Coaching and Care of Athletes

COACHING AND CARE OF ATHLETES who had trained the runner than of the runner himself that the race was lost. A few days prior to the event I was at the ground where the visitors were training, and I heard that athlete say to his coach, "Well, I'm pretty tired, but, at the same time, ifyou want me to do any more work, why, I'll go right .to it!" I had also heard the coach talking, and it was fairly clear in my mind that he was over-anxious for his own position. It seemed as though he felt that he might lose his appointment with the authority who employed him if his team did not make good in the forthcoming contest. Now when a coach gets into that state of mind it is bound to have a bad effect on those athletes who have a real liking for him, because it places an unnecessary load of anxiety upon their minds. When this happens it is almost invariably the case that the athletes so affected do not succeed in giving of their best. Staleness, 9f course, is a thing which one is bound to meet sooner or later. The symptoms are all too plain to recognize. The athlete becomes lethargic and often loses his appetite. His expres– sion is heavy, his eyes an~ dull; possibly he suffers from insomnia, or perhaps he is always tired and sleeps too much. It may be also that he becomes unduly irritable. The symptoms of staleness are easy enough to recognize: the cure is hard to find, and the cause very often even harder to identifY. No athlete should go stale through actual training if his schedule has been properly planned and one watches him con– stantly. In this connection the man's weight from day to day is a good guide. As I have said, he is likely to lose weight when he first goes into training and to put on an app9-rently abnormal amount of weight when he has been in training for a week or so. After that he will reach what is known as his 'variable optimum' weight, and this should remain almost constant. A temporary gain or loss of a pound. or ·two one way or the other does not· matter much, but · when a man loses five or six pounds and does not soon put them on again, then it is time for the coach to begin to consider the position. Normally speaking, the cure for staleness is rest, relaxation, and a complete divorce for the time being from anything to do with athletics. On the other hand, a coach should take care not to alarm his athlete by even hinting that he is going stale. If he can carry him over the bad period without ever letting him know that he is 94