The Science of Colliding With Hurdles
Now and again an interested observer will inquire about the hurdles, an organized track event undertaken by high school boys.
What is this interesting event?
What are the rules?
What are the steps to success?
We can answer these and other questions in these few paragraphs.
The race is run on a multi-lane track, capable of accommodating six to eight separate lanes. It is as far as I know the only track event outside of the field sports, such as high jump or shot put, that requires equipment, in this case, height-adjustable free-standing hurdles placed at frequent intervals along the length of the race.
These hurdles are set to these varying heights and spaced at these predetermined intervals depending upon the specifics of the contest.
Those races as measured in yards are the 110, the 220, the 330, and by recollection a 440 or quarter mile as well.
The heights of the hurdles, as mentioned, are adjustable, and can be sorted into low, intermediate, and high.
The races thus take the form of the ‘110 lows,’ or the ‘220 highs,’ and so on.
To give you something to hang your hat on, the low hurdles might come up to the beltline of an average height high school boy, the intermediate somewhat higher. As to the high hurdles, the groundbreaking Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! had it just about right, that is to say they are as high as an elephant’s eye.
The runner is advised to not look directly to the top of the high hurdle, just as a first time climber is advised to not, at the bottom of Mt. Everest, make a point of looking at the very top peak of that mighty mountain.
It is better to keep your attention on what is directly before you – the trek to base camp and camp 1 and so on in the one case, and traversing the space between the hurdles in the other – than to gaze upward upon an impossibly high summit. In both cases it can lead to neck strain.
I refer at the beginning of this article to an interested observer who inquires after the sport, but that is simply a journalistic convention. As far as I know no one in the great expanse of time that humans have made a home on the planet has ever asked anyone else about the hurdles.
At the most, if this fictional interested observer were walking by, just blessedly walking by, a high school track during a meet or during practice, just more or less living like an ordinary human being, they might at the furthest reach of conjecture go so far as to look over at the hurdlers and idly wonder, “what are they doing that for?”
Oh, the wisdom of the common man!
Indeed, that is the question, one of those paradoxes that have rung down through the ages: what are they doing that for?
The runners themselves seem caught in one of those French existentialist plays that go and on in order to make the point that we are all only scraps of protoplasm floating through a mindless universe.
They can’t quite say what led them to this ‘sport.’
One theory is that the coaches, who are high school teachers themselves, have access to the grades and SAT scores and of course their own observations regarding the varying brightness or dimness of the boys out for track that year, and divide them up accordingly.
(There is a special discussion to have regarding the fellows that go out for the field events, that is to say javelin, high jump, long jump, the shot put, a few others. Choosing these events, which unreel at a leisurely pace, call for a seconds-long burst of effort every half hour or so, and use equipment that more than anything look like something you might find in an old basement, shows wisdom that rises to a level of what can only be called genius-stage, particularly as compared to hurdlers, who are at the other end of the spectrum. When at the beginning of the season these high-IQ individuals raise their hands and select themselves for the field events the observer can only admire the canny, even cunning, intelligence involved.)
The brighter lads within the running events category typically go for the glamour: the 60 yard dash, the 100 yard dash, the 220 yard dash.
You notice the choice word ‘dash’ in the names of the races, which indeed gets the point across that these events are short and the pain involved is soon over with.
Importantly, these short races attract a lot of participants, which is a balm to the non-talented.
For one thing if you are a mediocre athlete your personal non-talent can get lost in the shuffle. A few speed demons emerge but the rest of you finish honorably in a pack and there is no personal shame involved.
Most importantly, since track events are run in ‘heats’ in which the winning runners of one race are then pitted against the winners of another, and so on for several heats until you get to the finals, the odds are good indeed that you will be washed out in the early going.
It is important to keep your goals in mind, even as a young person, and a young person’s goal on these occasions is to fail early, fail often, fail entirely, get eliminated, and then go about your busy day. It’s a big world out there. What are you doing hanging around a cold, windy high school track?
This is true as well of spelling bees, and of these field events that I spoke of earlier, which are not only easy but are soon done with, particularly the high jump, which allows you to fail fully almost from the beginning. And it isn’t even that hard! You just jump a couple of times and run into that bar, it clangs down to the concrete each time, and then you’re out of there.
These ‘heats’ I speak of are a different matter in the hurdles, since the event draws far fewer participants than the others. It calls for some discussion.
Anthropologists tell us that the species didn’t get this far without some irreducible level of common sense, and in the typically small turnout for the hurdles at the beginning of the season we see yet another example.
For good reason few high school athletes ‘go out’ for the hurdles. Upon first being introduced to the sport newcomers eye the height of the barriers – fences, really, which in other circumstances would be used to block oxen, trespassers, and escaped criminals – examine the scar tissue building up on the knees of the current participants in the sport, and suddenly have a personal vision of their success in one of the flashier events.
