Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

CHAPTER IV TRACK ATHLETICS IN THE COLLEGES THE colleges, meanwhile, somewhat conserva– tive as they had been at first in taking up the new sport, had long been pursuing it with under– graduate enthusiasm, and the records, poor enough at first, had begun to approach within striking dis– tance of the figures of what one might call modern times. Running was taken up in the Eastern col– leges in the early seventies, and the Intercollegi– ate Athletic Association was organized in 1876; but it was not until well along in the eighties and nineties that anything like the present widespread interest was aroused. It is difficult to realize, in these days of athleticism, how primitive, athleti– cally speaking, the time was. It must be re– membered that when running was taken up by the undergraduates the people at large had not yet "discovered the country"; the bicycle, which effected a sort of social revolution to the genera– tion which used it, was not yet invented; and the value of exercise and outdoor sport, together with all our modern erudition in the way of anthropo– metric charts and pulley-weight pedagogy, were 266