DISTANCE RUNS AND DISTANCE RUNNERS Temperamentally, the nervous and high-strung American type is more adapted to the sprints than to the distance runs. That is to say, theoretically speaking, the typical American athlete ought, with a given amount of training, to make a better com parative showing in the hundred than in the mile, and by the same token his English cousin ought, with an equal amount of preparation, to make a better comparative record in the mile than in the hundred. That the present world's record for the mile was made in England and the world's record for the hundred was made in America is a rather more fortuitous proof of this fact than the show ing which our college athletes have made against the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge. For the men who make world's records are indi vidual prodigies rather than types, and far less representative of the class from which they spring than are the average amateur athletes of the col lege teams, who have gone in for running for the fun of the thing, and are only slightly more proficient at their various events than perhaps scores of their fellow-collegians. And that the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge are better at the long distances than those of Har vard and Yale has been only too vividly demon strated on the several international occasions when these young gentlemen have had the pleasure of meeting.
The most plausible explanation of the average superiority of Englishmen at the long distances is the big fact that outdoor sport has been for generations, and to a considerable body of the people, a real and vital thing in a sense that we do not as yet understand it here. Sport has long been a habit there ; with us it has not yet quite ceased to be a fad. Distance running requires endurance rather than speed, and endurance is not acquired in a month or in a year. If it makes a difference in the way a race-horse answers the question which the jockey puts to him in the stretch, whether or not his grandsire won the Suburban, so should it make a differ ence in the last fifty yards of a mile run whether or not a man's father rowed in his college eight and a man's grandfather followed the hounds at three-score-and-ten. And if the battles of the Iron Duke were won on the football fields of the English schools, so, one fancies, is the mile or two-mile run of to-day's international meet won in the paper-chases of Rugby and Eton. The
English climate, as well as the English habit of exercise, has also had its effect in cultivating endurance. The very thing which takes the life and snap out of an American sprinter who spends more than a week on English soil, seems to act as a sort of stay and seasoner to the more leisurely English athlete. There is, undoubtedly, some thing almost magnetic in our American air, at least in the sort of atmosphere that is found in the northeastern Atlantic states where the inter national meets have been held. It acts as a nervous stimulant, and it has been observed on several occasions that English athletes who had apparently been knocked out by the change of climate, and who went into a contest feeling any thing but fit, yet managed to run quite as fast as they had ever run at home. What the English climate lacks in this stimulating effect it seems to make up in its general soothing and nourishing influence, and if the athlete who has been bred in it is deficient in snap and nervous spring he is strong in endurance and vitality.
The fastest authentic time yet recorded for the mile run was the record of 4 minutes I24 seconds made by the Englishman, W. G. George, in i886. George had been running for several years as an amateur before becoming a professional in a match with another English distance runner, Cummings, and he had an amateur record of 4 minutes 18f seconds, made at the English championships, in 1884, which was at that time a new record for the world. The fastest amateur mile that has yet been run was that done in 4 minutes i5t- seconds, by T. P. Conneff, at the New York Athletic Club track at Traver's Island, on August 28, 1895. So far as the record books go, therefore, America can claim the fastest amateur mile; and yet Con neff was born in Ireland, and he had run on the other side before coming here. Our next fastest mile, 4 minutes 2 I 1 seconds, was made by George Orton, and he came from Canada. In England, on the other hand, a number of men have done 4 minutes zo seconds in the mile, and at the Eng lish championships in 19°2, for instance, J. Binks won in 4 minutes 165 seconds, the second man was only one yard behind him, and the third and fourth men both finished within 4 minutes 2 0 seconds.