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Show am JUST how much training and hard driving can the human system stand? When it comes to a matter of lilting a human being to peak form, training is one of Uie most subtle of all Uie arts. It is a job that calls lor expert treat-, treat-, ment. . For ei.ample, I was talking about tliis with Col. Bob Neyland. head coach of the army team. Colonel Neyland knows what condi- tx VX tion means as well Grantland Rice Si anyone I've run across. "The point you have to watch," he said, "is the human limit. You can't afford to pass that point. In my many years of coaching I've seen squads brought up to 80 per cent efficiency when it came to blocking or tackling. When we tried to lift this 80 per cent to 85 per cent by harder work and longer time, on almost every occasion the squad would drop back to 75 per cent or even 70 per cent. They were willing nough to give all they had, but physical and mental fatigue would leave its poison and the extra work was worse than wasted. It was harmful." Football and War If this goes for football, it also j oes for training needed in war. A good many people, knowing that war is a tougher game than football, or any other game ever invented, can't understand why a soldier shouldn't ne worked from daybreak reveille to nightfall. They can't see why any recreation is needed. But those who know their business in the army and navy understand he cracking point. When anyone is packed with mental men-tal and physical fatigue, there must he resting spots, as every good trainer knows. After that point he can't absorb any further development develop-ment in skill or condition for the time bing. This is why both the army and javy have been smart in getting so many physical conditioners who know what should be done. Golf, for another example, is not a killing game. But a fatigued golfer golf-er is rarely any good. The message mes-sage that comes from a tired brain to tired nerves and muscles is always al-ways badly blurred. The Surest System The surest system is to start training train-ing kids from 13 to 16 years of age. They can be trained to walk from :'J to 12 miles a day. As they get a little older this can be lifted to 15 miles or 20 miles. We have too many hundreds of thousands of boys from 13 to 16 who have known far too little leg work. At that age body contact should be light, to be Increased from year to year. Someone was smart enough in tioth Germany and Japan to start training these younger boys as far lack as 10 years ago. Standing before be-fore the Army-Redskin game in the Los Angeles Coliseum a few weeks ago several of us from the top tower looked down on the Olympic swimming swim-ming stadium, recalling Jap swimmers swim-mers from 14 to 16 years of age winning distant swimming events. These youngsters had been started at the age of nine or ten. Some of them were among the Jap troops that swam to Hong Kong. I have mentioned before about the hundreds of thousands of German Ger-man kids from 12 to 16 who were m hard training all over Germany during the 1936 Olympic games. In this respect both Germany and Japan, knowing the inevitability of a war they were going to start, made this youth training a national plan. This youth training isn't a matter of surmise, but a matter of fact and of record. I still recall an old Southern Civil war poem to Little GifTen of Tennessee. Part of it ran like this "Smitten with grapeshot and gangrene Sixteenth battle and he fourteen." The Only Way Almost every athlete of any importance im-portance started his game as a kid. You never develop stars who start fter 25 or 30. Bob Jones began playing golf at ihe age of eight. Jack Dempsey was street-fighting at the age of 10. Babe Ruth was playing baseball at 11. You never make the Big League starting some game after 20. The knaok comes to younger minds and younger muscles to kids who came along to championships later on. If this is true in sport, it must be true in many phases of combat work in war flying, marching, shooting, swimming, parachute jumping any part of the war games that calls for skill and stamina. So far this has been overlooked in this country. For the army or navy I'd much rather have a 16-year-old boy than a civilian beyond 30 or 35. The latter are game enough. They will have just as much courage. But they can't have that unbeatable gift of youth so much more easily taught, so much more effective when the showdown arrives. |