Yesterday, I broke it with my face.
Completely my fault - I set the hurdles specifically close and accidentally set up the final hurdle twice as close as it was supposed to be and didn't check them before full speed hurdling through them - I actually learned and (inadvertantly) taught a couple of good lessons at the cost of this poor hurdle.
1. We All Fall Down. A number of our Harvard athletes were on the track to witness my grace (what fun is an epic fall if ther's no one there to share it with? I mean, if a hurdler trips in the woods with no one there, there's still a sound, it's just not nearly as funny to talk about later), and I think it was actually a good thing for them to see. Possibly due to the completely fabricated stories I tell them about my training or the incredibly wise and all-knowing reputation that has been built up around me as an athlete and coach (please read sarcasm here) but I'm not sure they all realize that I still make plenty of mistakes. Just about every one of my hurdlers has gone down in a workout, and although it has been a while for me and I definitely don't like it to happen often, I hope they realize that its something we all do. Its just a part if hurdling. Again, I'm not a fan of
falling, nor do I coach my athletes to the point that I think they might fall, but to be honest, if you haven't fallen, if you haven't FAILED, as far as I'm concered, you're not trying hard enough. In order to get better you must go somewhere you've never been before. Until you step to that line and dare cross it, that line becomes a wall. On my new lift card from Coach P (now at Duke - good luck to him, we miss you around here) there's a quote attributed to Anthony C. Clarke:
"The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossoble."
True, its best not to use your face to seak such limits, but hey, different strokes for different folks...
2. Commit. This could have been much worse, but fortunately for me, this hurdle came of the incident much worse than I did and I attribute that to one thing: I was 100% commited to hurdling it - despite ridiculous circumstances. I use it all the time in coaching, especially the field events (ie pole vault), but its the old football rule: the moment you let off, as soon as you drop below anything but 100% commitment, that's when things go wrong, and that's when you open yourself up for injury. If you are staring down a 250 ilb linebacker running full bore for your spleen, or hauling but down a vault runway with a 16 foot long fiberglass pole in your hands the size of a telephone pole, or if say, completely hypathetically, you find yourself 3 hurdles deep and running at full speed into a 39" hurdle 3 feet closer than you expect, if you're not commited or trusting enough in your own
athletic ability to blast through and you try to bail, that's when you set yourself up to do something your body is unprepared for, when you set yourself up for disaster.
Hell, to tell you the truth, I'm damn proud of myself. I fully believe that a year or two ago, had I found myself at that speed that close to a hurdle, the "oh sh*t" mechanism would have kicked in and I would have spazzed out and done everything I could to avoid that hurdle. For the drill the hurdles were already close and thus I was already cue'ing on my quickness in between so that as I found myself impossibly close to the hurdle, surprisingly, my first reaction was simply: you're gonna have to get a lot quicker to make it over this one. I tried, I caught a spike, I tripped, I fell, but above all I did not question and just went. I commited.
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