Percy C. Madeira - University Archives and Records Center ...

Lon Myers . Who HeId Enough Records for Three
Men . Ranging, All the Way From 100 Yards to One Mil e
layer of fine cinders on top . They are planned fo r
resilience and spring . They are planned to drai n
easily . They are swept and rolled before big races .
They are cared for constantly, every day, until the y
are like billiard tables .
According to Mr . William J. Bingham, Director of
Athletics at Harvard University . it has been estimated
that the present stadium track is about si x
seconds faster than the first Harvard stadium track ,
the one built in I897 .
Lawson Robertson, the Olympic coach, who know s
more about track athletics than any other man I
know, is of the opinion that the track in the Olympi c
Stadium at Los Angeles, which has a base of peat, is
some seconds faster than the Harvard track .
It was on a fifth-of-a-mile track, with two mor e
turns to the mile than the modern quarter-mil e
track, that the early Intercollegiate Association an d
the National Association held their meets .
Second, today we have tenth-of-a-second sto p
watches. Fifty years ago, the stop watches cut the
seconds into quarters, later into fifths, and now int o
tenths. If a man ran a hundred yards in nine an d
eight-tenths seconds fifty years ago, his time would
be recorded as ten seconds . In order to get a better
THE SATURDAY EVENING POS T
record, he would have had to run fast enoug h
to register nine and three-fourths . and h e might
have had to run it in nine and six-tenths t o
have cut his official time down to nine an d
three-fourths seconds .
I asked Lawson Robertson what advantage
it would be fair to say the tenth-second sto p
watch gives the present-day runner, and h e
said, "The advantage would be about twotenths
of a second . "
Third, the modern crouching start . All race s
used to start with a standing start when I wa s
running . Mike Murphy . who developed th e
crouch start. used to say it was worth a tent h
of a second to a runner . Robertson thinks it i s
worth more than a tenth of a second .
Fourth . the 220 used to be run around a curve ,
and the start was at the beginning of the curve .
The lanes were not staggered : in fact, there
were no lanes . The result was a crowding of th e
contestants, a jostling and pushing and elbowing,
and an inability r eally to get under way
until the straightaway was reached . A man on
the outside sometimes had to run yards farther
than a man on the pole . I asked Robertson to
figure the time advantage the modern 220
straightaway gave a runner .
"One full second ." he said .
I asked him . " What about the elimination of
one curve from the quarter mile? We used t o
run it around two curves . By the time the runners
have hit the first curve now, they ar e
straightened out, and all scrambling and jockey -
ing has been eliminated . "
Robertson thinks that a man running a quarter
around one curve instead of two has a time
advantage of eight-tenths of a second before he
even steps on the track .
In addition to these things . I thought of others .
no less important to my mind . As a matter of fact .
perhaps more important than improved tracks ,
crouching starts and tenth-secon d
watches .
First, expert coaching . Serond, com -
competition . Third, a new mental ceiling .
Educating Feet
HE clubs, colleges, universities,
Thigh schools and prep schools of
today employ men whose business i t
is to polish and perfect the form of th e
young men under them . They kno w
about rhythm, timing, co-ordinatio n
and obtaining a maximum r esul t
from the minimum effort . They mak e
sure that their teams will go into
competition knowing all that the
champions know, by the use of slo w
movies, charts, diagrams and measurements
.
Their stars begin where th e
champions of last year. and the year
of the Motion Picture . Above— William Byrd Page Who jumped Nine Inches Higher Than His Own Head . to a World's Record
1 7
before, left off. as far as a knowledge of technique i s
concerned .
In my day . we taught ourselves . Or we comp e ted
untaught . We sailed over hurdles instead of clipping
them scissorwise, because we didn't know any bet -
ter. We flung ourselves at a broad jump take-off o r
at the high jump and vaulting crossbars with a will .
but without the placing of colored pegs at certai n
mathematically spaced intervals along the runway .
worked out to a fraction of an inch by a coach . W e
didn ' t know about moving the vaulting standards
back from the pit when the bar climbed higher, so
that our trajectory would lift : we hit the jumping
take-offs helter-skelter, either inches behind or foul -
ing, instead of so judging our run that every last inc h
would he utilized .
Stepchildren of the Cinders
UR old ash vaulting poles had no spring . The y
O were of heavy wood which was clumsy to manipulate
. and there was no box sunk into the ground into
which to thrust your pole while vaulting, as is th e
case now . We didn 't know that a pole of bamboo
would act as a catapult and throw a man inche s
higher in the air . We thought we were lucky if the
ash pole didn't break in midair and impale a vaulte r
on its jagged halves .
We had no trainers who made us check our weight s
on a chart before and after each practice, to see
whether or not we were drawing our edge too fine .
Nobody told us what to do each day in order to approach
a race at the peak of condition. No coach o r
manager took care of all the petty and annoying little
details of buying tickets, arranging hotel accommodations
. transportation to and from the meet . an d
of seeing that our baggage was in the dressing roo m
for us when we got there. No manager kept an ey e
on the progress of the meet and saw to it that we we r e
warmed up in time and out on the track to r eport t o
the clerk of the course . (Continued on Pa te 7 7