CHAPTER VII.
OF AILMENTS—OF TRAINING AND DIET—OF STALENESS—OF DISCIPLINE—OF COACHING.
Ailments.
I may preface what I have to say about ailments by stating, as emphatically as it can be stated, that every man who proposes to take part in a race ought, before he begins practice, to be thoroughly overhauled by a medical man. I do not believe that any man whose heart and lungs and general constitution are sound can be injured by rowing. On the contrary, I have seen scores and scores of instances in which sound but imperfectly developed youngsters were formed and solidified and made into robust men by the exercise. But if a doctor reports of an apparently powerful man that his heart is weak and his circulation defective, or that the state of his lungs is unsatisfactory, no power on earth would induce
me to include him in my crew. Race-rowing is one of the severest strains to which a man can submit himself, and only a perfectly sound man can go through it without taking harm.
Coaches are sometimes ridiculed for the excessive care they take of their men; and there are not wanting those who draw the inference that rowing men are peculiarly liable to illness, and suffer, when attacked by it, more than others. Nothing can be further from the truth. If we are anxious, it is because we know that for the special strain involved in racing a man must be in specially good condition, and we desire, above all things, to avoid anything that may keep him back in his training and his work. Moreover, even a slight illness may entail temporary retirement from the crew, and thus necessitate changes in its order which will prevent the men from getting together.
In rowing hard a man should keep a good colour. If you see him turning green and yellow, you may be sure that something is wrong with him, and you must pack him off to the doctor at once. It may turn out that his digestion is in fault, and that a careful attention to diet is all that is necessary to cure him. I have seen only two men actually
faint during a race. One of them was a distinguished Oxford Blue, who collapsed during a heat of the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley; the other was a college oar rowing in the Cambridge Fours. With regard to him, we discovered afterwards that he had overtaxed his strength by working in the Cambridge engineering workshop for about six hours every day. Both these cases took place a good many years ago, and in neither has any permanent injury resulted. I have, of course, seen hundreds of men absolutely rowed out at the end of a race; but, with hardly an exception, they were perfectly fit a few minutes afterwards and, possibly, in the course of a few hours they might be seen rowing in another severe race with unimpaired strength and vitality.
With regard to ailments generally, I cannot do better than quote Mr. Woodgate in the Badminton book: "A crew should be under strict orders to report all ailments, if only a blister, instantly to the coach. It is better to leave no discretion in this matter to the oarsman, even at the risk of troubling the mentor with trifles. If a man is once allowed to decide for himself whether he will report some petty and incipient