are, quite simply, stunningly beautiful. Further distinguishing this experience from previous years was the fact that I was totally alone this time. This put a whole new and exhilarating twist on the race. Fully on my own in the wilderness, doing something as simple as mindfully walking, was an almost surreal experience. Eventually I numbed out to the pain. Life was bliss.

About eight hours after I left Rabbit Lake, the finish in Skwentna came into view. I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, choke down my emotions. I was exhausted but exuberant as a few sobs of happiness burbled up my throat as I ran down to the finish line. I finished in fifth place in 32 hours even. Fourteen hours earlier, Benjamin had beaten Lyons in a sprint, completing the distance in a new record time of 18:01. It had been a heck of a race for all of us.

Race Notes

Ultracyclist John Stamstad of Team Bridgestone blitzed the hard-packed 200mile bike race in a new record time of 15:17, beating two-time winner and course record holder Rocky Reifenstuhl in the process.

The fastest runner, Robert DeVelice, covered the same 100 miles as we snowshoers in 14:53.

Two 13-year-old boys, Fred Bull and Chris Seamen, skied the 100-mile course in 33:22.

Only six athletes dropped out of the 1993 Iditasport.

And What | Learned From It

In weight-bearing sports on snow, lightweight is good. But without the kindness of strangers in the right places and their tents and trash, lightweight can be deadly.

Always carry extra fluid, or be willing to stop to melt snow, in the winter wilderness.

Training for a 100-mile race on foot should include some running, not just cycling.

Real, authentic snowshoe racers are incredible athletes and outdoorsmen. I’m not yet one of them.

Snowshoeing in true wilderness, all alone, is a blissful, exhilarating, and liberating experience. It’s walking on water, and it feels like the purest way ,

to blend with the landscape. Jb

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

To Run Well, We Don’t Need a Specialist. We Need Simplicity.

Eight MEDICINE AND SPORTS

What nature really abhors is complexity. She strives for simplicity, and runs the universe on principles and laws that can be reduced to a few short equations. The universe is, therefore, a seamless whole which we educated specialists have cut up into innumerable unintelligible pieces. And the more we focus down on particulars, the more we concentrate on facts, the more we narrow our line of sight, the less we understand how it all works.

Take the simple process of running. When I began running, I was an educated specialist who concentrated on one area of the human body. I was an expert who relied on other experts for advice.

I soon needed it. Although my ancestors could run forever, my limits were quickly reached. Serious running led swiftly to a series of foot, leg, knee and lowback injuries which threatened to end my new-found happiness on the roads.

I went dutifully to my specialist friends and found to my surprise that they were of little help. They were preoccupied with giving relief to my aching foot, my swollen knee and my throbbing sciatic nerve. They treated the effect, not the cause. And when I resumed running, back came my misery and pain. Clearly, I needed someone more sophisticated, some super-specialist. I had not gone high enough on the specialist ladder to find the wise man to help me.

I soon discovered there was no such wise man. I needed what Bucky Fuller calls a comprehensivist, someone who, childlike, still sees the world as something to be understood, who sees the world as reacting to a few basic laws and principles and who knows that everything that needs to be known is inside of us ready to be drawn out.

When you think this way, you know that running is as natural as breathing. If, therefore, running is routinely accompanied by injury, there must be some

deviation from the natural state. The barefoot child, the barefoot native, has no foot or leg trouble. The foot used constantly on dirt or grass or sand transmits only pleasant messages to the tendons and muscles and bones and joints up above. There is no such state as overuse.

It is only when we wear shoes and run on hard flat surfaces that the foot begins to disintegrate.

Almost equally unnatural is the specialization in the one repetition action of distance running. The native and the child engage in all activities with their legs. They run backwards and sideways, and jump and leap about. In this way, all the muscles are exercised and kept in natural balance. With me, it was quite different. The strong muscles on the back of my legs and back got stronger and shorter as the front muscles and the abdominal muscles got weaker and weaker.

