LESSONS IN HURDLING
With the departure of Fish, the east well of Hale ceased to be a scene
of mysteriously fomented disturbance. Mr. Alsop, having been wofully
betrayed through blind following of his own prejudices, resolved to
be more cautious in forming opinions in the future, and less hasty in
the performance of duty. He had yet to learn that a teacher may make a
reputation in a week which he cannot live down in the whole subsequent
school life of his pupils.
For Sam now began the busiest, most exciting period of the year. The
college examinations were near enough to render devotion to lessons a
matter of personal advantage; the outdoor school meet and the track
contest with Hillbury challenged his zeal and ambition. Besides
these serious interests, May and June offered their usual lavish
opportunities for innocent but distracting amusement, ranging from
tennis and scrub ball games and long walks, to the convention of wags,
wits, and philosophers, which gathered every pleasant evening after
dinner on the high steps of Carter, and intermittently sang songs and
discussed men and things--mostly men--to the vast entertainment of the
listeners. Here Brantwein, released for the time from the burden of the
peanut basket, was a protagonist, with socialism as a general theme
and every exposed head as a target for his verbal shillaleh. The crowd
yelled applause for every crack he gave, and lavished double measure on
every telling return.
Good practice in the high hurdles amounts to something more than daily
exercise in starting, running, and jumping. The course is one hundred
and twenty yards over ten hurdles, with fifteen yards clear before the
first, and fifteen more after the last. Between each pair of hurdles
lies a distance of ten yards; each barrier is three feet and six inches
high. The runner must clear the barrier in such a way as to interrupt
his advance as little as possible, by rising neither too high nor too
low, by taking his jump neither too long nor too short, by landing
in the right position, by adjusting his inter-hurdle strides to the
distance and to his own powers. It has been known since the race was
first practised that the average man must take three strides between
hurdles; but the length of the jump, and the proper arrangement of
short and long strides, are even now matters of dispute.
Collins’s theory, which of course Sam followed, was that the jump
should be short rather than long. He insisted that to prolong the
distance covered while in the air on the force of previous effort
is to cut short the opportunity to use the legs; to overjump is to
introduce into the race a series of dead periods when the runner is
passively waiting for his feet to touch the ground before he can become
active again. So the trainer labored with Sam to bring him over the
hurdle to the ground at the earliest possible moment; to teach him
the quick rotary whirl of the legs that neither drags nor interferes
with the step, the forward leg doubled and slightly swung, the other
brought quickly around after it in a wide arc; to force him to take
the landing step short--in order to bring his feet under him--and to
stretch the other two strides. Sam’s handicap was his slowness and a
tendency to make his strides too long. His advantage lay in staying
power; he could do twelve hurdles as well as ten. So the clever trainer
worked him day after day on starts and over two or three hurdles, and
once a week sent him over eleven.
“You don’t put me over the course enough, it seems to me,” complained
Sam, one day. “I’m tired of that everlasting thirty-five yards.”
“If you can do two hurdles right, you can do ten,” answered Collins,
calmly. “If you can’t do the first two, you can’t do any.”
“I should say that it’s speed between that I lack,” pursued Sam. “I get
over the hurdles pretty well, but I lose momentum somewhere between
jumps.”
“You take your first step too long, as I keep telling you. Four to five
feet is all you ought to cover in that first stride after the hurdle.
If you come down right and take the first step right, you can put speed
into the other two and get just the right take-off to drop you over
the next hurdle. Speed will come in time.”
“I wish it would!” lamented Sam.
“It isn’t all in fast running,” said Collins, “nor half. Taking the
hurdles is the main thing. There’s really only two running steps
between, if you throw out the short step. And what a fast runner makes
in those two steps, he’ll more than lose on the hurdles, if he doesn’t
do ’em right. Three feet lost on a hurdle is thirty feet on the race,
a good second and a fifth. No one wins a race by that much. The work
that’s cut out for you is to get your jump so near perfect that you
don’t lose anything in going over. Then just steady, hard running will
put you ahead of the fellow who hasn’t your staying power.”
“We all seem to have about the same amount of that.”
Collins hesitated. His first impulse was to deny Sam’s statement;
his second to let it go unchallenged. After all, there was nothing
so important for Sam’s progress as that he should continue to think
that everything depended on hard, steady work. Sam was one who could
stand work. While he was occasionally discouraged, he never became
despondent; he did not grow irritable under defeat nor refractory at
criticism. He disclaimed high expectations, smiled at discomfiture, and
plodded on.
The school meet came and went, bringing little glory to the name
of Archer. That Fairmount would beat him in the hurdles, Sam fully
expected. The start was fairly even, but Fairmount was in the air
above the first hurdle when Sam was leaving the ground on his first
spring; at the fifth Fairmount was yards ahead. Yet at the tenth,
strange to say, Sam had almost caught him. Archer finished less than
two yards behind the leader, and fully six ahead of Sanderson, his
nearest pursuer. Fairmount’s time was sixteen and four-fifths. So Sam,
according to Collins’s estimate, had come close to seventeen seconds,
a gain of at least a second by a year’s work. From this result, with
which the trainer was fully satisfied, Sam was at least inclined to
draw more consolation than discouragement. He had still another school
year before him.
It was his defeat in the pole vault which caused him the most chagrin.
