CHINA:How's this for Olympic spirit? With the urging of her father, an eight-year-old girl is running from Sanya, on Hainan island in the south of China, to the capital Beijing in the north, an epic journey of 4,200 kilometres.
"We've arrived in Que county in Henan province now and we have 70 per cent of the project behind us," Zhang Jianmin, a farmer from Linggao, near Sanya, said in an interview. The pair are travelling 60 kilometres a day and expect to arrive in Beijing on August 28th.
His daughter, Huimin, stands 125cm tall (just over four feet) and weighs in at just shy of 21kg (3st 4lb).
The images of the little runner are startling, clad in her pink Disney tracksuit accompanied by a group of adult runners, snapped in a quick photo opportunity in a southern village, or wearing her singlet as she pounds the tarmac - the journey is 2,500km as the crow flies, but much further on the road.
She causes quite a stir wherever she goes, with a mixed response - some onlookers praise her national fervour, particularly as today marks one year until the Beijing Olympics, while others think the girl is too young to take on such a task.
"One day we were training and my daughter said she wanted to see the Great Wall of China," said Zhang. "I said well you can run your way there."
The ambitious father has come in for a lot of criticism in the Chinese media since the run started on July 3rd.
There were reports that Huimin had a heavy cough after reaching Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, 15 days into her journey.
Next stop is Langfang in Hebei province on August 15th, where she will run an international marathon.
A director of a sports school in Hainan told local media that he advised Zhang to stop his daughter from her intense training "because it would affect the girl's heart, nerves and hormones".
One critic described Zhang as a selfish father who was behaving like someone trying to make a plant grow faster by pulling it upwards. "He should at least heed the doctors' advice that such excessive exercise can have adverse effects on the girl's health," Wu Jiayin wrote in the Shanghai Daily.
But Zhang is unworried.
"Some people say it will harm her health but she's been training for four years and it's natural for her to run these distances," he said. "She sometimes runs 80km a day when she's training, you know. This is less than usual."
Huimin's training routine starts with a 40km run at 3am every day, then school, then more running.
Zhang reckons his daughter has great potential and hopes that Huimin can compete in the 2016 Olympic Games, when she will be 17.
"I want her to focus on her studies, to go on to university. She's in school now, but if she wants to and is interested then we can focus exclusively on running."
A poor pig farmer, Zhang is depicted as an avid sports fan who failed to attain his own personal dreams of athletic success and is now living vicariously through his daughter.
There were also reports that Zhang signed a 20,000-yuan (€2,000) contract with a sports shoe company in July, but he denied any money changed hands.
He said the company was paying for hotel rooms along the route.