Now I know my body and what is happening to it. I exercise my muscles. I have duplicated that absent dirt and sand in modeling inserts for my shoes. And the shoes I wear have a shank and sole that counteracts some of the attrition of the hard flat surface.

But most of all, I listen to my body and try to unlearn being an educated specialist. It’s a lifetime work, this becoming a simple and seamless whole.

* Eo *

If you have heart disease, should you take it easy? Not on your life, according to Dr. Terence Kavanaugh, the director of a cardiac rehabilitation unit in Toronto. In 1973, Kavanaugh had eight of his exercising post-coronary patients increase their running to an average of 50 miles a week and then took them to the Boston Marathon. Everyone finished except Kavanaugh.

The Toronto cardiologist is a prime example of a new trend in medicine— prescribing sports instead of drugs. Where once heart disease would disqualify a person from athletics, now more and more physicians see it as a compelling reason to participate. Where once the examining doctor looked for heart disease and high blood pressure and diabetes and asthma and the like to exclude people from sports, the same physician is now urging these same patients to play.

It makes good sense. Illness or not, the individual must try to maximize himself. He must seek his optimum function, physically, psychologically and spiritually. In so doing, he becomes more and more the person he is. This natural health of mind and body comes from inside, not outside, and to attain it the patient needs advice, not medicine. The best advice is very simple: “Be an athlete!”

There was a time when our existence depended on being an athlete. Simple day-to-day living called on all of man’s adaptive functions, required no less than physical excellence.

For the great majority of us, that state no longer exists. Today’s rigors are entirely different. Exposure in this environment is exposure to tensions and aggravation, to anxiety and guilt and anger and boredom. It is exposure to sugar and salt and alcohol and cigarettes. It is exposure to superficial goals and unrewarding achievements. It is exposure to what is destructive and not purifying. It is exposure to things to which there is no adaptation.

Today’s diseases are the interaction of a susceptible individual with that destructive environment. The athlete, on the other hand, returns to the original struggle for life. He returns to a discipline which protects him from affluence and its effects, to competition which is free from guilt and self-destruction, to physical excellence which restores his self-image and corrects his lifestyle.

The presence of illness or disease only accentuates the need for these activities. If disease is, in part, due to the environment, we must act against that environment. And the first act is action. The less the body does, the less it can do. The muscles set into motion all the adaptive mechanisms of the heart, the respiratory system, the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas, the sweat glands, the endocrine

glands and the nervous system.

This also sets in motion emotional and psychological and spiritual events which are less easily charted but equally important. As we return to fitness, to a state where we are bone and muscle and no more, we also remove the psychological and spiritual fat which had contributed to

our bloated lives and our bloated self-image. When the patient becomes an athlete, he accepts the discipline that sport imposes. What he eats, how much he sleeps, are seen as adding to or detracting from his full capability. He also recognizes that however handicapped he is, his limits are much, much higher than he

suspected.

“Do your best” applies to diabetics as well as All-Americans. “Become the person you are” is directed to asthmatics as well as world record holders. “Fulfill your design” is meant for heart patients as well as Olympians.

* Eo *

There were always people around complaining about progress, wishing they were back in the good old days—people who think splitting the atom was a tragic mistake, regard the moon shots as a waste of time, and wish the Boston Marathon would reduce its field to a few top athletes.

My view is just the opposite. Today, or perhaps tomorrow, is the good old days. Atomic physics has turned scientists into theologians. The Apollo program has turned engineers into ecologists. And the Boston Marathon has turned ordinary men into athletes.

The astronauts are obvious examples of the human body at maximum efficiency. They have a live-in physician, in command of some impressive and sophisticated hardware that measures all their functions that are vital, and some that aren’t. NASA has discovered that its most delicate instruments are its own astronauts.

