Even during the final period of training, everything happened so pleasantly and naturally that I had none of the nervous qualms common among American athletes. At first I thought I missed the early morning walks our teams take daily, the companionship and jollity of the training-table, and the sense that the team was making a common sacrifice for an important end. Yet here, too, the college made up in a large measure for what I failed to find in the university. One of our eightsmen was training with a scrub four that was to row a crew of schoolboys at Winchester; and we had a little course of training of our own. Every morning we walked out for our dip to Parson's Pleasure, and breakfasted afterward beneath an ancient ivied window in the common room. In the pleasantness and quiet of those sunlit mornings, I began to realize that our training-table mirth, which is sometimes so boisterous, is in part at least due to intense excitement and overwrought nerves. And the notion of self-sacrifice, which appeals to us so deeply, seemed absurd where we were all training for the pleasure and wholesomeness of sport, and for the sake of a ribbon of blue. The interest the university took in our welfare became made manifest when the "first strings" were sent off to Brighton for the change in climate which all English teams require before great games. Some of the rest of us, who had nowhere else to go, went with them, but most of the men went home to train. The second string in the three miles stayed up at Oxford for commemoration, and joined us after three consecutive nights of dancing. He said that he found he needed staying up work. Every morning at Brighton the president made the round of our quarter of the hotel shortly before eight o'clock, and spoiled our waking naps to rout us out for our morning's walk, which included a plunge into the Channel. For breakfast, as indeed for all our meals, we had ordinary English fare, with the difference only that it was more abundant. On alternate days our training consisted in cross-country walks of ten or a dozen miles. Our favorite paths led along the chalk cliffs, and commanded a lordly view of the Channel. Sometimes, for the sake of variety, we went by train to the Devil's Dyke and tramped back over the downs, now crossing golf-links and now skirting cornfields ablaze with poppies. All this walking filled our lungs with the Brighton air, and by keeping our minds off our races, prevented worry. Sprinters and distance men walked together, though the sprinters usually turned back a mile or two before the rest. The rate prescribed was three and a half miles an hour; but our spirits rose so high that we had trouble in keeping it below five.[2]