HOW TO GET STRONG
through a brief, hurried "training" of a few weeks, under some so-called "trainer," who does not even have him examined to see if his heart and lungs are fit for any hard work at all, much less for such an exhausting ordeal as a race—on a wheel, or afoot, or in a boat; when perhaps there is functional or even organic heart disturbance there; and danger there surely is. But if, as has been pressed, each person is so examined, and, when found all right, then, moderately at first, then for several months gradually, steadily, sensibly, is brought on to more and better work; it is but natural to expect by-and-by improved tone, vigor, power. As one physician says: "Bad valvular action should be regarded as an absolute bar to cycling. Mere weakness of the muscular fibre, on the other hand, will be distinctly benefited by common-sense riding."
Athletes fit to be athletes do not die young—at least from any athletic cause. Undermine one, though, with some form of dissipation, or vice, and you can kill him early (though not as early then as the nerveless, undeveloped wreck who never touched athletics). But which kills—the athletic work or the vice; that which built him up,—or that which wrought his ruin?
Plato—boy-wrestler before his parts had even matured; contending in the great national games for the champion boy-wrestlership of Greece in her best days—stayed till eighty-three, and put in a pretty busy and useful life besides. Did he die young?
Lord Brougham, the fleetest runner of the whole region; as one writer well puts it, with a constitution of lignum-vitæ; yet one of the most prodigious mental workers the world has ever seen, died at eighty-nine. Is that young?
Gladstone, a trained athlete from his cradle to eighty-
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