Just For Practice

Northern Advocate, 28 September 1949, Page 8

Just For Practice

To put fitness into a footballer you run him round the block (provided it is a mile or so round) three. or four times a night. To get a boxei fit you give him hour after hour of skipping and ball-punching. Yet no sportsman sureiy can have as gruelling a time when training as the ; racing cyclist. Amazing “jaunts" of anything up to 100 miles are taken in their stride as part of the necessary routine for preparation for a big event. A wheelman's weekend is one long grind—and, strangely enough, that's just the gear, he declares.

Vic Hills, Waitemata Cycling Club star -and Auckland provincial 25-mile road racing champion, who last Saturday had little difficulty in annexing the major Northland road racing championship title in the big 80-mile contest at Kaikohe. showed unmistakably how he practices. HOME NON-STOP His system was that you go in for events' far' from your comfortable hearth and home —and that you get out the old cycle and pedal it all the way there, have your go at the race, then pedal the infernal thing all the. wayhome again. That is exactly what Vic Hills did. He left Auckland on Thursday and reached Whangarei that afternoon. Because he was taking it easily, he forbore to go on the extra 55 miles to Kaikohe but stayed the night in Whangarei, finishing the trip next morning. The race over, he abstemiously went to bed at an hour which, if proverbs contain any real horse-sense, should make him healthy, wealthy and wise. The hotel maids had barely finished washing up his breakfast dishes before Vic was out on the open road again, bound for home non-stop. A 345-mile ride, just for practice, with the 80 miles of the contest thrown in for luck. “Take it easy Why, I have got to work on Monday morning!” he expostulated. •