CHAPTER XXIII
LESSONS IN HURDLING
With the departure of Fish, the east well of Hale ceased to be a scene of mysteriously fomented disturbance. Mr. Alsop, having been wofully betrayed through blind following of his own prejudices, resolved to be more cautious in forming opinions in the future, and less hasty in the performance of duty. He had yet to learn that a teacher may make a reputation in a week which he cannot live down in the whole subsequent school life of his pupils.
For Sam now began the busiest, most exciting period of the year. The college examinations were near enough to render devotion to lessons a matter of personal advantage; the outdoor school meet and the track contest with Hillbury challenged his zeal and ambition. Besides these serious interests, May and June offered their usual lavish opportunities for innocent but distracting amusement, ranging from tennis and scrub ball games and long walks, to the convention of wags, wits, and philosophers, which gathered every pleasant evening after dinner on the high steps of Carter, and intermittently sang songs and discussed men and things—mostly men—to the vast entertainment of the listeners. Here Brantwein, released for the time from the burden of the peanut basket, was a protagonist, with socialism as a general theme and every exposed head as a target for his verbal shillaleh. The crowd yelled applause for every crack he gave, and lavished double measure on every telling return.
Good practice in the high hurdles amounts to something more than daily exercise in starting, running, and jumping. The course is one hundred and twenty yards over ten hurdles, with fifteen yards clear before the first, and fifteen more after the last. Between each pair of hurdles lies a distance of ten yards; each barrier is three feet and six inches high. The runner must clear the barrier in such a way as to interrupt his advance as little as possible, by rising neither too high nor too low, by taking his jump neither too long nor too short, by landing in the right position, by adjusting his inter-hurdle strides to the distance and to his own powers. It has been known since the race was first practised that the average man must take three strides between hurdles; but the length of the jump, and the proper arrangement of short and long strides, are even now matters of dispute.
Collins’s theory, which of course Sam followed, was that the jump should be short rather than long. He insisted that to prolong the distance covered while in the air on the force of previous effort is to cut short the opportunity to use the legs; to overjump is to introduce into the race a series of dead periods when the runner is passively waiting for his feet to touch the ground before he can become active again. So the trainer labored with Sam to bring him over the hurdle to the ground at the earliest possible moment; to teach him the quick rotary whirl of the legs that neither drags nor interferes with the step, the forward leg doubled and slightly swung, the other brought quickly around after it in a wide arc; to force him to take the landing step short—in order to bring his feet under him—and to stretch the other two strides. Sam’s handicap was his slowness and a tendency to make his strides too long. His advantage lay in staying power; he could do twelve hurdles as well as ten. So the clever trainer worked him day after day on starts and over two or three hurdles, and once a week sent him over eleven.
“You don’t put me over the course enough, it seems to me,” complained Sam, one day. “I’m tired of that everlasting thirty-five yards.”
“If you can do two hurdles right, you can do ten,” answered Collins, calmly. “If you can’t do the first two, you can’t do any.”
“I should say that it’s speed between that I lack,” pursued Sam. “I get over the hurdles pretty well, but I lose momentum somewhere between jumps.”
“You take your first step too long, as I keep telling you. Four to five feet is all you ought to cover in that first stride after the hurdle. If you come down right and take the first step right, you can put speed into the other two and get just the right take-off to drop you over the next hurdle. Speed will come in time.”
“I wish it would!” lamented Sam.