" The father of an eight-year-old girl who completed a 55-day run across eastern China denied forcing her into the ordeal, saying she considered pounding the pavement for hours each day a form of play.
"You can force your child one day," Zhang Jianmin (張建民) was quoted as saying in the China Daily newspaper, referring to his daughter, Huimin (張惠敏).
"But you can't force one to wake up early in the morning everyday if one doesn't want to," he said.
Zhang Huimin arrived in Beijing on Sunday after she started her extraordinary odyssey on July 3 from Sanya, at the southern tip of the island of Hainan, 3,560km from Beijing. Her father, a distance runner in his youth, followed her on an electric bicycle.
The girl, who weighs 20kg and stands 1.25m tall, got up at 2:30am every day to train for the run and would have had to have run about 65km a day for 55 days -- the equivalent of about one-and-a-half marathons a day.
On the Beijing trip, she only rode twice on her father's motorized bicycle, the China Daily said -- when she was chased by four wild dogs and when a mountain road was too steep to run down.
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