Strains.
Ordinary muscular strains generally yield to a good rubbing with an embrocation. For wrist-strains a leather band may be recommended. Abdominal strains must be seen to by a doctor.
Colds.
The best remedy for a severe cold is to give your man at least one day's complete rest, and make him keep his room. Indeed, with most ailments a day's rest will work wonders; and it is far better for a coach to make up his reluctant
mind to grant it, than to run the risk of losing a valuable man altogether by keeping him chained to his oar when he is unfit to work. However, no man who takes proper care of himself, and always makes a point of wrapping up when his crew easies, ought to catch a cold.
Training and Diet.
The rules of training and diet should be the rules of common sense, applied to cases in which the body has to prepare itself, by severe work and perfectly simple, healthy living, for an exceptional effort or series of efforts. Rules there must be, if only on account of the advantage that comes of being able to make exceptions to them. But the chief points must be regularity and simplicity—a regularity, that is, which shall not entail an unvarying and wearisome monotony, and simplicity which shall not exclude occasional little luxuries that act as a stimulus to a man's jaded energies.
I shall give here two tables showing the hours and the dietary of an Oxford crew training during a little more than five weeks for the race against
Cambridge, and of a Leander crew training for nearly three weeks for the Grand Challenge race at Henley Regatta.
I. Oxford Crew.