Athletics and Football (extract)

86 ATHLETICS amount of exercise. They must not, however, on any account neglect their speed, and frequent starts and short spins must be practised in addition to their longer trials ; for some time or another during the race, if a quarter-milerof this class is to win, he must spurt past his speedieropponents. Even with these, however,our ownexperience has shownus that more men come to their race overdrawn than unfit. As it is with diet, so it is with exercise; each man must be treated in the preparation for a race with that amount and that quality which will suit his individual case, and the mistakes that are made come from following a system with unreasonable subservience without recollectingfor whatends the system wasoriginally adopted. In considering the performances of celebrated sprinters we have seen that it is hard to say whether those of the present or the past day are better, but in coming to the quarter-mile and longer distances there can be no doubt that the runners of the last few years have done better times over these courses. The reason is not only that the men are better trained, and that out of the larger number of competitors there is more chance of finding a veritable champion, but there is this further con­ sideration, that it is only by slow degrees that athletes have discovered of what amount of speed and stay the human body is capable. In the earlydays of athletics a quarter-milewasoften treated by good runners as a waiting race, and the times of good raceswere accordingly very slow. For the first two years after the establishment of the championship in 1866 the quarter-mile race waswon by Ridley, an Eton boy, who certainlymust have been a phenomenon, as in 1867, while still at school, he wonthe Hundred Yardsand Quarter-mile Championshipsin the same day. The times, however,can shownothing ofhis real ability, as they wereas follows: in 1866,55 seconds ; in 1867, 52I seconds. In the following year, when Ridley was at Cambridge, he showed something of his true powers,for in the Inter-Universitymeeting of that year he won the Quarter-mile in 51 seconds, winning with some ease. That year, however,he was not destined to