Bredin on Running & Training

124 RUNNING AND TRAINING. end of a hard match-and here I will make another digression by remarking that at Rugby football I was about as useful as a duck would be in a billiard handicap-whilst a good three-quarter doing the same amount of work would end up fresh and well; but if the scenes were changed to a cinder-path, I could run 200 yards at top speed, and, with two minutes' interval, repeat the performance a good many times. Taking a good sprinter like Gould, who could have made a fair race with me on the first occasion, when we commenced the third jaunt I have little doubt that he would have required a long start to hold his own. Where the very considerable difference in stamina lies between running on a track or a field I do not know, and the explanation that, in the former case, a man gets on his toes, which it is impossible to do in boots, scarcely appears to me to sufficiently account for the loss of stamina of most runners on a football field. Gould relates a good yarn concerning a certain football match which took place in a Somersetshire town on a very wet day, when both the grass and ball were so slippery as to make the Welsh system of passing exceedingly difficult. On leaving the ground after the match, a yokel, tapping him on the shoulder, inquired, " Be you A. J. Gould ? " " Yes," came the reply. "Then if I knowed ee was as poor as that, I'm blowed if I'd have ever paid sixpence to see ee play." At Reading that autumn, '92, I for the first time met J. Kibblewhite (the winner of numerous championships on the flat and across country, who could run half a mile inside two minutes and ten miles inside fifty-two), and beat him by half a yard in a level r,ooo yards race,