for many months now i have told myself that i am a Gazelle. lol. for no reason at all. i claim that i am as fast as one and just as alert. i had jack all to do on the net last night, so i looked up gazelles. i wanted to find out how fast they could do 400m, becasue the next day i had to run it and i thought i could just tell the teacher how fast the gazelle can do it..and i wouldn't have to run..! 59seconds is how fast they can do it. i ran it in just over 1 min. (1.17mins). but i found an interesting story while i was trying to find the gazelle's time...and it goes like this- In 1947 the sportsworld press was flabbergasted by a report from the Middle East. An Arab prince decided to go hunting for gazelles in a jeep. In due course they spotted a herd grazing in the distance. They approached at top speed and drew alongside the stampeding animals, when one of the prince's servants tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to what seemed to be a gazelle running on its hind legs. They moved in closer to view this extraordinary spectacle and were astounded to discover that it was not a gazelle but a young man ! The prince looked at his speedometer which was registering 30mph, twice as fast as Roger Bannister ran to break the four-minute mile! They pursued the youth until he dropped exhausted to the ground. He was immediately photographed and tied up. The picture was cabled to every news agency in the world. The lad was thin, with long black hair, no beard, completely naked and very scared (which was hardly surprising). The prince sent the boy to a Cairo hospital where it was discovered he could not talk nor eat any food other than grass. Without his gazelle friends and not used to captivity he began to pine, refused to eat and eventually died. A sad and remarkable story, but true none the less. i couldn't get over it. it's crazy to think that such a thing happened. i looked into it more and more (the power of research and reading) and i found that it was true. i couldn't believe that such a thing could happen. and i found out that world class athletes are training in the "gazelle method" formed from this one guy that lived with them. world class coaches applied his life style to the track... and it goes sumthing like this- What is the significance of this amazing occurrence? It is this: gazelles do not jog, nor do they do steady runs. They are built to run fast away from their enemies, perhaps once or twice a day to survive. They learn to do this from the day they are born Modem middle-distance training methods are based on the principle that athletes start running slowly and get faster. This has one obvious snag - the athlete never experiences what it is like to run at world-record pace; in fact, the athlete may NEVER run at such a speed. This has a bad psychological effect the longer it continues because world-record pace is thought to be something beyond reality. But is it? If we examine every distance-running world record, then work out the speed per 400m, then break that down into the rate per 1OOm, we will discover that we CAN train at world-record velocity. What's more, we can actually the distance in total at that speed For example, let's take a mile in 3mins.46secs, that is 56.5secs per 440yds or 28.2 per 220yds or 14.1 per 1OOyds. We might not be capable of running many 400m in 56secs (400m is about two metres short of 440yds) or even many 200s in 28secs, but we can run 1OOm in 14secs. If we ran 16 x 1OOm in 14secs with 30secs recovery after each, we have a mile done at the world-record pace of 3:46. When we have accomplished that, we might consider running 24 x 1OOm, and from there we could progress to running l50m in 21secs, still with 30secs rest, then eventually on to 200s in 28secs, 250s in 35secs, 300s in 42secs and 400s in 56secs. i would like to try it and see of it works. and who said nothing good can come from Gazelles!!!?