The astronauts’ physical aim is survival. The marathoner is seeking excellence. Making the 234,000 miles from Cape Kennedy to the Plains of Descartes and back requires the best medical science can offer. But the 26.22 miles of a marathon are no less demanding, and there are lessons to be learned there that can be taught nowhere else.

Few observers, however, are impressed by the marathon as a research laboratory. In place of the electronic marvels of aerospace medicine and its corps of whitecoated professional personnel, the runner is met by a casual volunteer physician who gives him a 10-second interview with a stethoscope applied to his chest.

All the runner gets from this agent of Mission Control is, “Good luck. Next.” No one wires him to prevent catastrophe. No one monitors his pounding heart. No one observes his brain waves or sends instructions about his next meal. He is alone in space without instruments, knowing nothing about disastrous changes in his salt and water supplies, unaware of impending circulatory collapse, ignorant of alarming elevations of his lactic acid.

But, instruments or not, the long distance runner is learning. He is learning, for instance, that running these great distances is not simply a matter of talent and training. The race is not always, or even frequently, to the swift. Disaster awaits those who think all it takes to run a marathon is a slow heart, lean body, strong legs—and lots of free time.

With primitive tools and methods, distance runners are learning to avoid things that stand in the way of excellence, and to pick up the things which promote it.

The distance runner knows now that one thing he needs is good feet, and in the absence of that the proper shoes. He knows his training must start months ahead—everyone knows that—but also that too much training is worse than not enough. He is finding, too, what heat can do to him and how to neutralize its effect.

This and more the marathoner has learned: the value of a three-day sugar and starch binge just prior to a race, the danger of a fast start, and the feeling that something very special is happening inside of him.

Most significantly, he’s learning that these things happen in predictable patterns. They’ve always happened that way, but it has only been recently that he has seen what these patterns are. Now, he’s in a position to control the odds—to make running more a science and less a gamble.

The runner in search of excellence has discovered what Einstein did—that “God doesn’t play dice with the world.”

Eo * *

The most important medical book of this century was not about disease. It was an account of research into the functions of the emotions written by Walter B. Cannon in 1915 and called Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage.

The book was based on Cannon’s thesis: “The bodily changes that accompany great excitement are directed toward efficiency in physical struggle.” An individual can tap enormous reserves when the emotions (Cannon called them “energizing mechanisms”) are called into action.

Now we need an addition to Cannon’s work, another medical classic that is not about disease but about the development of human potential in much more logical and systematic ways. It could be called, Bodily Changes with Exertion, Environment, Diet and Constitution. And it should be based on the theory that there are unexplored ways for each one of us to be stronger and faster and more durable.

As with any exploration of man’s world, be it physical or intellectual, psychological or spiritual, this hunt is not without danger. Cannon’s work uncovered the adverse as well as the beneficial effects of emotions. He showed that feelings, when misdirected, are the cause of psychosomatic disease. So too the athlete pushed beyond his capabilities will develop the illnesses of “overuse” —what we could call “the diseases of excellence.” These diseases of today’s athletes will be the diseases of tomorrow’s common man, when increasing leisure will open up humanity’s possibilities—which is why sports medicine is the medicine of the future.

As of now sports medicine (and indeed all of medicine) resembles nothing more than a giant spy network in which no one has the master plan. Everyone is working out his little coded message in complete isolation, with no idea of what others are contributing to the solution. The result is a system going nowhere. And even where there is movement, it is in the wrong direction. Sports medicine remains a source of frustration to both physician and patient. No Walter Cannon has come along with his vision of the big picture, with his ability to gather diverse facts from many fields and put them together.

Despite this we are making progress. The world’s records of 20 years ago are the high school records today. The human body is not only the greatest marvel in the world, it is getting more marvelous as standards of living improve.

But marvel or not, there are limits. We will continue to push them back, but they cannot be ignored. They must be treated with respect. The man trying to become a whole man must be aware that he has hidden weaknesses and susceptibilities. “There is a crack in everything God made,” wrote Emerson. And it will reveal itself under stress.

