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Why your hurdler slows down after the last hurdle

The run-in to the line gets almost no practice time, and in a race decided by hundredths that is where a lot of it goes.

Ask a hurdle coach what they worked on today and you will hear about the start, the first three steps, the stutter, the trail leg. Ask when they last timed the run-in from the last hurdle to the line, and most will not have an answer, because most hurdle practice stops at the last barrier.

What actually happens after the last barrier

For most of the race the athlete has been running to a fixed distance with a stride pattern built to fit it exactly, three steps between barriers, the same three steps every time. The run-in is the first open sprinting they have done since the blocks, with no barrier left to regulate the stride, and a pattern trained for one job does not switch jobs cleanly in three or four strides.

Three things commonly cause the fade, and they are not the same problem wearing different clothes.

• A cleared-the-barriers relief. Some athletes mentally finish the race at the last hurdle and physically finish it a stride later.
• A stride pattern that will not reset. The legs keep running the three-step rhythm for a stride or two after there is no hurdle to run it to, which shortens the stride right when the race wants it lengthened.
• A tired last clearance. If the trunk dip or the hip rise over the final barrier is worse than over the first, the athlete lands from it already behind on posture, and posture lost late in a race does not come back for free.

What is worth measuring, and what is not

StatLap's Film Room reads hurdles clips for trunk dip over the barrier, lead-leg extension, how far the hips rise at the hurdle, and overstride between barriers. Run the same athlete's clearance over hurdle two against their clearance over the last hurdle in the same race, and a tired final barrier shows up as a number rather than a guess.

What it will not do is tell you the run-in itself got slower. That is a straight split, and this is not a timing tool for it. If you actually want to know whether the last 15 metres cost time, time it: the Workout page's laps mode times consecutive reps with no rest between them, on the phone already at the line, and the segment can be compared to the same athlete's flat speed over the same distance elsewhere in the session.

One clip only tells you about the clearance it was filmed at. If the last hurdle looks clean in practice and the race still fades, the fade is conditioning, not technique, and no amount of camera work finds a fitness problem.

Related

Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise