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Monday 3 January 2011

Speedendurance.com

Archie Hahn – How to Sprint, the Theory of Sprint Racing

Posted: 03 Jan 2011 05:00 AM PST

Archie Hahn won the 60m, 100m, and 200 meters at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, followed by another gold in the 100 meters at the 1906 intercalated Games in Athens. If you count the 1906 as a real Olympics, then his back to back double would not be repeated until Carl Lewis 1984-1988. (and even that has controversy)

His hometown was Milwaukee hence his nickname, "The Milwaukee Meteor".

Archie Hahn later coached at the the University of Virginia and wrote the "landmark" book How to sprint, the theory of sprint racing; in 1929. This was one of first books on sprinting, as compared to Charles Paddock’s Track and Field or Fred Wilt’s Run Run Run which came out later. Even Geoffrey Dyson's book The Mechanics of Athletics was printed in 1962 (a recommended read by the way endorsed by Tom Tellez).

Thanks to print on demand, the book is now available to the public. It is public domain, but chances are your local library may not have it.

How to Sprint, the Theory of Sprint Racing

The disclaimer in the preface does warn us the book contains errors and printing imperfections. Personally, I recommend this book mostly as a trivia, historical and collectors items. As for training secrets, I think we've come a long way since 1929.

This book was written before the use of starting blocks.

Let's start with cover… they could have put a proper picture on the cover instead of the Shakespearian pen, paper and seal photo. The book isn't that old.

On the cover, it has the Authors name, Archibald Hahn, followed by some garbage characters [FROM OLD CATAL. I assume it was meant to say [From old catalog stock number… You would think there was a QA process to detect this early in the printing?

It is also missing page 1 of the Table of Contents.

Here is a training sample, for Month One, Week One which is utterly hilarious!

From one to three laps on a 400m track each day, using extremely slow jog pace, preferably interspersed with short walks. No Sprints or starts.

That's it.

We've come a long way, baby.

Trivia

On the flip side, it is full of great trivia. For example,

Lawrence "Lon" Meyers was the first person to with 8 National titles in the year 1880: the USA 100-220-440-880 and the Canadian 100-220-440-880. Note that at the USA Champs, he had run 7 races in one day including qualifying races.

It also discusses the first spikes worn in the USA 1868 at an indoor meet… by a Brit! So they must be good (that was the consensus at the time)

The book How to sprint, the theory of sprint racing; isn't very expensive at 20 bucks but a great historical book to have in the collection if you collect that kind of stuff.