This may sound pretentious to anyone who simply wants a doctor to take care of his tennis elbow or heel spur or aching knee. But no elbow or heel or knee is an island. Everything is connected to everything else, and is related to the total person.

The athlete with these problems has been described as a person who tries to get the most out of his genetic endowment through training in his environment. These training methods are based on Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, the application of increasing loads with appropriate rest intervals.

These programs are, in effect, gross testing of every system in the body. They stretch the athlete physically, psychologically and spiritually. Each athlete, therefore, is an experiment-of-one who needs an individualized schedule which includes sleep, diet and practice sessions. Otherwise, he will get his badge of honor, a disease of excellence.

Unfortunately, given the present state of the art, he is likely to get the disease before he arrives at the excellence.

* Eo *

Would you believe there are people in America in trouble from trying too hard? This information, however implausible, happens to be true. And not a mere handful of dedicated nuts. All over the country, runners, tennis players, football and baseball players, golfers and athletes of all description—pro, amateur, weekend and what have you—are consulting their physicians because of symptoms due to trying too hard.

The first wave of these patients caught the medical profession by surprise. Doctors are accustomed to seeing man’s attempt to maximize himself—but only for ill. They are adjusted to a fat, indolent clientele.

This gloomy group, however, has become interspersed with an odd bunch who come to the office because of foot, leg, arm and other pains due to excessive activity. “Tt all began,” the patient will say, “after I started running 100 miles a week.” Or, “I’d been averaging three hours of tennis a day without trouble when I changed my racket.” Or, “I wonder if 36 holes three times a week is too much.”

Medics trained to disease rather than overuse confront these self-maximizers in disbelief, and are unable to give any advice except to cease and desist from such foolishness. This is an unsatisfactory prescription for any athlete, but especially disappointing to one passionate enough to devote the amount of time necessary to develop this type of ailment.

That amount of time has been estimated to be five times what athletes put into training prior to World War II. Distance runners, because of the success of the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Lydiard, are running up to 20 miles a day—a distance during which each foot strikes the ground 17,000 times. No wonder any number of “overuse syndromes” occur in this category of athletics. No surprise, therefore, that we have to deal with stress fractures, shin splints, fallen arches, achilles tendinitis. If even a microscopic difficulty is repeated 17,000 times, something has to give.

Nine STRESS AND REST

In the winter of 1940, when I was a senior at Manhattan College, I won both the mile and half-mile races in one of those numerous armory meets held during the New York indoor season. My times were the best I had ever run, and the entire performance drew a mention from Jesse Abramson in the Herald-Tribune the next day. The following week, I felt tired. I never ran another good race while I was in college.

Three decades later I set a US mark for my age in the two-mile and came back to win the mile an hour or so later. The next day, I won a 50-and-over five-mile race. I felt tired for months after that.

The story is a familiar one whenever coaches and runners talk about the mysteries of running. A personal best performance, another push to the limits and then disaster. Being at absolute peak is just one step away from losing it all, and usually it is the old sin of pride, that extra race, which triggers the destruct button.

The urge toward excellence can breed arrogance—a feeling that you are superior to the laws of nature. The athlete’s sin is no minor one like lust or envy or greed. The apple of being all you can be, and being it now, is almost impossible to resist.

For some, recovery follows in a week or two of inactivity. For others, months go by before they are able to run with competence and zest. This is bad enough, certainly, but how many runners are lost to the sport forever? How many athletes, not knowing what is going on, push themselves harder and harder as their running deteriorates, and finally give up on the sport for which they were most fitted?

My guess is that the number is enormous. This staleness and poorly treated musculo-skeletal problems are the major causes of quitting running. The question, therefore, is can we anticipate these breakdowns and somehow forestall them and the subsequent defections? Is there a way to prevent these depressing and incapacitating events?

