Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/128

Rh The unhesitating answer is—No. The training of an athlete for a contest must continue to be essentially different from the training of a man for his every-day living.

Furthermore, the training of an athlete, with the single view of enabling him to concentrate his entire muscular powers for a struggle lasting from ten minutes to two hours or more, is likely to be injurious when seemingly most successful. The injurious effects, however, may be reduced to a minimun by a careful adherence to physiological rules.

"Training," says a physician, "sacrifices a man to muscle, not less than a prize pig is sacrificed to fat. Muscle and fat being in each case the special object, the success of the art is measured by the amount of the sacrifice. But it is not thus that men and pigs are made healthy."

This is an extreme view, perhaps, particularly in sight of recent improvement in training systems. But all forcing is injurious, and training is a forcing of the muscles. As Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, it is "burning the vital fire with the blower up." It is like cramming for an examination —an innnense amount of information is gathered in a very brief space of time; but too often the mind has been sacrificed to the memory; the over-stimulated brain soon loses its vigor;