Why? The Science of Athletics

HUMAN MECHANISM so happen that the man in question has fallen dead while taking part in a veterans' race, then the answer is that if a man is fool enough to join a suicide club no one but he himself can be blamed for the consequences. He has not come to an untimely end because he followed athletics when he was young and fit, but because he would persist in going on competing in a pastime of youth after advancing age had begun to harden his arteries. Youth will be served, and Anno Domini cannot be denied. Personally, I am strongly of the opinion that the governing body of athletics should make it a hard and fast rule that no veterans' races should be run in connection with any sports meeting held under A.A.A. laws. In the field events the case is different, and one does find instances of men like Matt McGrath and Pat McDonald, the American hammer and shot experts, going on competing right into the fifties without any ill effects. Apart from men who go on competing long after they should have the good sense to hang up their spiked shoes, it often happens that a man who has given to athletics pretty well everything there is in him, until he is, say, five-and-twenty, suddenly decides that it is about time he began to think about settling down to earn his living. He then brings to his work that unbounded vigour and enthusiasm that previously he has given to athletics. So keen on his job does such a man become that he takes little or no exercise, overworks and possibly over-eats . . He over-eats, probably, because in the later years of h1s athletic career he has been accustomed to doing him– self pretty well, for the sake of making up muscular wastage. Going from an active to a sedentary life is the very deuce, anyhow, and if you add to that the worry of establishing a l;>usiness, you get a pretty good idea of ~hy that type of man soon begins to suffer from indiges– tion and nervous dyspepsia. In such circumstances I do not think that one can blame his early demise on to his E