Yes, one way is to understand and work with GAS. The General Adaptation Syndrome is a three-phase formula of stress and its effects first outlined by Canadian

physiologist Hans Selye. It is based on the common and easily observable fact that man exposed to an unaccustomed strenuous task goes through three stages: experiences a hardship, then gets used to it, and finally can’t stand it any longer—or as Selye terms the sequence, (1) alarm, (2) resistance, (3) exhaustion.

Translated into training, this means applying increasing amounts of work (Stage 1) with a resultant improvement in performance (Stage 2) but stopping before exhaustion (Stage 3). The coach and his athletes must know that peak ability means exhaustion and staleness are close at hand.

The moral is simple: The next time you run out of GAS, fill up your tank with rest.

Eo * *

The main worry of the competitive runner is not injury but overtraining. The runner knows the race is as easily lost by training too much as by doing too little, by trying too hard rather than not enough, and by going too far with the Nietzschean wager, “What doesn’t destroy me makes me strong.”

The Italians, who have made a science of observing this destructive phenomenon in their beloved bicyclists, call it sur-manage. We call it staleness or overtraining or peaking too soon. The causes are many and vary for each athlete, but Nietzsche’s dictum still holds. A stress is applied and the body reacts. If it adapts, the body is stronger. If it fails to adapt, it is destroyed. To prevent such catastrophes, the process must be caught in the early stages, at which time a cure is still possible.

Unfortunately, the early symptoms are quite vague: lack of enthusiasm, decrease in interest, tiredness and irritability are complaints all too common for most of us from time to time. The runner may also notice a shortened attention span, difficulty in studying, trouble with staying asleep at night, a drop in grades. And during this time, he becomes more liable to develop allergies as well as colds and strep throats and mononucleosis. There is an increased susceptibility to inflammation and infection.

All this may alert the runner that something is amiss. But the first definite sign of staleness he may recognize is a poor performance. If so, it is already too late to do much. The runner will now have to spend weeks and even months getting back to the peak he has just passed.

Next, the runner enters the dangerous six-week period of high intensity interval training that will bring him to his maximum capabilities. These sessions increase his body’s ability to use high-energy phosphates and handle lactic acid. They

build up his anaerobic capacity which so often is the decisive factor in dividing winners from losers.

He must, however, keep this work within his personal limits. And no coach can tell the runner his appropriate pace as precisely as his own body can. (4) Speed workouts therefore must be individualized.

But even an experienced runner finds listening to his body can be deceptive; he needs (5) more scientific ways of monitoring his progress toward this treacherous zenith on his performance charts. And our Italian friends have provided one.

When you first awaken in the morning, lie quietly in bed for five minutes, then take your pulse. Rise, go to the bathroom, and then weigh yourself. Record both pulse and weight. Following training, shower, weigh and then lie down for 15 minutes (do not sleep), then check pulse. Again, record both pulse and weight. These figures will show if you are training too little, too much or just enough. If your morning pulse is higher than the previous morning, you are not completely rested and should either not train or train lightly. If your weight is also falling, you are overtraining. Your afternoon pulse and weight should get closer and closer to the morning figures as you get nearer and nearer to your peak.

Now the runner is finally ready for (6) his tapering period, 7-10 days of decreasing work to husband his strength, both physical and psychological, for the final assault.

It all sounds so easy. But what about the cross-country runner faced with three three-mile races a week almost as soon as he gets his uniform. Instead of a diet of pure endurance runs, he has these tri-weekly high intensity equivalents of six interval halves at 2:30-2:35 with no rest in between. And if somehow he escapes peaking prematurely under this program (and the interval halves his coach adds on), he is faced with six championship races in a row. Sur-manage is the inevitable result.

* Eo *

When Don Schollander was in training for the 1964 Olympics, he was faced with the prospect of three major tests in a row: the national championships at the end of July, the Olympic Trials at the end of August, and six weeks later the Olympics themselves.

