During the 1924 Paris Olympics, Paavo Nurmi ("The Flying Finn") ran seven races in six days -- one of which struck many as particularly remarkable. Having won a 500-meter sprint, Nurmi won the 5,000-meter event just seventy-five minutes thereafter.

Later the same night, several of Nurmi's friends (including Adrian Pavlen, a former Olympic long-distance runner and IAAF president) took a bus from the Olympic village in Colombes to a party in Paris, a distance of some six miles. "We looked out the window," Pavlen later recalled, "and there was Nurmi... walking to Paris!"

[In his later years -- though suffering from heart disease, partial paralysis on his left side, partial blindness, and cerebral thromboses -- Nurmi walked eight miles every day.]