Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics learned. All-important as the quick start is in such a distance as the one-hundred-yard dash, there are nevertheless remarkable sprinters who have de– pended more on their speed during the last half of the distance than during the first. Wefers, for instance, was such a man. Many a time this large and powerful runner would be on even terms with or even behind his rivals until the last twenty or thirty yards, when he would slip mysteriously away from them as though some exterior power had interposed and lifted him on. I never saw Crum, the Iowa sprinter, run, but I have been told that the same thing was often true of him. In the hundred-yard much more than in the distance runs, the ground to be cov– ered is "felt" as a unit. The experienced runner feels those various strides that are to carry him to the goal in one definite mental impression, very much as one reads a sentence of type with– out noticing the separate letters; he hurls himself toward the tape as toward a mark to be hit, very much as you swing your fist through the air to land on a punching bag, or describe a curve with a whip-lash, with a definite knowledge that at a certain point, which you can "feel" muscularly, the lash will catch and snap. Different runners define this sensation differently. One man con– ceives of the distance as a single straight line, for instance ; another feels it is in two waves, so to