It is common for a runner to manage two distances well; he may be able, like F. T. Elborough or Colbeck, to run any distance between 100 yards and half-a-mile, but the man who can beat his compeers at every distance has not yet been found, and is not likely to be.

But to return to our subject of sprinting. The rapidity of motion, we have said, is derived from the front muscles of the thigh. The push comes from the back muscles of the thigh and from the small of the back. To convey to an uninitiated reader a notion of what real sprinting includes, he may be reminded that in longer races a man who wishes to pass an antagonist makes a rush or spurt for a few strides. Sprinting consists in a continued rush or effort at high pressure, and as such is far more exhausting than it seems. The foregoing reflections-may serve to explain in some measure the many surprises and anomalies that a consideration of sprinters and sprinting suggests. Sprinting ability consists in the capacity to make a violent effort in the way of speed. It is therefore not a paradox to say that it requires as much cultivation as a capacity for any other kind of athletic sport. You may find the capacity in men who appear of all shapes and sizes to a superficial observer. Certainly your sprinter may be tall or short, may be of any weight up to thirteen stone, though he is rarely a feather weight. He is more often inclined to be fleshy than to be thin, and may be of any height, though he rarely is over six feet.

Of some famous sprinters the unspoken reflection of many a spectator must have been, 'Well, you are the last man I should ever have thought could run fast.' When Junker, the Russian, who won the Hundred Yards Championship in 1878, first appeared at an athletic meeting, a patriotic and jocose journalist described him as a 'bulky foreigner.' Another well-known sprinter, also a champion at the same distance, was advised by a competent authority to try some other distance, as he was too fat to run fast. Another curious thing about sprinting is the varieties of action in which good performers indulge. Junker sprinted as if he were badly bandy-legged, although we never knew that he was so. Lockton, of the L.A.C., who in his day was, we think, even faster than Junker, ran in the style most affected by professional pedestrians, with his body low and well forward. W. P. Phillips, who managed to beat Lockton for the championship in 1880, ran almost erect, looking even more than his full height of six feet. Trepplin, one of the fastest of the many fast sprinters who have hailed from the Universities, was a vision of whirling arms and legs. Junker was flat-footed and erect; Wharton, the champion of 1886, is flat-footed, yet manages somehow to bend his body far forward as well.

Yet many and various as are the forms which sprinting ability takes, there are one or two signs by which a sprinter can be recognised. Whether his legs be short or long, he has large muscular thighs and a broad back. A sprinter, too, to use a cant phrase of pedestrianism, 'strips big' - i.e. looks bigger stripped than he does in his clothes; or, in other words, is a heavier man than he appears to be in his ordinary life.

But, before we discuss the best forms of sprinting and its exponents, we must say something of the practice and exercise which a sprinter should take in order to reach his best form. The best practice for a 100 or 120 yards race is to have continual bursts of thirty yards or so with another man, who is about as good or rather better than yourself. If practising with a man who is inferior, you should give him a short start in these 'spins' and catch him as soon as you can. Such practice both helps a man to get into his running quickly and 'pulls him out,' to use a trainer's expression; that is, the striving to keep pace with a better man, or to catch a man in front whom you can catch, involuntarily forces a man to do a little better than his previous best if he is capable of it. A man should never practise sprinting alone; he becomes sluggish, and can never really tell whether he is doing well or ill. If he is simply training for a 100 or a 120 yards race, after half-a-dozen of these spins he should take a few minutes' rest and then run the full distance, or at any rate a burst of seventy or eighty yards, before he goes in to have a rub down and resume his clothes.

If he is training for 220, 250, or 300 yards he must, of course, accustom himself to longer trials; but in general, even for the longest of these distances, it is quite enough to run 200 yards at full speed. In fact, as a general rule, for all practice it may be laid down that a man should very rarely run a trial for more than two thirds of the distance for which he is training. In writing this we know that to many trainers such an opinion will be considered a rank heresy; but that it is a sound rule, at any rate to amateurs who have other daily avocations to attend to, which must occasion more or less fatigue, is our firm conviction. The great point in every race, and especially in a sprint or in a quarter of a mile, is to come to the scratch fresh. Our experience of amateurs is that two out of three of them come to the scratch in a big race a little bit overdrawn; but of this we shall have something more to say anon.

In the short sprints the start is, of course, almost half the battle, and a man should be continually practising a start and a ten-yards run - and very trying to the back the performance is. It is, of course, advisable to get accustomed to start from a pistol, but if there is no friend handy to fire a pistol or say 'Go' without any warning, it is not a bad device to fling a stone over one's head in the air and start as soon as it is heard to fall to the ground. Some men we have known to improve a yard or even two by frequent practising at starts, and most hundred-yard races are lost or won by less than a yard. We need, perhaps, hardly describe the right attitude of the body for a start in these days when everyone has seen an athletic meeting. The runner should be on his toes, with the right foot seven or eight inches behind the left foot, which is on the line, and so that the chest is almost parallel to the line and bent slightly forward. Some in starting stretch their right arm forward so as to bring the chest completely straight to the line, but this is not adopted by all, and if overdone is, we think, a great mistake.