Dinner consists mainly of roast beef or mutton, or choice of both. It is the custom to allow ‘luxuries’ of some sort every other day, e.g. fish one day, and a course of roast poultry (chicken) on another. ‘Pudding’ is sometimes allowed daily, sometimes it only appears in its turn with ‘luxuries.’ It generally consists of stewed fruit, with plain boiled rice, or else calves’-foot jelly. A crust, or biscuit, with a little butter and some watercress or lettuce, make a final course before the cloth is cleared.
Drink is ale, for a standard; light claret, with water, is nowadays allowed for choice, and no harm in it. A pint is the normal measure; sometimes an extra half-pint may be conceded on thirsty days.
An orange and biscuit for dessert usually follow. In the writer’s days every man had two glasses of port wine. He thinks this was perhaps more than was required (as regards alcohol); one glass may suffice, but there may be no reason against the second wineglass being conceded, with water substituted, if the patient is really dry. Claret also may take the place of port after dinner. Fashions change; in the writer’s active days, claret would have been scorned as un-English for athletes.
Such is the usual nature of training diet; of the exercise of the day, more anon. There does not seem to be much fault to find with the régime above sketched; in fact, the proof of soundness of the diet may be seen in the good condition usually displayed by those who adopt it.
All the same, the writer, when he has trained crews, has slightly modified the above in a few details. He has allowed (a little) fish or poultry daily, as an extra course, and for the same reason has always endeavoured to have both beef and mutton on the table. He believes that change of dish aids appetite, so long as the varieties of food do not clash in digestion. Men become tired with a monotony of food, however wholesome. Puddings the writer does not think much of, provided that other varieties of dish can be obtained. A certain amount of vegetable food is necessary to blend with the animal food, else boils are likely to break out; but green vegetables such as are in season are far better than puddings for this purpose. Salad, daily with the joint, will do good. It is unusual to see it, that is all. The salad should not be dressed. Lettuce, endive, watercress, smallcress, beetroot, and some minced spring onions to flavour the whole, make a passable dish, which a hungry athlete will much relish. Asparagus, spinach, and French beans may be supplied when obtainable. Green peas are not so good, and broad beans worse. The tops of young nettles, when emerald green, make a capital dish, like spinach, rather more tasty than the latter vegetable. Such nettles can only be picked when they first shoot; old nettles are as bad as flowered asparagus.
If a crew train in the fruit season, fruit to a small amount will not harm them, as a finale to either breakfast or dinner. But the fruit should be very fresh, not bruised nor decomposed; strawberries, gooseberries, grapes, peaches, nectarines, apricots (say one of the last three, or a dozen of the smaller fruits, for a man’s allowance), all are admissible. Not so melons, nor pines—so medical friends assert.
In hot summer weather it is as well to dine about 2 p.m., to row in the cool of the evening, towards 7 p.m., and to sup about 8.30 or 9 p.m. It is a mistake to assume that because a regatta will come off midday, therefore those who train for it should accustom themselves to a burning sun for practice. With all due deference to Herodotus (who avers that the skeleton skulls of quondam combatant Persians and Egyptians could be known apart on the battle-field, because the turban-clad heads of Persians produced soft skulls which crumbled to a kick, while the sun-baked heads of Egyptians were hard as bricks), we do not believe in this sort of acclimatisation. If men have to be trained to row a midnight race, they would be best prepared for it by working at their ordinary daylight hours, not by turning night into day for weeks beforehand. On the same principle it would seem to be a mistake to expose oarsmen in practice to excessive heat to which they have not been accustomed, solely because they are likely eventually to row their race under a similar sun. In really oppressive weather at Henley the writer and his crews used to dine about 2 p.m. as aforesaid, finish supper at 9 or 9.30, and go to bed two hours later. They rose proportionately later next day, taking a good nine hours in bed before they turned out. So far as their records read, those crews do not seem on the whole to have suffered in condition by this system of training.
Many men are parched with thirst at night. The heat of the stomach, rather overladen with food, tends to this. The waste of the system has been abnormal during the day; the appetite, i.e. instinct to replenish the waste, has also been abnormal, and yet the capacity of the stomach is only normal. Hence the stomach finds it hard work to keep pace with the demands upon it. Next morning these men feel ‘coppered,’ as if they had drunk too much overnight, and yet it is needless to say they have not in any way exceeded the moderate scale of alcohol already propounded above as being customary.
The best preventive of this tendency to fevered mouths is a cup of ‘water gruel,’ or even a small slop-basin of it, the last thing before bedtime. It should not contain any milk; millet seed and oatmeal grits are best for its composition. The consumption of this light supper should be compulsory, whether it suits palates or not. The effect of it is very striking; it seems to soothe and promote digestion, and to allay thirst more than three times its amount of water would do. Some few men cannot, or profess to be unable to, stomach this gruel. The writer has had to deal with one or two such in his time. He had his doubts whether their stomach or their whims were to blame; but in such cases he gave way, and allowed a cup of chocolate instead—without milk. (Milk blends badly with meat and wine at the end of a hard day.) Chocolate is rather more fattening than gruel, otherwise it answers the same purpose, of checking any disposition to ‘coppers.’
It has been a time-honoured maxim with all trainers, that it is the fluids which lay on fat and which spoil the wind. Accordingly, reduction in the consumption of fluid has always been one of the first principles of training, and it is a sound one so long as it is not carried to excess. It is not at the outset of training that thirst so oppresses the patient, but at the end of the first week and afterwards, especially when temperature rises and days are sultry. Vinegar over greens at dinner tends to allay thirst; the use of pepper rather promotes it. In time the oarsman begins to accustom himself somewhat to his diminished allowance of fluid, and he learns to economise it during his meals, to wash down his solids.