If you Can’t Think it, if you Can’t Feel it, You Can’t Do it
by Steve McGill
For hurdlers to get the most out of their potential, they need to be able to think the event and feel the event. To “think” the event means, primarily, to be a student of one’s own technique, one’s own strengths and weaknesses. It means being able to listen to a coach’s instruction and to be able to apply, within an individual training session. It means being able to look at practice footage and race footage and identify weaknesses and have conversations with the coach about how to address the weaknesses. It means developing an understanding of how all four limbs relate to each other, and of how technique, rhythm, and speed relate to each other. Being able to “feel” the event means being able to trust one’s instincts while hurdling. It means being able to make subtle adjustments during a rep or during a race. It means being able to pick up on the body’s cues and make adaptations based on the information it’s providing. Like I always tell my hurdlers – hurdling is rocket science in that there are a billion things to consider in regards to how to run faster. But hurdling is not rocket science because at the end of the day all you can do is run as fast as you can. So you have to be able to think the event and feel the event. Not one or the other.
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One of the athletes that I’ve been working with since June of this year is Raelle Brown, who has been featured in several articles in The Hurdle Magazine recently. Raelle came to me with two years worth of ingrained bad habits because she had been hurdling without a hurdle coach. We spent the entire summer and early fall drilling out bad habits as we tried to ingrain new ones. In the past month or so, our sessions have been outstanding, and Raelle has been making remarkable progress with her block start, her hurdle technique, and her speed between the hurdles. Another way in which she has progressed has been in regard to her ability to think and feel the event. When we first started together, she was the student and I was the teacher. I gave instructions and she followed them. But such is no longer the case. Now, we work together as a team; I’ve grown to appreciate her ability to self-diagnose when she makes a mistake, and her ability to identify the mistake before I even say a word.
This past Sunday, because I was training no other athletes that day, I could focus on Raelle exclusively, which meant we had time and opportunity to work on her trail arm. Despite having made tremendous progress with her lead leg action, lead arm action, and trail leg action, her trail arm was still swinging away from her body at takeoff, and then swinging across her body as she descended. So we addressed that issue specifically. At first I instructed her to pull the arm straight down, to not let it swing away from her torso. That cue didn’t really work. (We were doing block starts, because fixing it in drills is easy and can be fool’s gold). So I simplified my instructions and told her “Let’s at least keep the elbow slightly bent the whole time. When you feel like the elbow is about to lock, punch the hand back up.”
This simple cue – keep the elbow bent – proved to work wonders. The trail arm looked tighter and more efficient. I also mentioned that she should slightly adjust her lead arm. As it was, the hand was driving up to the middle of the forehead. The slight adjustment I suggested was to drive the hand up to the side of the forehead. My logic was that making this minor change would help prevent the trail arm from swinging. And it worked. So between those two cues – keep the elbow of the trail arm bent and keep the lead arm on the side of the forehead – pretty much solved our trail arm issues. We were able to add a second hurdle and a third hurdle without the problem returning.
Raelle is really coming into her own as a thinker of the event. We have conversations now, as opposed to me doing all of the guiding. After one rep in which she floated a little bit, I suggested that she lean more. In looking at the film on my iPhone, she looked too erect. Then she noticed that she was running flat-footed between the first and second hurdles. “Oh!” I said, instantly realizing that the erectness I was seeing was not caused by a lack of a lean, but by the shift from running on the balls of her feet to the first hurdle to running flat-footed to the second hurdle. And the flat-footedness was also causing the lack of a lean. So I agreed that she should focus on staying on the balls of her feet. She did so the next rep, and it looked great. I love when that kind of thing happens. When coach and athlete figure something out together, when we’re working as a team.
Raelle is typical of athletes I’ve coached in the past who performed at a high level and with whom I developed a meaningful coach/athlete relationship. I’ve always preached that you have to be a student of the event, and that the athlete you must study most closely is yourself. While studying greats from the past and present is definitely helpful, knowing your own strengths, your own weaknesses, your own tendencies, is what leads to breakthroughs time and time again. Along the same lines, being able to feel what you’re doing while you’re doing it is equally vital. Like I always say, the film can’t give you feedback until the rep is over, and neither can the coach. But your body can give you instantaneous feedback, so you have to develop the ability to listen to it and be willing to to be guided by its cues.
Below is footage of Raelle’s most recent workout:
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