Why? The Science of Athletics

WHY?-THE SCIENCE OF ATHLETICS winning the Empire Games roo yatds in 1934 and you will soon see the sort of expression that should be im– printed upon a man's features when he is going all out to win a fast sprint race. Heart the Vital Organ It is no wonder that we call the heart the "vital organ" when we think of this little self-regulating pump, weighing less than a pound, and realize the amount of work which it does automatically. According to Professor A. V. Hill (Living Machinery, G. Bell & Sons Ltd., London), even when a man is at rest his blood circulates at nearly a gallon a minute, which is about equal to the total amount of blood in his body and represents nearly soo,ooo gallons a year. Under the stress of violent exertion, such as we have just been discussing, the output may be eight times as great, and even a man doing normal work would produce the equivalent of raising almost a ton of water from sea level to the top of Mount Everest. The heart will work for us in the most exacting and what often appear to be unfair conditions. It is, in fact, comparatively hard for a really fit man to give his heart too much work to do. As Dr. Tait McKenzie has told us, violent effort imposes a big strain upon the blood vessels and the blood-vessel walls, and if the heart is not sound or if the muscles are old or are inelastic there is a danger of rupture. But if the muscles are young and fully elastic, as they are in the case of a well and sensibly trained athlete, then the danger of such a rupture has not been shown to exist. One hears, occasionally, of instances of erstwhile great athletes dropping dead when they have reached the forties, and the inevitable question is asked, "Would that have happened to them if they had not followed athletic sport so keenly in their youth?" Quite frankly, there never can be a proper answer to that question, simply because each such case can be judged only on its own individual history. Should it