Kilpatrick, the world's fastest half-miler, entered the championship class in the summer of 1894, when he won both the intercollegiate and the national amateur half mile. Kilpatrick was then a student of Union. The half at Mott Haven was run in 1 minute 59e seconds, and that at the national championship in 1 minute 55/ seconds. Kilpatrick, also, won the national amateur cham pionship half mile in the two following years, 1895 and 1896, in the respective times of i min ute 561 seconds and I minute 572- seconds. His supreme performance, and that on which his world's record stands, was made at the games between the New York Athletic Club team and the Oxford-Cambridge team on September 2 I, 1895. There were four men in the race, F. S. Horan and C. H. Lewin of Cambridge Univer sity and the London Athletic Club, H. S. Lyons of the New York Athletic Club, and Kilpatrick, who ran both as a member of the latter club and as a student of Union. At the start Lyons and Lewin took the lead, and the former, who was an exquisite judge of pace, ran the first quarter in 54 seconds, as he had been directed to do. Kil patrick, who judged pace poorly, trailed Lyons, as he had been instructed, and thus finished the first quarter in very fast time —much faster than he would have run it if left to his own devices. Shortly beyond the quarter-mile mark the cham pion to-be swung ahead into the lead. For the next two hundred yards he continued to draw farther and farther away, and although Horan of Cambridge made a game rally and shortened the gap a bit in the last one hundred yards, Kilpatrick won decisively, sixteen yards to the good. His time was I minute 53f seconds, which broke all previous records for the half mile, amateur and professional. Horan, himself a runner of the very first class, finished in i minute 555 seconds. As far as weather and track went the conditions under which Kilpatrick's record was made were perfect. The inevitable " if," which almost inva riably tantalizes the spectators of a record-break ing performance, was present here in the shape of the embarrassing circumstances in which Kil patrick was placed during the race. His running clothes became deranged early in the race, and he ran the last quarter under such vexation as was enough, in the opinion of " Father Bill " Curtis and other spectators of similar discernment and experience, to have slowed his time a considerable fraction of a second.
The college runner who has come nearest to Kilpatrick's form was Evan Hollister of Harvard '97. Hollister won the intercollegiate half mile three years in succession, in 1895, 1896, and 1897. He was relied upon for consistent firsts in the half and quarter at dual games, and in team races at the winter meets he was an equally reliable performer. His record — the Harvard College record, and the fastest college half mile next to Kilpatrick's — was made at the Harvard varsity games in the spring of 1897. It was the writer's pleasure to run — at a discreet distance — in the race in which Mr. Hollister made this record, and I remember that everybody wished there had been some one to push him and make him do better. As it was, starting from the pole he strode out ahead and ran what was practically an unpaced trial from start to finish. It was a fine day for running and the track was perfect. Hol lister broke the tape in i minute 54g- seconds, and he was quite able to take care of himself at the finish. If Mr. Kilpatrick could have been there that day and in his 1895 form, there would have been a half-mile race worth seeing. Hollister was a tall and well-built man, with more body to him than most half-milers have. When running, his back was held almost perfectly straight, a bit too straight perhaps, and the spring seemed to come almost altogether from his legs, without much aid from up above. But whatever the re sulting picture lost in flexibility and easy litheness, it made up in its impression of straight speed and power. As one used to see him coming down the cinder path, with his back firm, arms down, and chin well in, he reminded one of an express train on a good stretch of level track. Kilpatrick raced and won only once at Mott Haven, and then, probably because of his inability properly to judge pace and his habit of loafing in the first quarter, he won only in 1 minute 59A-- seconds. Hollister's i minute 565 seconds made at Mott Haven in 1896, therefore, stood as the intercol legiate record until equalled in 1904 by E. B. Parsons of Yale.
No half-milers have since come up to step into the seven-leagued shoes that Kilpatrick and Hollister wore. Burke, who was one of Kilpat rick's contemporaries, lasted long enough to win the half in 1898 at the national championships, and at Mott Haven in 1899. The latter race was
won in 1.54 but Burke was more particularly a quarter-miler and his best work was done at the shorter distance. J. F. Cregan of Princeton, who won the half in 1.58* at Mott Haven, in 1898, on the same day that he won the mile in 4.23*, was one of the best middle-distance men who have come up since the record was made. Cregan had the build and the look of the typical half miler, but he went in most seriously for the longer distance and he repeated his Mott Haven victory of 1898 in the mile in 1899 and 1900. These three consecutive victories, in the times of 4.23*, 4.255, and 4.24, are the most consistent record for high-class mile running ever made at Mott Haven. George Orton of Pennsylvania, and of various athletic clubs, holds the inter collegiate mile record of 4.235, one-fifth of a second better than Cregan's record which he made in 1895. Orton won the mile again at Mott Haven in 1897, in 4.25. He was an inde fatigable racer and a successful campaigner on all sorts of tracks. He won the amateur champion ship miles in 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, and 19oo. His best time for these races was 4.24i, which he made in 1894, the year before he broke the intercollegiate record, and the rest of the times were all respectable. Orton was a typical mile runner, short, compact, hard as nails, and he ran low, easily, and always craftily.
This running with one's head, necessary as it is in all the distances longer than the dashes, is indispensable in such long-drawn-out contests as the mile. In the quarter the runner practically sprints down to the last fifty yards, when the inevitable fatigue overcomes him and he finishes " on what he has left " ; in the half the first-class racer tries, generally, to do the first quarter in from 57 to 59 seconds. He has the sensation of " moving up " in the last half, but this is caused rather more by the added effort necessary to maintain the pace after fatigue has set in than by any actual increase in speed. It might almost be said, speaking in generalities, that it is the run ner's aim in the half to start out at a pace which can consistently be maintained from start to finish. There are different methods of planning out the pace in the mile, but the intelligent runner is likely to run his first quarter in the neighbor hood of 65 seconds, the second quarter at about the same pace, the third quarter a bit slower, and the last as fast as he safely can. To be lured into a rash sprinting match in the first part of so long a distance as the mile is obviously fatal, and yet it is a striking fact that time and again men who have all the physical qualifications of first class milers fail merely because they lack the self-control and the headwork properly to run this race. Certainly, in a large field, where there are two first-class runners of practically equal ability, one of whom runs blindly and by impulse and the other of whom races with judgment, the chances of victory are decidedly with the man who runs with his " head." To be able to " feel " the pace which one can consistently maintain throughout a mile race, to settle into it after the spring away from the mark, not to be held back by crafty campaigners who happen to be especially good at the sprint-in to the tape nor to be hurried by decoy pace-makers — all this requires endless trials of running under the watch, and, when the race actually comes, all that the contestant has of judgment, self-control, and patience. There are times when a scratch man may want to sprint away at the start for the express purpose of taking the heart out of his less experienced and less con fident opponents, or purposely hold back because he knows that he can beat them when it comes to the sprint home, or when the best way to wear out a rival may seem to be to hook one's self into his stride, force him to set the pace, and trust to taking the fight out of him by a sudden show of strength at the finish. All such things depend on the runner's temperament and physical condi tion, the fields that he is up against, and the special accidents of the race. Whatever is done must be done quickly, and any one who has ever run a mile or a half mile knows that it is very much easier, after the race is over, to tell what ought to have been done at any given moment than it was to decide during the running, when things were moving like the pictures in a biograph machine, legs were leaden, and lungs were stone, and some rank outsider was showing his heels ten or fifteen yards ahead. And it is this strategic ability, this trick of thinking in action, that makes the difference between the runners who merely run pluckily, and those who run and win.