For this reason the hurdles attracts outliers of one sort or another: the easily-herded, the absent-minded, the bewildered, and in truth, not many of those.
These small numbers play into the peculiar dynamic between the hurdle races and the process of of running heats.
The rules, or as far as I know, simple tradition, requires that these ‘heats’ be run, so that even if only two hurdlers, perhaps even from the same school, run the race, then they both will be passed upward to the next heat, and then again to the next one still, until by the end of the meet they may have run the same stupid race three or four times.
But we have not yet talked about the most unique aspect of the hurdle events, their violence.
With the subject of collisions, or involuntary impacts with the hurdles, we reach the heart of the matter.
A Martian in a rocketship scouting out likely targets for destruction in the attack to take place that afternoon to scorch the earth and bring the human species into subjugation, might easily conclude that the purpose of the hurdle races has nothing to do with finish times or medal-winning, but exists for the runners to collide with as many hurdles as possible in the course of the event.
(By the way, this Martian warlord guy figures heavily in the fantasy life of hurdlers, who wish fervently that he and his fleet of marauders, if they are coming anyway, might as well come before the start of the 330 hurdles and commence the total destruction of the globe, starting with this very high school track.)
This same observer might conclude that extra points were awarded for the more spectacular collisions, for the collisions that take place in front of the viewing stands, and more points still for sprawling or somersaulting type falls at full speed which take place directly before any gathering of high school girls.
(Not to worry! They’re not watching anyway! A point I will return to.)
To gage from the reaction of the crowd the highest achievement of all is a kind of synchronized pileup across all six or eight lanes of runners, each colliding with the hurdle in his lane at the exact same time as each other runner is colliding with his own personal hurdle, resulting in a total takedown of all participants in the race, who now sprawl inertly if painfully before the grandstands.
I say ‘the reaction of the crowd,’ which overstates the case by some orders of magnitude.
I mean only that they look around and notice the collision and may grimace in distaste at the carnage, then go back to whatever they were doing.
No sport in the history of man has ever attracted less sustained attention that high school hurdles, and in this matter, as in so many others, we are well advised to attend to what sociologists call ‘the wisdom of the crowd.’
In this time that I speak of — I cannot say if it is still so today — it was an element of the nobility of the sport or the honor of the athlete, or some such folderol, that the runner immediately pick himself up from a collision and gamely reenter the race with lunatic resolve, though by now the rest of the runners may well have completed the event entirely and wandered back to the locker room, perhaps have even driven off with their parents, and the meet organizers are removing the hurdles from the track behind him and putting them away, eyeing him impatiently. Nonetheless, aware of his own noble spirit, the fallen warrior limps through the rest of the race, still colliding and still falling with each of the remaining hurdles he encounters.
It would be a better thing to do after such a collision for him to simply walk off the course and go find something interesting to do.
‘There’s more to life than throwing yourself at fences at full speed,’ might be the thought that occurs to him at such a moment.
(By the way I use here the masculine nomenclature —he, and his, and him, and so on —because by the age that I speak of high school girls had been sprinting ahead of us in intelligence measures and simple animal self-survival for some time. I don’t believe I ever saw a girl run over a single hurdle, not as a challenge, not as a joke, much less run a race just to see what it was like, which demonstrates my point of the relative intelligence between the genders.)
The observer, Martian or otherwise, might conclude that it must take a lot of practice to hit that many hurdles in the course of a single race, and that would be right.
Even in practice when you are not running at full speed and competitive juices are not flowing, the hurdles are collided with more often than not. The runner takes that instinctive knowledge with him into the actual competition.
Knowing that the key to success in any sport is focused repetition at all stages of preparation, the observer would accordingly not be surprised in practice to see a steady routine of run---------->collide, run---------->collide, run---------->collide, run---------->collide, run---------->collide, and indeed this is so, for your typical hurdle practice session consists largely of nothing but running and colliding with the damn things.
This is so because no amount of practice will ever make the runner any good at the hurdles.
It will not make the hurdles lower, nor shorten the distance between them — a distance which inevitably takes exactly the number of steps necessary to bring you leading leg up at precisely the right moment required to drive it into the upcoming hurdle in the most painful way possible — nor dispel the effects of gravity and the eternal laws of bodies in motion.
No amount of practice will ever make the sport seem anything other than an event that wandered over by mistake from an adjoining horse-jumping tournament on another field entirely and now everyone is too embarrassed to point it out.
I have made a study of the secrets to success of those most powerful and influential among us and in no seat of power, or corporate post, or achievement in the arts or sciences, have I ever seen mentioned that the person in question used to run hurdles in high school, and you can see why.
