Word: gg
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...world's fastest distance runner: long-legged, hollow-cheeked, 24-year-old Gunder Hägg (rhymes with egg) of Gavle, Sweden...
...since Finn Paavo Nurmi's memorable visit nearly a generation ago has a European athlete started for the U.S. with a better build-up than Gunder Hägg. Last summer he broke ten world's records at distances ranging from 1,500 to 5,000 meters (slightly over three miles). From sketchy reports U.S. track fans pieced together an extraordinary figure: a fireman by trade, so thin he looks like an inmate of a Jap prison camp, and yet rugged enough to run a mile in 4:04.6, two miles in 8:47.8, three miles...
Four Minutes Flat. Unlike Nurmi, Hägg has no fancy theories about his speed. A bashful, homespun farmer's son, reared in the wooded hills of northern Sweden, he attributes his flawless style to the springy forest paths, thickly padded with pine needles, where he first learned to run. He believes he is smooth and swift because he enjoys running more than anything else in the world except playing his accordion and doing the hambo, a native Swedish dance...
When a reporter once asked him if he had a slow pulse like Nurmi's (46), Gunder Hägg admitted that he had never bothered to notice (he has since discovered that it is low-48 at rest). He also scoffs at stop watches, diets and training rules. "I run," says he, "the way my muscles and nerves tell me. When I feel the time has come to sprint, I sprint...
...Except attendance in the Unitarian, Universalist and Christian Science churches, which had a high positive correlation with GG...