Word: raced
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Said the half-miler: "Sure, but it's mostly mental. Your running's about 90% in your head. The nervous energy you build up before a race carries you the first 200 yards. You're not breathing any harder than when you started...
...half-miler confessed unblushingly that he invariably goes under the stands half an hour before his race and gets deathly sick. The others nodded understandingly. All of them got sick too, some before a race and some afterwards. It was the terrible "keying up" process that track champions must go through. Since it helps them win, most of them consider it a blessing, not a handicap...
...them knew a runner who got so nervous before a race that he was afraid to walk down steps and had to be carried by teammates. At those times, Herb McKenley, the great Jamaican quarter-miler, walks around in a stupor, unable to speak when spoken to. Sweden's famed miler, Lennart Strand, gets absentminded; he recently went out for a race without his running shirt...
...wife always took over the night before a race. Brown-eyed Shirley Ann Patton, with whom Mel "started going steady" in the seventh grade, would invite friends over, instructing them in advance to talk about everything but track. When Mel went to bed, around midnight, he slept quietly. Next morning, Shirley Ann found odd jobs for him to do, and kept a string of small talk going to stall off thoughts of the race until about 11 o'clock. Then, as they parked two-year-old Susan with grandma and got ready to leave, inside Mel Patton the current...
Patton before a race. The split second the gun goes off, all this pent-up emotion explodes...