Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/262

 soon have a health and vigor almost unknown among our women and girls to-day.

If walking and horseback parties, instead of being, as now, wellnigh unheard of among our girls, were everyday affairs; and there was not a point of interest within ten miles which every girl, and woman too, did not know well; it would prove a benefit both to them, and to the next generation which would be almost incalculable.

Among American women running is a lost art. One writer says a woman can run just fast enough for a man to catch her. Yet many have never succeeded in running that fast. In some states there are said to be 70,000 such. Yet you will have hard work to find an exercise that will begin to do as much to make a girl or woman graceful as correct running. Girls should all learn to run. Few of them are either easy or graceful runners; but it is an accomplishment quickly learned; and began at a short distance and slow jog, and continued until the girl thinks nothing of running a mile in seven minutes, and that without once touching a heel to the ground, it will not only do more than almost any other known exercise to make her graceful and easy on her feet, but it will also enlarge and strengthen her lungs. A roomy school-yard, a bit of lawn, a gymnasium-track, or a track around the school-house, either of these is all the place needed in which to learn this now almost obsolete accomplishment. The gymnasium is perhaps the best place; as there they can wear costumes which do not impede freedom of movement.

If, besides these things, the girl or woman will determine that, as much as possible of the time each day in which she is sitting down, she will sit with head and neck up, trunk erect, and with shoulders low; and that