Athletic Training

150 ATHLETIC TRAINING everything to gain, from athletic competition. Indeed, I have seen so many cases in which weak and undeveloped boys and young men have become strong and well through ath– letics that I know the dangers of the so-called athletic heart have been terribly _exaggerated. What convinces me more than ever of the soundness of my contention is that I have never known a single athlete whom I have trained or with whom I have worked, either in professional or amateur athletics, who died from 'what some physicians term the athletic heart. In my younger days I trained many of the best long-distance walkers and runners, men who ran or walkeq. from sixty to seventy miles a day in preparation for their athletic contests. If the declaration of those who be– lieve in the dangers of the athletic heart were to be accepted, most of these men should have dropped dead on the street lorig ago. But the fact is that many of them are now between sixty and seventy years of age and in perfect health. I have not been able to trace one death to the athletic heart. The heart is an automatic organ, and as such it more readily adjusts itself to the strain