“Physically and psychologically,” he wrote, “it was impossible to peak for all three.” He decided, therefore, to take a chance and ease off in the Trials where he took two second places to qualify for the team.

Few spectators realize the truth of Schollander’s statement. They assume that the athlete comes each week to the competition more or less in the same condition. That condition, they think, is maintained by training methods which are standard, and result in permanent peak condition and performance. The runner, to them, is the world’s equivalent of the “top gun.” He must win every time out

or they will begin to say, as they did of Schollander, “Is he going downhill? Is he clutching under pressure?”

Unfortunately, runners and coaches, raised on the American tradition of either testing themselves against the top guns or maintaining their own position as top guns, ask themselves the same question. The final result of such constant affronts to man’s physical and psychological capabilities is just such a debacle as occurred in the 1972 Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore.

Rr Hughes

In the 800-meter trials, the three fastest Americans of the past year—Tom Von Ruden, Juris Luzins, and Mark Winzenried—were eliminated. The trio had held starring roles through the indoor season, traveling from coast to coast and frequently running twice a week. Based on their past records, the race at Eugene seemed to be a mere formality before they picked up their tickets for Munich.

But it was not to be. They failed. They had succumbed to a new unrecognized menace—overracing. The greatest known danger to runners prior to this has been overtraining. The effects of daily practices of grueling intensity and duration have been fairly well documented. And although coaches continue to tread the line which separates fitness from exhaustion, most are fully aware of the hazards.

Overracing, however, is a less evident threat. Moreover, it is insidious. The race, you see, is the love-making of the runner. This is his peak experience. The clock, that unforgiving minute, is there to be tested and enjoyed. So are the other competitors providing the tempo that makes each race so different from the next, and the crowd whose shouts keep you continually keyed up and reaching for your best effort. It is a package few can resist. Von Ruden, Luzins and Winzenried couldn’t.

Von Ruden went stale. Luzins’ arch acted up. Winzenried came down with achilles tendinitis. Overracing bore its fruit.

As the week in Eugene went by, American coaches were being taught a lesson one of them already knew. Bill Bowerman, the first coach in this country to recognize the dangers of overtraining, was also the first to realize the hazards of overracing. And at the Trials his pupils took five of 12 berths in the four longest runs.

How does Bill Bowerman do it? How come that year after year his Oregon runners are the best in the country and frequently the best in the world? What is the Bowerman secret?

His method is simplicity itself. From the lowest level of ability (he has coauthored a book on jogging), he has advocated the hard day-easy day program—a hard day of work and an easy day to recoup. For some, this might even be two easy days. Running should be fun, he thinks. It should be approached with zest, he believes. Very little is to be gained, he states, by torturing yourself.

So Bowerman avoids the overtraining menace, and he has helped his runners resist the lure of overracing. Oregon runners are only rarely seen during crosscountry, which Bowerman views as a season for building up the distance man. Races, he claims, interfere with that progress and—even worse—may tear the runner down.

An Oregon runner in an indoor meet is an even rarer event. Bowerman waits for the outdoor season before he gets his men into high gear, pointing toward the later stages of the season. Then and only then all systems are go.

The basic pattern begins to emerge. Bowerman views track as a lifetime activity (Eugene is the “jogging capital”) which can be made enjoyable and rewarding year

in and year out. And like all human activities it follows the seasons as we build up gradually to a yearly peak performance. We leave that like a mark on a tree to which we return in a year to see how much taller and stronger we’ve become.

* Eo *

Are you a “sleep cheat”? Are you gradually adding to a sleep deficit night after night? If so, you are in for serious physical and psychological consequences, warns Dr. Julius Segal of the National Institute of Mental Health. Segal is only one of a number of researchers on sleep who are discovering that sleep is one of the essential needs of man. “We sacrifice it,” says Segal, “at considerable peril to our bodies and minds.”

This is no news to poets, parents and coaches. The people who are really close to what makes for health and happiness and maximum human performance knew this all along. Those whose knowledge of the human condition came from meditation and love and concern realized this long before the experts on physiology and the biological sciences.