Jones, of course, rose like a bird soaring against the wind; his
light, lithe body arched the rod gracefully at ten feet, six. Sam
surmounted nine feet, six--but Mulcahy reached nine feet, ten. It was
not jealousy that beset the defeated vaulter, nor wounded pride, nor
the mean ill-will that grudges success to a rival. Sam’s heart had
harbored only feelings of congratulation towards Fairmount, who had
beaten him in the hurdles; his enthusiasm over Jones’s achievements
was genuine and whole-souled. These two were sportsmen through and
through, to whom the joy of the contest, the delight of winning, the
promise of gaining points for the school in the meet with Hillbury,
constituted the whole stimulus and reward. Mulcahy cared for none of
these things. At heart it mattered not two straws to him whether the
blue or the red triumphed, as long as his own advance was assured.
To Mulcahy, athletics were but a ladder by which he could mount, the
means necessary to a desired end. He wanted prominence in school,
distinction, prizes. He wanted the Yale Cup as the crowning honor
of his school career. To win this, he professed an enthusiasm for
athletics, as the unscrupulous politician professes the principles that
win votes.
Ten days later Sam took part in his first contest with Hillbury. In
the interval he did some work in preparation for the event which is
not set down in the coaching directions. When Collins received from
the secretary of the Academy the list of those whose work was “up”
and who were therefore allowed to compete, the names of Fairmount
and Chouder were missing. There was a hurried consultation with the
faculty, resulting in the announcement that if the backward work were
made up to the satisfaction of teachers by the day before the games,
the prohibition on the two men would be removed. Bruce called upon
Mulcahy, who was known to have had experience in tutoring. Mulcahy
could not possibly find time for extra work. Then Sam undertook the
case of Fairmount, and Moorhead volunteered to coach Chouder. Both
tutors labored early and late to bring their charges into a condition
acceptable to the authorities. Moorhead had the more difficult task,
for Chouder was behind in two subjects, and learning came harder to
his slow, unreceptive mind than chopping wood or running races to
his sinewy body. It was Moorhead’s first opportunity to do something
tangible for the school athletics, and he gave the best that was in
him, freely and patiently, hour after hour, oblivious to the fact that
there could be no public recognition of his service, no personal glory
in victory. Fairmount triumphed over his geometry with a C, while
Chouder, to his infinite satisfaction and the relief of his anxious
tutor, scraped through his examinations on a brace of D’s.
So it happened that Moorhead, as he perched high on the cheering
section at the Hillbury games, felt that he had more part in the
contests than those who sat about him, mere longing hearts and
vociferous units in the chorus. When Chouder took the two-twenty yards
from Merton of Hillbury, running from the start like a predestined
victor, Moorhead thrilled with the consciousness that it was in part
his race and his victory. In the low hurdles his candidate was not so
successful, as the redoubtable Kilham of Hillbury led at the finish,
though Chouder pressed him hard. Fay and Shirley had to content
themselves with second and third places in the hundred yards, but
Bruce won the quarter in a grand burst of speed that cut the time down
close to fifty seconds, and Weatherford made sure of the half-mile.
Jones sailed deftly over the vaulting bar at ten feet, seven, with
Mulcahy a safe third at nine feet, eight. And old Brandy Brantwein,
feeling unusually free from the trammels of society by reason of the
absence of the peanut basket, showed what socialism will do for a man
by throwing the hammer four feet beyond the best cast of the Hillbury
individualist, and putting himself into second place in the shot
contest.
The general issue was already decided when the high hurdles were
called. Seaton had won. Under the inspiration of victory, Sam felt that
he, too, might achieve something worth while. His start was good, but
at the second hurdle the two outside men, Kilham and Fairmount, were
already ahead of him. At the fourth they were still farther ahead, but
he pressed steadily on, clearing his hurdles by two inches, dropping
short and driving himself forward with the routine pace. At the
seventh hurdle only Kilham kept his distance; Fairmount was nearer. The
tenth he passed at Fairmount’s side, with Kilham but a stride beyond.
In the finish, Fairmount sprinted better and gained a yard, but was
still behind the leader by the thickness of his body.
“If you hadn’t coached up Fairmount so that he could pass his
condition, you’d have been second in that race instead of third,”
remarked Duncan, as they discussed the events of the day, after the
celebration.
“And we should have lost one point,” answered Sam.
“One point wouldn’t have made any difference in the result. You
deserved second, anyhow, by the way you’ve worked. Fairmount will be
gone next year, and then you’ll have things your own way.”
“There’s Kilham,” said Sam, wistfully. “He’s only an upper middler.
He’ll be in Hillbury next year and beat me out again; then he’ll go to
Yale and I to Harvard, and he’ll beat me four years more. That’s what
I’m up against!”
“Oh, cheer up!” returned Duncan. “You’ve improved a lot this year. You
may beat him all to pieces next year. They said that your race to-day
was in mighty good time, and you weren’t much behind Kilham.”
Sam shook his head with a smile of resignation. “I haven’t won a thing
this year, and I probably shan’t do any better next, but I’m going to
keep right on. I’m too much used to losing to mind, and there’s always
a chance that by a fluke I may win something.”
“It’s a shame!” thought Duncan to himself. “I’d never coach a fellow up
just so that he could take a prize from me, if the school never won an
extra point.”