Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

CHAPTER VI DISTANCE RUNS AND DISTANCE RUNNERS TEMPERAMENTALLY, the nervous and high-strung American type is more adapted to the sprints than to the distance runs. That is to say, theoretically speaking, the typical American athlete ought, with a given amount of training, to make a better com– parative showing in the hundred than in the mile, and by the same token his English cousin ought, with an equal amount of preparation, to make a better comparati ve record in the mile than in the hundred. That the present world's record for the mile was made in England and the world's record for the hundred was made in America is a rather more fortuitous proof of this fact than the show– ing which our college athletes have made against the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge. For the men who make world's records are indi– vidual prodigies rather than types, and far less representative of the class from which they spring than are the average amateur athletes of the col– lege teams, who have gone in for running for the fun of the thing, and are only slightly more proficient at their vanous event than perhaps y 321