SPRINTING AND AMERICAN SPRINTERS Sprinters are born and not made. The making helps, and is necessary, but the gift of speed must be born into them. Almost any youth with a presentable pair of legs, a sound heart and lungs, sand, and a bit of fighting edge can, by faithful training, make himself into a respectable distance runner. Men whom one remembers in college as apparently hopeless duffers one sees a year or two later at Mott Haven — members of the team now, perhaps even winning the mile or the two mile run, and at last carrying home the varsity initial to be cherished forever after and handed down to their children's children. In the sprints things are ordered differently. Your sprinter may be long or short legged, it is true ; he may be as slim as a match or he may have to hurl his thirteen stone like a catapult down the hundred yards to the tape ; but to be really a fast man, as we reckon speed in these days of better than even time, he must have a certain combination of strength and spring and nervous energy, a dynamic je ne sais poi, which can no more be acquired by training than one can acquire six fingers, or blue eyes, or an extra cubit of stature.
In the actual running of those arbitrary dis tances, the one-hundred-yard and the two-hundred twenty-yard dashes — which have come to be taken as our tests of speed — and particularly in the shorter of these distances, the start is, more than anything else, the all-important thing. In no way can the distance runner or the average man who has never run at all have this more vividly demonstrated than by starting from a mark with a man who can cover one hundred yards in even time. Although he will feel that he is jumping from the mark the instant the pistol snaps, he will find that there is an appreci able instant in which he stands practically rooted to the ground, while his rival, as if by some baffling magic, shoots out and upward and into his stride. In the ordinary race nowadays, so common and axiomatic has this trick of fast starting become, runners are generally too evenly matched to make the extreme quickness of the start apparent to the average spectator. This quickness in starting is, of course, to a certain extent a matter of practice and judgment, but it is also the result of a more rapid telegraphing from the eye and ear to the brain and back again to the muscles, and as such it is much a matter of temperament and only very partially a thing to be learned. All-important as the quick start is in such a distance as the one-hundred-yard dash, there are nevertheless remarkable sprinters who have de pended more on their speed during the last half of the distance than during the first. Wefers, for instance, was such a man. Many a time this large and powerful runner would be on even terms with or even behind his rivals until the last twenty or thirty yards, when he would slip mysteriously away from them as though some exterior power had interposed and lifted him on.
I never saw Crum, the Iowa sprinter, run, but I have been told that the same thing was often true of him. In the hundred-yard much more than in the distance runs, the ground to be cov ered is " felt " as a unit. The experienced runner feels those various strides that are to carry him to the goal in one definite mental impression, very much as one reads a sentence of type with out noticing the separate letters ; he hurls himself toward the tape as toward a mark to be hit, very much as you swing your fist through the air to land on a punching bag, or describe a curve with a whip-lash, with a definite knowledge that at a certain point, which you can " feel " muscularly, the lash will catch and snap. Different runners define this sensation differently. One man con ceives of the distance as a single straight line, for instance ; another feels it is in two waves, so to speak, one sweeping upward from the start, and the other sweeping upward to the tape, with a just appreciable "hang " somewhere in the middle dis tance. It is when a man loses his grip on this definite conception of the whole distance that he runs away from himself and begins to "climb stairs." While thus refining on these purely sub jective and psychological aspects of the sprint, one may not inappropriately mention another of the less obvious truths about running of which the spectator is not aware. Every man has some distance which, conditions being equal, he can run better than any other distance. This dis tance is determined by the man's build, tempera ment, and physical make-up, and it may not coincide with any of those arbitrary distances which we have established by mutual consent as the length of our races. Records are, therefore, to a certain extent, only approximate proofs of the ability of the runners who made them. It is only approximately true to say that Smith is a faster man than Jones because he can con sistently beat him at one hundred yards, when Jones, perhaps, could beat Smith quite as con sistently at anything up to half that distance. This is, of course, rather more a theoretical than a practical difficulty, and the man who breaks a world's record earns all the glory that is coming to him. And yet, when the fraction of a watch tick determines whether or not a man shall be athletically famous, it seems only right and proper to recall the fact that our rigidly meas ured distances are somewhat arbitrary, and to remember, in saluting the champion, the vast army of plucky chaps who have eaten their hearts out and been forgotten because, by a hand's breadth, perhaps, they were fated to be classed among those who also ran.