There’s a ravenous appetite for hurdle coaching in the Front Range. As coaches go, I’m a small fish out here since I’ve only been seeing Colorado athletes for two years, but it’s a small pond and I’m proud to be a part of it.
I’m reaching more teenage athletes as a result of a rising tide of interest in sprinting and hurdle racing out here, which means I’ve had more “first” sessions in the last month than in many prior years of my coaching practice.
Naturally, athletes and parents and partners have been curious about what goes on in that first live coached session. To my middle and school athletes (and your families), here’s what you need to know.
First up, the first session is for and about you. I want to understand how happy you are with track. I want to hear about your goals and your frustrations and your passions in the sport. Since I’m not your team coach, I don’t have to think about where you can help earn points. I’m only interested in which events fire you up.
Then, I’m trying to determine if what you love, what you’re good at, and what you want from coaching is within my domain. I don’t help anyone by guessing my way through training sessions, so I’m not here to coach the throws, triple jump, or distance runs. I know sprints and hurdles, plus a good understanding of beginner long jump and pole vault. So our first session is figuring out IF I can help you before we move on to HOW I might do so.
We sort out all of that in the 10 minutes of conversation before you actually do any work. If you want to know what I’m looking for through the rest of the session, read on.
One of my strengths as a coach is the empirical base that I have in the sprint events. I know acceptable, good, and great mechanics. I know good, great, and exceptional sprint times over a variety of test distances. I know both the theory and the sensation of a good race model or approach run. And I know how it feels to deliver a particular level of effort.
So from the first step of your warmup to the timed fly runs, I’m watching for how you execute.
- Are you so stiff that you can’t hit the block start crouch?
- Are your hip flexors too weak to lift your knee above your hip?
- Are you unbelievably quick, yet lack the explosiveness to accelerate?
- Are you wildly powerful, yet have never learned sprint mechanics?
- Are you sound in all your fundamentals, but taking it easy because you’ve never been timed at practice?
I’m watching for all of this and for everything else. The goal is to find the single, most impactful thing we could work on together to make you faster.
A lot of athletes come to me from “strength”-oriented programs. This means lots of stretching and lots of jogging and a fair amount of sprint-distance intervals (450s, 300s, 150s, etc. on less than full recovery). I’m oversimplifying here, but most of those “run strong” programs don’t teach sprint mechanics, don’t do power-focused warmups, and don’t time short sprints.
So it’s likely, whoever you are, that we spend 20 minutes working on march-skip-cycle drills. For hurdlers, maybe you do those drills alongside your lead leg and trail leg drills, so expect us to get right over the top of low hurdles.
But nearly every new athlete I meet needs these fundamentals. Either you need them because you’ve never learned them, which is unfortunate, or you need them because mastering fundamentals is the path to excellence, so every athlete always needs them!
All of this means I tend to interrupt or extend your warmup while I watch it. And because you’re working on new coordination patterns in your warmup, it’s common to feel oddly fatigued by the time we reach timed sprints. Nothing to be done about it really. Just come to our session after a full night of sleep and with a good meal or two in you!
My programs are speed-first. So we time sprints over measured distances. We take several *minutes* of rest between efforts. This is disorienting for new athletes. Lots of folks just like you have been confused when I yell to walk slower after a rep far more often than I yell to push harder before one.
Know that I’m watching for how you respond to this, too. Does the rest make you uncomfortable? Can you focus on a single technical cue during a rep or are you fighting to do everything? Are you trying to please me when you run or comfortable experimenting with technique?
We’ve only gotten this far in the session if I’m confident I can help you. But now we’re at a key inflection point: do YOU feel empowered by my coaching style and confident that I can get you to the next level?
After the last timed rep, we talk about your times, about what they mean for your strengths and weaknesses, and about what two things you can do to make progress even without me. I like to send you away with a practice plan, to remind you that you control your development.
Now, I’m generalizing again, but young female athletes almost never eat enough, so one of those two things is typically a suggestion about breakfast or snacks. Young male athletes almost never get enough sleep at night, so one of those two things tends to be about bedtime routines. I’m here to clear a barrier that’s limiting your performance; if it happens to not be on the track, I have a duty to tell you that. But you can get ahead but reading my Recovery Doesn’t Just Happen series.
And finally, when we’re done with the conversation and assessment and suggested work, I give all the power back to you: do you want to keep working together?
That’s what you really need to know about the first coaching session: it’s about you, not me. Whether you’re a Colorado kid in the sprints and hurdles or you’re an adult amateur in a field sport, my only goal is to give you my best and guide you to your stated goal.
My philosophy isn’t “right”, but there are a lot athletes it works for. You can expect me to tell you honestly if I think it can work for you, then to ASK YOU if it’s the way you want to work, during our first session together, in-person or virtual.
I want there to be more coaches here in Colorado and around the world for you to choose from. I want to see the pond grow; the competition doesn’t frighten me. But when I’ve helped enough of you succeed, I hope to have earned my place as a big fish, so I get to reach even more athletes. Your accomplishments will say more than my sport career ever will.
My goal for your collective accomplishments is to help 1,000 scholastic athletes set breakout PRs and to help 200 amateur athletes level up.
It all starts with that first session!