About the Author

Floyd Graham has had a steady interest in sports since childhood.  Track and Field Athletics remains one of his favorite sports.  He is from a sports-loving family which not only adored sports but competed in various sports including track and field athletics, soccer and cricket at the high school and collegiate levels.  

The author can vividly recall his first race when he was about eight years old against a female cousin, years his senior.  It took place on the grassy driveway from the front steps of his home down a steep incline to the gate – a distance of about sixty yards.  There was no winner in the hastily staged race as they both collided in descending the hill, suffering bruises.  Some years later, he and his brothers tried to refine their techniques and improve their speed by running thirty yards in the twilight after supper.  Old leather shoes which had outlasted their attractiveness as fashion statements were transformed into running shoes or “spikes”, as they were commonly termed, by removing the heels.  On moonlit nights they staged “track meets” among themselves and a friend, Donovan.  Small stones which glistened under the moonlit sky were used to define the lanes.  They taught themselves to be hurdlers by extending a string between two idle sticks they found and placed into service as the uprights of hurdles.   They pole-vaulted with bamboo poles and jumped into mounds of earth.  Record books were kept of the performances.  Initially, there was no clock or stopwatch – yet times were recorded.  Seconds were measured by counting.  A clock, retired because of its inconsistency and unreliability, was later found.  The clock had no second hand and, therefore, ingenuity dictated that to record a time one counted the “tick-tocks”.  Times recorded were sensitive to the excitement of a race.  The more excitement there was, the faster the timekeeper counted as his elevated pulse was directly proportional to his counting speed.  Oftentimes, no time was recorded because the timekeeper would get so caught up with the excitement of a race that he would forget to continue counting until the race was finished. 

The rudimentary track competitions appeared to have served some useful purpose as the author and his brothers had some success in track and field athletics.  The author was a national high school long jump champion and was inducted into his undergraduate college’s Athletic Hall of Fame.