” I exclaimed, “You should be feeling super-crowded between the hurdles, and you’re not.” We were near the end of the workout by that time. We did three more reps, and she finally brought the speed and aggression that had been lacking up to that point. Did doing so cause some technical issues? Yeah, a little bit. The trail arm got a little wild. But it’s a lot harder to teach a hurdler to run aggressively than it is to fix a trail arm that swings too much. The ability to attack a hurdle aggressively comes from within. Technique, meanwhile, can be taught. So, I was very happy by the end of the session, as I felt like we had achieved a breakthrough in those last few reps that can carry over to the next time I see her. Once she realized she was running passively, she put a stop to that nonsense and started looking like the beast of an athlete that lay hidden within.
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I already knew that Milleah was a perfectionist similar to Raelle, just from the fact that she was always pointing out errors even on reps that I thought were good. And just like with Raelle, that type of self-critique can be beneficial once we get to a point where we need to fine-tune the details, but it can be debilitating when learning a lot of new stuff. I think the reason she was being so passive was because she was thinking of all the mistakes she needed to avoid making. In talking to her parents at the end of our session on Saturday, it became evident that Milleah has been taught by her school coaches to focus heavily on technique. I get it, because I emphasize technique a lot too. How can you not, as a hurdle coach? But the other thing I’ve learned over the years is that speed comes first in order of importance. If you’re not in attack mode from the word go, then you’ll get blasted even if your technique is impeccable.
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