Athletics of To-Day 1929

Classical Distances No. 2, Plate rr. As Nurmi's front foot is grounded at the completion of each stride he lets the knee of that leg give a little and leans his body forward so that the next stride may be perfectly balanced and aided by a strong push off. At the last Olympic Games in Amsterdam I noticed that all the new generation of Finnish middle distance runners– Kinnunen, Larva, Loukola, and Purje- have adopted urmi's peculiar form, and it is not improbable that this new style may soon be given something more than a merely national vogue. Lightly built, natural runners of the Stallard type need very little work beyond an occasional half or three-quarter mile spin at mod rate speed and a fair amount of walking- six or eight miles at a speed of four miles an hour. The more robust type, like A. G. Hill, Lloyd Hahn, and C. Ellis, need long and strong work to start with, a good deal of sweating, and hard running up to two miles and walking up to ten miles. Milers should do a good deal of sprinting and quarter-miling, aiming in the latter work at a Gg secs. quarter, reduced gradu– ally to something faster. Let the miler r ad his own history on the track by studying his footwork and measuring his strides; let him find out thew ight at which he does his best work and check it by constant use of the scales. Acquire perfect control of your own body by varying the length of the stride while running in training. One means of resting oneself during a di tance race is to alter the gait, but this must be done without d creasing the speed of progression. Striding provides the normal gait, but a bounding action may be us d for short p riods without loss of speed. The difference betwe n the two actions may be se n in ig. 5. The triangles repr s nt the approximate time during which the foot is on th ground forming the fulcrum upon which the body swings forward and the intermediate curv s d note the distance covered by the effort. The effort put forth in striding is obviously the greater of the two, and striding, th refore, is more fatiguing but increases the spe d, a will be apparent by