Not once, however, did he let him run the full Marathon distance of twenty-six miles. In his expressive phrase it would “take too much out of him.” From fifteen miles he gradually increased the distance, until on one occasion he let him run twenty-two, and then he stopped him, although Bert protested that he was easily good for the remaining four.
“No, you don’t,” said Reddy. “I’m only asking your legs and lungs to make the twenty-two. The last few miles will be run on your nerve anyway, and I want you to save up every bit of that until the day of the race. You’ll need every ounce of it when the time comes.”
For Bert it was a time of stern self denial. As he neither smoked or drank, it was no sacrifice to be forbidden these indulgences. But the carefully restricted diet, the cutting out of the many things his appetite craved and had been accustomed to, the hard and unending work required to perfect his wind and develop his muscles called on all his courage and determination to see the thing through.
“Gee,” said Tom one day, when after an especially severe practice they were walking toward their rooms, “I don’t see how you stand it, Bert. A slave in the cotton fields before the war had nothing on you in the matter of work.”
“Work certainly does seem to be my middle name, just now,” laughed Bert, “but the pay comes later on. I’ll forget all this slavery, as you call it, if I can only flash past the line a winner. And even if I don’t have that luck, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I have done my best and gone down fighting.”
“You’ll end up fighting, sure enough,” said Tom emphatically, “but you won’t go down unless you sprain an ankle or break a leg. The only question with the boys here is not whether you will win—they’re dead sure of that—but whether you’ll hang up a new record.”
“There really isn’t any such thing as a record for the Marathon,” said Bert. “The conditions are so different in each race that no one can fairly be compared with another. If it were simply a matter of padding around on a flat track, you could get at the time easily. But the roads, the hills, the wind and the weather all come into the account, and they’re never just alike. The fastest time so far is two hours and thirty-six minutes.”
“The day you ran twenty-two miles, Reddy said that you were going at the rate of two hours and twenty-five minutes for the whole distance,” said Tom. “That’s some speed, all right.”
“Yes,” replied Bert, “and as far as feeling went, I could have kept it up to the end. Those last four miles though would have been the hardest and probably the slowest. But I never cared much about records anyhow. It’s men that I have to beat. Time is a thing you don’t see or hear and you can’t work up much enthusiasm over it. But when another fellow is showing you the way or pushing you hard, then’s the time you really wake up. The old never-give-up feeling comes over you and you tell yourself you’ll win or drop dead trying.”
Just at this moment Dick ran up, waving a telegram.