I can hear the crowd.
I can hear my competitors running. I could hear the track spikes.
I can feel my heartbeat.
And I never forget I'm running and I'm smiling.
Kevin Young the gold medalist! A new world record, Tom!
You've held this world record for twenty nine years?
Twenty-eight years and eleven months.
Kevin Young is a former olympic hurdler
and up until the night before this interview
he held the world record for the 400 meter hurdles event.
Karsten Warholm bested him by .08 seconds during the Tokyo olympic trials.
And few days before that, Sydney Mclaughlin broke the women’s world record
for the 400 meter hurdles.
It’s an event that’s over in under a minute.
And olympic athletes make it look effortless.
But it’s not as simple as just running and jumping.
It’s actually one of the most demanding races on the track.
So you've got to deal with the endurance factor and the speed factor.
It's a quarter mile, so it's a fast race.
The cross between sprinting and hurdling puts these athletes in a unique position:
They need to train to run at the speed of a race half the length
And build the endurance needed for a race at least twice the length.
Around the track are 10 hurdles evenly spaced 35 meters apart.
To get over them, hurdlers have to make the most
of the 3 energy systems in the human body.
Typically for the first two hurdles off the blocks
the goal is to fire up to race speed.
The first 8 - 12 seconds of a race athletes tap into energy reserves in their muscles,
Which is fine for short, explosive races like the 100 meter dash,
During Warholm's race you can hear the announcer say,
"He reacted to that gun like a 100 meter sprinter."
but after about 10 seconds that energy is spent
And there’s still at least 300 meters and plenty of hurdles to go.
For the next 3-5 hurdles, athletes have to focus
on maintaining their speed using the two other energy systems.
One needs oxygen to help them with endurance as they move through the race.
The other produces energy fast without oxygen, but leads to that familiar muscle burn.
If they move too fast they’ll burn out and have trouble clearing hurdles later on.
By hurdles 6 through 8 they’re coming around the final bend and need to give it their all
to not lose speed.
This is where you see Kevin Young surge ahead in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
"Kevin Young has the lead"
I got to the eighth hurdle, and I literally took off away from the field,
my stride was open, I was moving, and I just pulled away from everybody.
At this point, legs start to feel heavier, and those hurdles start to look higher.
When talking about hurdles 9 and 10 one track coach I spoke with said,
“It’s sheer willpower.”
From that last hurdle there’s still another 40 meters to the finish line to sprint.
But mastering endurance and speed means nothing if you’re not clearing the hurdles efficiently.
And this is what really sets the 400 meter hurdles apart -
the race isn’t just physically taxing
- it’s highly technical.
It's all about being on the track running. That's what you get your speed from.
The hurdle’s there to slow you down.
Hurdlers don’t jump, per-se. They sort of sprint right over the hurdles.
The goal is to spend as little time in the air as possible.
The first leg over the hurdle, called the “lead” leg,
should already be pushing down to the ground
as the “trail” leg follows over the hurdle.
Once they hit the ground they’re focused on the next hurdle.
You have to establish a particular rhythm in the race.
When athletes like Young talk about "rhythm" they’re talking about how many steps
they take between each hurdle.
I remember when I started running hurdles
I would run up on the hurdle, trying to go 13 steps between the hurdles
because the master Edwin Moses did it - and I would always chop steps.
Which is why stride patterns are carefully calculated and practiced long before the starting gun
like in Young’s 1992 world record breaking race:
Stick with your stride pattern.
Stride pattern was 20 the first
thirteen to two
thirteen to three,
tweleve,
tweleve, for hurdles four and five -
then back to 13 for hurdle six through ten,
and 18 steps from the tenth hurdle to the finish line.
Rhythm matters for two reasons:
One - so you don’t stutter coming up to a hurdle
or clip it like Young did on the 10th hurdle of his 1992 race,
and two - so you can control which leg is the “lead” leg.
If you're going 13 steps, you're on one consistent leg
- Your dominant leg.
If you go in 14 steps, you're going left, right,
left, right, left, right.
Top athletes can lead with either leg - but it’s not uncommon for them to have a favorite
If you have a leg that you're not used to hurlding with
you may take it and it'll twist you all up
and have you off balance and you'd just be hoping
and praying that you'd land on the other side of the hurdle.
Finding and perfecting the right pattern is what drives the best athletes forward,
but it's not a "one size fits all" approach.
Just as Kevin Young couldn’t break a world record
following the techniques of Edwin Moses,
Karston Warholm couldn’t use Kevin Young’s methods.
He went out harder than I would ever.
He went 13 to nine, and the tenth hurdle he went 15.
And he just went over it and it was just speed.
Speed at the end of a well-practiced, well-executed plan.
I know how well I ran and my success in the sport itself,
I said, these guys are going to take it to a whole nother level.