Athletics and Football (extract)

34 ATHLETICS a fellow-countryman of Allardice (who always ran under the name of Barclay) compiled a work, ' Pedestrianism, or An Account of the Performances of Celebrated Pedestrians during the last and present Century, witha Full Narrativeof Captain Barclay's public and private Matches,and an Essay on Training.' It is from this work,published in Aberdeen byMr. Walter Thom in 1813, that we derive our account of many of the eighteenth-century feats which we have mentioned above. We can hardly blame Mr. Thom for following the prevailing fashion of the age in his advice on training. The diet he recommends is beef, mutton, stale bread, strong beer, and Glauber salts; the exercise, constant morning walking and sweating. ( The patient,' he says, 'should be purged with constant medicines, sweated by walkingunder a load of clothes and by lying betweenfeather-beds.' Fish, vegetables,cheese, butter, eggs, are strongly forbidden, and the use of an occa­ sional emetic is suggested. Let modern athletes be thankful that they are trained upon a different system. Mr. Thom begins by stating that he had originally only intended to make an account of Captain Barclay, but then thought it advisable to add preliminary chapters upon the captain's more eminent predecessors in athletic fame. This preliminary part he divides into four heads—(1)matches of several days' continuance ; (2) one day matches ; (3) those which were performed in one or more hours, and required good wind and great agility; (4) those completed in seconds or minutes, which showed great swiftness. From this some­ what crude division it could only be expected that he would swallowa number of marvellousstories as to distance and time ; but, in spite of these defects, the book is genuinely interesting. It would be tedious to give a list of the long-distanceper­ formances recorded by Mr. Thom and the ' Sporting Magazine,' the best of them being those of Foster Powell; but it is worth notice that the performers are from every class of society— officers in the army, country gentlemen, farmers, labourers, butchers, many of them being professional pedestrians and