A Third Excerpt from The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling
by Steve McGill
Below is an excerpt from Chapter Three of a book I’m currently working on, entitled The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling:
The great Renaldo Nehemiah once said in an interview with the author that if you want to excel in the hurdles, “you have to learn how to hurdle.” His point was that hurdling isn’t the same as flat sprinting. It’s not just about speed and power. There’s a technical element involved that cannot be ignored or pushed to the background. Tonie Campbell, a contemporary of Nehemiah’s who made three Olympic teams in the 1980’s, said in an interview with the author, “The first thing a hurdler learns is how to fall.” Put it all together and what do you have? In order to learn how to hurdle, you first have to learn how to fall.
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Falling can be a traumatic experience for a hurdler – especially bad ones that cause injuries. But even not-so-extreme falls can invoke fear. For beginning hurdlers, a bad fall or a major stumble kind of functions as an initiatory rite. If you respond by getting back up and finishing the race, you’ve just found out that you’re a hurdler for real, which is something to celebrate, even while the experience is a humiliating one. If you respond by walking off the track without finishing the race, that’s an indication that the hurdlers are probably not for you and you should try a different event that doesn’t involve so much potential danger.
Falling is an occupational hazard for hurdlers. There is no such thing as getting so good at hurdling that there is a zero percent chance of crashing. Gail Devers, who won the 1992 Olympic gold medal in the 100 meter dash, also would’ve won it in the 100 meter hurdles had she not clipped the last hurdle and stumbled and fallen across the finish line. Allen Johnson, who won the 1995 World Championship, 1996 Olympics, and 1997 World championships in back-to-back-to-back years, who owns the most sub-13.00 races ever run in the 110 hurdles, once fell in a preliminary round Olympic race years after he had already established himself as an all-time great. So if the greatest in the world can fall, anybody can fall.
In my first season running hurdles, I fell in my first 300 meter hurdle race and again in my third 110 hurdle race. In the 300 race, I had no clue what I was doing; I was just running and jumping, trying to make it through. I clipped the fourth or fifth hurdle with my trail leg and before I had a chance to catch myself I was rolling on the hard cinder track, scraping my legs and arms. Bewildered, I stood back up and kept running. The other hurdlers had gone way ahead of me; there was no chance of catching any of them. Feeling embarrassed and ashamed, I ran the rest of the way and crossed the finish line, feeling like a failure. Our head coach, Mr McAlpin, walked up to me and put his arm around my shoulder. “All hurdlers fall,” he said, “but the good ones get back up. And you got back up. Now go in the training room and get something on that cut.”
The good ones get back up. Those are words I’ve never forgotten. It’s a message I’ve passed on to my own hurdlers who have found themselves in similar situations.
My fall in the 110 hurdles was more of a major stumble than a fall. It occurred in a dual meet, at home against a rival school, Penn Charter, who had two good hurdlers, both of whom were way better than anyone we had. The fastest one, Arthur Duff, was so good that I felt intimidated lining up against him. Their other guy, a short, dark-skinned dude, wasn’t as good as Arthur but had crazy speed in the open sprints. Our school, Malvern Prep, had three hurdlers – a senior named Jeff Guyon, myself (a sophomore), and another sophomore named Scott Glascott. I don’t remember much about the race. But I remember being shocked, at the eighth hurdle, that I was closing in on the dark-skinned dude. I had gone into the race assuming both Penn Charter athletes would blast me, but I was catching this dude and might even beat him.
As I was thinking this thought, I got too close to the last hurdle and smashed into it with my lead leg. I stumbled Gail Devers-style across the finish line in last place.
Lesson learned. If you don’t keep your focus on the hurdle, the hurdle will reach up and grab you, and pull you down.
Often, falls occur when you’re actually getting better, and you have yet to adapt to your new speed. That’s why I always say, for a sprinter, getting faster means running faster times; for a hurdler, getting faster means needing to adopt a new rhythm or else face the possible consequence of crashing. That’s what happened to me in that race; I wasn’t used to my own speed.
A similar thing happened to a girl I coached from 2022-2024, Grace Galloway. In 2022, which marked my first year ever as a head coach, I took on the role because the previous head coach had retired and the athletic department was desperate for someone to replace him. We had a small team, and we were competing in the 1A-2A state meet, consisting of the smallest schools in North Carolina. After the first few meets I noticed that none of these other teams had any really good hurdlers, and some (including us) didn’t have any hurdlers at all. So I had to find someone to at least try the hurdles so we can grab some easy points there.
