Why? The Science of Athletics

... -=- HEAT, LIGHT AND ENERGY 34 1 bring over to England the Harvard and Yale and the Princeton and Cornell teams are still puzzling over it. Eddie Farrell, the Harvard coach, once made this state– ment : "If we go early or late, the climate affects us. We don't know what to do. The teams, as a rule, don't show up 'as well over there as they do here. It's a matter of change of climate." The same thing happened when the American Olympic Team came to Amsterdam in 1928. Everyone was pre– pared to stake his last shilling on Paddock, McAllister and Wykoff beating the world, but they found Amsterdam seven feet below sea level and inclined to be chilly in August and so they just did not come through. They had lost their vim and dash. Yet the Canadian runners, who had made what amounts to almost the same journey, did well, and Williams won both the 100 and 200 me'<.res. When a team is to be taken te.> a hot or a cold climate the coach can, if he is sufficiently clever and far-sighted, make his plans, as Nurmi is said to have done. There are, however, other considerations to be taken into account. Low oxygen pressure greatly enhances the severity of effort, while an increase in the pressure of oxygen in the air breathed enables an athlete to run faster, because he can take more oxygen per minute into his blood and muscles. Coming into rarefied air and going into competition at once nearly always works out in accordance with that theory, as I found in 1919 when I came up from German East Africa to Nairobi and was beaten into third place in the 100 yards Championship of the King's African Rifles by two men who had been at that station for months, but both of whom I think I could have beaten if all three of us had trained and lived in the same circumstances. The idea of taking a team to the place of competition a week before the event seems to me foolish . It might work out to some small extent if they were going from conditions of low pressure to those yielding an increase in the pressure of oxygen in the air, but it certainly would ; I ! ~ I : I i l 1