[QUESTIONS FOR YOUNG MEN.]
ON ATHLETICS.
There was a time when the college man who joined an athletic team felt that he must train hard for a month or two before his great match came off, and that then his duty to his college and his team ended, and he could go out of training until the next season. "Training" then meant a somewhat barbarous plan of eating half-cooked meats, drinking limited quantities of water, taking physical exercise almost all day long, and doing little else. Since those days we have all discovered that training consists in eating normal food that is well cooked and taken at regular times of the day, going to bed at night by nine or ten o'clock, and rising to half past seven or eight o'clock breakfast. That part of the matter has been pretty well settled, but perhaps the most important defect in the old training system has not been corrected, though every one will acknowledge that it is a defect the moment he thinks it over. This is the absurd idea that you can get ready for a big athletic game in one or two months. A very long time ago it was discovered that if you want to do anything well you must practise at it day by day for many more months than can be crowded into one year. Nobody ever made a great success at anything by working night and day for a month or two. And it is precisely the same with baseball or rowing or football as it is with studies or law or the ministry.
You may have been eating all sorts of things during the summer, sitting up late at night, and getting up late in the morning. Do you fancy that on the 1st of October you can begin an entirely new life, and make a good football-player of yourself by Thanksgiving day? Not by any means. If you want to be the member of some college athletic team, begin before you get to college. Begin by eating carefully, not by eating food fit for wild animals, but by eating good meats, and so on, and not filling up on candies and sweets day after day at meals and between meals. There is a reason for this. A man whose stomach is weak has no courage, and if he has no courage he carries himself through a game on his nerves, and is completely exhausted at the end of that game. No one can give himself a strong, vigorous digestion in one month, nor in one year if he is at all weak there. It requires years of normal living to do this, and it is the most important part of all training. Probably the famous story about Napoleon is quite true, that he thought more of his soldiers' food and shoes than of their guns, for he maintained that no man could fight in pinching shoes and on an empty stomach. In the same way you cannot train your muscles, to do extraordinary things in a few short weeks. It requires months and years of gradual work. If you start in late and work hard every day you will ruin your muscles instead of improving them, and as a matter of actual record many a good man has been lost to his team for this reason alone.
What is the most critical time in a baseball match or a football game? When does the oarsman's great test come? Certainly not at the start, for we all do well then. But at the very close of the game, when, after all the players have become exhausted, the real nerve of the contest arrives. That is the time when the man who has been slowly and carefully training year by year will find that he is better than all the others, and that he can put in the extra pound at the oar or the extra speed at the long football run which carries his team to a closely won victory.
Athletic training, therefore, is nothing sudden, nothing to be "taken up" at any one time for a short space, but a general self-control and guard which the boy or man keeps over himself in summer and in winter, keeping himself healthy, in good hard condition, and ready for anything he may be called on to do. Any one will tell you this is quite in line with the best methods of study, of work, or of business in after-life; that it is the steady, careful man that wins. But as we are not preaching here, this must be left for fathers and older brothers to do.