One day at the beginning of practice, I asked if anyone would be willing to give the hurdles a chance. Grace’s hand shot up. She had been running the 800 and either the 400 or 1600. Once I saw her hand, she was done with those events.
She was another one not fast enough to three-step, but she picked up switching legs quickly, so she was four-stepping in races. I taught her the bare minimum technique-wise because we didn’t have a lot of time; there was maybe a month left in the season. Also, we didn’t have a track to train on regularly. Our school didn’t have one, and I could only get to a rubber track on weekends. Anyway, Grace ended up running 19-low, which was good for sixth at the state meet! The following year, she trained with me a lot in the off-season and also did a lot of strength training on her own. She was faster and stronger and had gained the ability to three-step the first two or three hurdles.
In one meet that year, she got out really well, three-stepped the first two hurdles, switched to four-stepping, was maintaining quick turnover between the hurdles, and then suddenly smacked a hurdle with her lead leg, tumbled, rolled back up without going outside of her lane, cleared the next hurdle, and finished the race. It was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. She had some bad scrapes on her forearms, shoulder, and knees, but otherwise she was fine.
After the race, and after getting ice bags put on her cuts, she was laughing with her teammates, describing what had happened, still on an adrenaline rush. Later, after she had settled down, I explained to her why she had fallen, how her improved speed had thrown off her rhythm. I assured her she was heading toward a breakthrough and a big drop in her time. Sure enough, she dropped into the low-18s the next meet. Not only was she not flustered by her fall, but she was galvanized by it.
Meanwhile, a girl that I started working with last summer in my private coaching – we’ll call her Abby – was never able to three-step a whole race despite being very fast and powerful. In our first session, she started off five-stepping; I thought she was still warming up. When I told her to three-step, she gave me a funny look, like she wasn’t sure she could do it. Turns out, she couldn’t. Obviously, she was fast enough to. But she was scared to. I didn’t know why, so I rolled with it. I moved the hurdles closer together so that three-stepping would be easier. She was able to do it with the hurdles moved in three feet from race distance, but not nearly with the type of aggression I was looking for.
In talking to her and her mom after practice, I found out that she had fallen in several races the previous season. “They were bad falls,” her mom said. So that explained the fear, the unwillingness to attack the hurdles. I worked with her through the fall and winter and early spring. But once the outdoor season got going, I wasn’t able to meet with her hardly at all because I was so busy with my school team. But she had gotten to a point where she had corrected her major flaws, was showing good speed between the hurdles, and was three-stepping with relative ease. But when given an update on her progress late in the spring season, I was told that she still wasn’t able to three-step a whole 100 meter race.
The only explanation I can think of is that the fear never disappeared completely. I think her falls from the previous years may have taken away her aggression permanently. Coaches have to coach hurdlers through fall – explain to them why they fell, develop strategies to avoid falls (without sacrificing aggression) in the future, give them words of encouragement so they don’t lose confidence. I don’t think Abby received any such coaching, so her fear just continued to increase.
The important of a coach’s guidance can’t be overemphasized when it comes to a hurdler’s development, especially that of a beginning hurdler, who is totally reliant on a coach’s knowledge in building a solid foundation. Even if the hurdler is willing to learn on their own as much as possible, and has the wherewithal to coach themselves like I did in college, the beginner still needs a coach who can help them navigate the multitude of physical, mental, and emotional challenges that hurdling can present. Without a coach, a beginning hurdler can quickly become disenchanted, disillusioned, and decide to drop the event. Or, because they love it so much, they stick with it, but ingrain bad habits that they may never be able to correct. I’ve had plenty of hurdlers over the years send me videos, asking for tips. I try to give them what advice I can, but the fact of the matter is, if I’m not there with them during the training session, I can’t provide the kind of coaching they need. I can tell you to lead with the knee but I can’t decide to switch from one drill to a different one, or to alter the spacing between the hurdles, unless I’m right there with you. It takes months to fix a technical habit that has been ingrained – and that’s in the off-season, when there aren’t any meets in the way. So, a coach who allows a hurdler to ingrain bad habits is really doing that athlete a serious disservice.
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