Why? The Science of Athletics

WHY?-THE SCIENCE OF ATHLETICS people, taking but little exercise, get into the habit of shallow breathing and often make use of no more than a tenth of the natural lung capacity, which means to say that they take in insufficient oxygen for the use of the blood, which, in consequence of this semi-starvation, refuses to provide enough red corpuscles and a condition of amemia is created. But when the athlete gets into action he needs more oxygen and it is supplied because the stimulation of the medulla by the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the blood causes it to send out message to the respiratory organs to work harder. The importance of oxygen to the athlete can be well understood from the stated fact that the main cause of fatigue is to be found in an insufficient supply of oxygen, and, of course, it is all a question of training as to whether the human system will supply sufficient oxygen to the muscles to enable them to perform the violent, or the sustained, effort which the athlete wishes to make. In their excellent book Athletics, D. G. A. Lowe and A. E. Porritt have incorporated an ingenious table, based upon certain world's records obtaining in 1929, which shows average speed in miles per hour for var:ious running distances. Thus, the hundred yards man tr'3.vels at from 20 r/4 to 21 rfg m.p.h.; quarter miler, r8 r/4 to 19 m.p.h.; half-miler,- rs to r6 m.p.h.; and the one-miler from rg rfg to 14 r/g m.p.h. With these figures before him, the reader will no doubt ask why the rate at wllich a man can, run diminishes so r"!-pidly in ratio to the distance he travels. But if the roo yards runner were to continue his rapid progress for much farther than the allotted distance of his race he would require somewhere in the neighbour– hood of 6! gallons of oxygen per minute to enable him to sustain his effort. As man is built at present, his heart and lungs cannot supply him with more than about rf7th of that amount of oxygen, and so we see that a sprinter cannot maintain his maximum effort for more than a fraction of a minute and that distance runners