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Show MOST RUNNERS FAIL : TO TRAIN PROPERLY Fault Is Typical cf Great Many Track Athletes. Majority of Sprinters Do Little or No Work Outside of Days on Which They Compete Fail to Build Themselves Up. Only a few days ago the remarl? was made to a prominent athlete that his trouble was that he never did any training except when he was on the track, and that that fault was not confined con-fined to him alone, but was typical of a great many if not most track athletes. ath-letes. "The trouble with most of you runners run-ners of today is," said this critic, "that you nearer do any training at all until you come out to run a race. The method meth-od that seems to have won approval of most of you calls for entering as many races as you possibly can In the course of the season and letting flie running you get in those races stand as a substitute for good, hard, persistent per-sistent training." In many respects this criticism appears ap-pears to be well founded if the performances per-formances of many of the best athletes can be taken as a basis upon which to pass judgment. Instead of building themselves up by a course of systematic" systemat-ic" '""Til?'-- middle-distance runners, V " ovei-vthing from a for example, emci c : 300-yard sprint to a two-mile race in preparation for a 600 or a 1,000-yard race two months hence. They do little training in between and once or maybe may-be twice a week they "run their heads off" at a distance either too long or too short for their special powers. A man who has received his early training under a competent school or college coach rarely if ever trains In such a haphazard way. He has been bred into the way of preparing himself for a given contest by a series of exercises ex-ercises leading directly tip to the event in question. Just for the sake of getting get-ting some competition he may run a race at a distance as a sort of tryout a week before the contest toward which he is aiming, but he never thinks of entering everything that comes along, satisfying himself that the running run-ning he does in that way Is the kind of training he necj. |