The scientists are, as usual, late arrivals. They are only now finding out what Keats meant when he wrote of “a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing.”

There are two types of sleep. The first is called “REM” (rapid eye movement) and consists of relatively short periods in which dreams occur. The second type is the orthodox or non-dreaming sleep. This is called “S” (slow-wave) sleep because of changes in the brain waves detectable on the electroencephalogram.

These two types of sleep apparently have different functions. S-type is necessary for biological health and performance. During this type of sleep, the body pours out growth hormone which in adults has the function of promoting the renewal of our tissues. REM sleep, on the other hand, seems to be mainly concerned with psychological function. Without it, we soon get into serious emotional and intellectual difficulties.

But haven’t mothers over the centuries known that? Hasn’t every one of us been told by our mother that we must sleep to grow? And hasn’t the cranky child always been excused by the explanation that he had not had enough sleep? Science is once again confirming the old wisdom.

Science is also confirming the wisdom of the coach’s curfew. When an athlete becomes a “sleep cheat,” he is upsetting a very delicate balance between applied stress and the body’s recuperative powers. Further, in limiting the hormonal repose he may be limiting his own potential in his sport.

Missing curfew has definite consequences on both types of sleep, but particularly on slow-wave sleep. This is of primary interest to the athlete. S-sleep increases after exercise and no doubt contributes to physical conditioning. With it comes an increase in protein synthesis which translates into speed, strength and endurance.

Just what is the optimal sleep length for each individual is unknown. In the early 1500s, Andrew Boode’s Dietary of Health suggested eight hours in summer and nine hours in winter as the ideal time to sleep. We have not progressed much beyond this suggestion. Surveys suggest that 7 4 hours is the average sleep taken by most people.

Most books on health and exercise physiology skirt this problem. They merely suggest “adequate” sleep, as if the individual surely knows his own requirement.

If we could hear what our body is telling us, that might be so. But in a 24-hour society where there is always action somewhere and any number of reasons not to go to bed, our need for sleep goes unnoticed. The call to slumber is ignored. The voice of the body is unheard. Which is why the lack of adequate sleep is a primary problem in the training of athletes.

Nature, you see, makes no allowances for such mistakes. Her penalties for violating the curfew are a lot more substantial than any coach’s. And nature’s bed checks occur every night.

Eo * *

My first coach was partial to naps. I took naps to make up for lost sleep, took naps to conquer fatigue and prevent exhaustion, took naps to make me strong and increase endurance. I even took naps to improve my disposition. When things were going wrong and there was any doubt about what to do, I took a nap. And for whatever reason, the nap theory worked. It produced what it promised.

The nap is a biological and psychological and spiritual necessity. It renews and restores and revives. But only in childhood do we accept it. Only in childhood do we use again and again that first 90 minutes of sleep which scientists tell us is the deepest and most refreshing of all.

Yet the nap is the only answer for the overtrained athlete who finds himself more and more fatigued, whose performance is deteriorating, who lacks zest and is losing interest. This athlete is the one who needs more sleep at night, a nap during the day and a halt in his training.

The professional athletes have come to know this. Those athletes who are totally into the use of their bodies, who plan their day around maximum performance, know the importance of rest. I saw in the New York Times that basketball player Walt Frazier occasionally sleeps for 18 hours straight when the Knicks are on the road. A survey of touring women tennis pros showed that most of them sleep nine or 10 hours a night. I recall also that Tom O’Hara, when he was the leading indoor miler, would sleep for most of the 24 hours preceding a race.

The nap is also the answer to the self-imposed work-play week of the ordinary citizen. Few people are constructed of material strong enough to handle a program which includes a 40-hour work week, commuting, nighttime TV, and a weekend of exhausting physical and social activities. This life-style leads to what must be the major deficiency disease of our age—a deficiency in rest.