Track athletics at Harvard have never been in a much more encouraging state than they are now. When the team began regular training in the middle of the winter almost exactly one hundred men offered themselves as candidates, and it is rather remarkable that there are still ninety-four men at work.
The first part of the work for the team is very light and it is natural that a large number of men should be attracted by it, but to have the number reduced by only five or six, after three months' work, with the additional hardship of going for a walk at eight o'clock every morning certainly bodes well for success over Yale and all other opponents. The team will go to a training table about the first of May.
The work at present is rather stiff as most of the men intend to enter in one of the three meetings next week; the Harvard class games on Tuesday; the Boston Athletic Association meeting on Thursday; and the Harvard University games on Saturday. The Harvard-Yale meeting is also near at hand. In the latter only a limited number of men can be entered by each college and the Harvard men will be practically the same as those to be entered for the Intercollegiate meeting on the thirtieth of May.
The sprinters' work in general consists of a hundred yards dash, where the quickness in starting can be best judged, or of a longer run, to show what endurance the men have. The half-mile and quarter-mile men are doing good work. They usually do more or less than the distances they intend to try, with once in a while a race over the exact distance. The mile runners and walkers, also, do just about this same work.
In the shot-putting, hammer throwing, pole-vaulting and jumping comparatively even work is done, but in the running and walking the men are so changeable from day to day that it is practicably impossible to say which of two or three men in almost every distance is the best. It is, indeed, fortunate that it is possible to enter all of the "best" men in the Intercollegiate games and that it is not necessary to select one man for each event, on the basis of the work that he has been doing in practice. Moen, Cooke, Hawes, Shead and Thayer are among those who are doing well in sprinting. Wright and Stead in the quarter, Batchelder in the half, A. M. White and Lowell in the mile. Carr, Nichols and collamore are also good in the last event. Wheel-wright in the pole vault, and Fearing, Green, Shead, Hale and Bloss in the jumps are excellent men, and Finlay will probably distinguish himself with the shot and hammer. Lee and Fearing are the best men in hurdling.
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