Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Cross-Country Running in America 347 seconds between the whistle-wail and the moment you breast the tape and are taken care of by your friends - in that there is no fun. Cross-country running, and, above all, hare-and– hound running, is fun while you are doing it. The farther you go the better you feel - it is an increasing joy as long as it lasts -you are free as a bird almost. Clothes, sidewalks, ridiculous stiff boxes called hats, ridiculous narrow grooves called streets, trolley cars, " L " trains, and other artificial means of locomotion are thrown aside; you're yourself and the ·world's your own. Are there ten miles or so of rough country between you and home - ten miles of thickets and meadow-land and brooks and rugged hill ides? You've got your legs and you've got your lungs, and you know them and know what they can do. And so it's up the hills and through the thickets and over the meadows - hit up the pace and the devil take the hindmost ! In all the list of athletic sports there is none that will do more to brush away from you the dust of overcivilization, that will do more to set you on your feet and give you a grip on the world than the run across country. Cross-country running started, of course, in England. English schoolboys were going in for hare-and-hound runs as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century. The famous "Crick Run" of "Tom Brown's School Days" was