Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book. Larry Olmsted

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СКАЧАТЬ half of which are current, out of the public eye simply by not mentioning them. Perhaps five to ten of his records are printed in the book itself each year. But his regularly updated website offers a detailed chronological list of his feats - along with advice on how to go about being a record breaker. This supports what he claims is the real purpose of his mission, to inspire others, and he cannot do that by hiding his records.

      When my records are broken there is a part of me that says “oh no,” especially if it is one of the longer ones that takes weeks or months of training, but it doesn’t really bother me, I’ve really come to a good place about it. Now I really see it as an opportunity. Because for some reason I don’t have the same motivation to break a record if I still have it. I think there is an innate push inside of everyone to make progress and I think this is progress. Why do people climb mountains or race cars? I think there is an urge to transcend. That is a lot of the motivation, to be the best and push past the limits. I’m not going against any person, but against the ideal. When someone breaks one of my records, I’m happy because he’s just raised the bar and, in some way, increased the level of progress of humanity.

      He insists it never gets personal - at least for him. “It’s not about competing with someone else, it is about finding the talent within yourself, the inner strength, doing the best you can and making spiritual progress. But over the years there have been a few people who wanted a rivalry.”

      Like Steve the Grape Guy, whose record for catching thrown grapes in his mouth Furman recently broke. Ashrita says the Grape Guy’s agent called, trying to set up a high-profile grape record showdown in New York. Ashrita passed. “I wished him the best of luck, but I’m not breaking his record. I’m not going against the person but against the record.” He says Suresh Joachim has also challenged him. Joachim is the closest thing in the world of Guinness to Ashrita, both in terms of numbers of records, types of records and stunning physical endurance feats. Despite still being far behind Ashrita in total records, Joachim is another leading example of the extreme of serial Guinness record setting. His website refers to him as ‘Suresh Joachim, The Multiple Guinness World Record Holder’, and he claims to have broken more than 30 different records, some of them mundane (riding escalators), some romantic (most bridesmaids and ushers at a wedding, his own), some mind-numbingly difficult (standing on one leg for over 76 hours). Ashrita recalled looking at Joachim’s website and reading about his intention to become the man with the record for having the most Guinness World Records, Furman’s most important ‘possession’. Nonetheless, Ashrita has deep admiration for his fellow record holder, especially since Joachim excels at phenomenal feats of endurance, such as running for 1000 hours. “He’s been doing records for years and he does more long-term ones, some of them are incredible. Some of the things overlap, like he had a crawling mile record and I broke it and he broke it back and I broke it. I think in his mind he would like to be the guy with the most records so obviously that’s a rivalry, but for me I am really trying to keep it at a different level, to inspire other people.” In speaking with Ashrita, it becomes obvious that he is pulled in opposite directions by his devotion to his religion and the understandable pride he has in his feats. “I don’t want to be the king of Guinness, that’s not my goal,” he insists. “I want to transcend my physical and spiritual boundaries. In that way, the Guinness book is part of my spiritual quest.”

      Ashrita’s record curriculum is a microcosm of the book itself: it is impossible to say one record is necessarily better than another, but some are stunning in their apparent difficulty, while others seem like technicalities that somehow snuck by the Guinness staffers, or were cheap shots at easy marks, like finger snapping. Both the 81-mile (130.35-kilometre) milk-bottle balance and the 12-mile (19.3 kilometre) somersault over Paul Revere’s route stand out as unfathomable - and untouchable

      - the kind of feats Norris McWhirter, the book’s creator, liked to call, “Almost very nearly impossible.” But the record I will always associate with Ashrita Furman is the one journalist Ben Sherwood spoke of: brick carrying. Even thinking about it hurts. Imagine picking up a standard construction brick. It weighs 4 kilograms (9 pounds). Hold it in your fingers, palm down, as rules stipulate. As soon as you have a good grip, begin walking. The goal is to keep going, brick in hand, for as long as possible. If you stop walking, or drop the brick, the event is over. You cannot change hands, touch the brick to your body, or in any way rest the brick on anything, ever. If you need to adjust your grip, you have to do so nimbly, without using the other hand or any outside agency. How long could you walk? At first I thought a few minutes, and on further reflection, maybe I could go half an hour. Maybe. No one I know who has pondered this question has answered more than two hours. The forearm cramps just imagining it. Ashrita has held this record many times, but like his great advancement in milk-bottle balancing, I doubt his best will ever be challenged. He carried the brick for 31 hours. To make matters worse, as if things could get worse, he did it on a cinder track and pebbles got in his shoes. He got terrible raw blisters. Then it rained. He never faltered. Looking back, even the unshakable Ashrita cannot believe what he did. “Afterward I had these blisters, all infected, and I went to a podiatrist. He said it was the third-worst case he had ever seen in his life.” It is probably the only time Ashrita Furman will ever finish a mere third in anything.

      Not long after our lunch, Ashrita was back to his usual antics, breaking the rope-jumping-on-stilts record in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Never one to waste a trip, Furman also broke records in baseball-bat balancing, along with his can-and-string-and-sack-jumping-with-animals miles while in Mongolia. Along the way, he stopped in Key Largo, Florida, to set the duration record for underwater hula hooping, then in Norway for a (different) can-and-string record. His scuba hula-hoop record, set in May 2007, was his landmark 150th, and by year’s end he had added 27 additional records to his total - more than most serial record breakers accumulate in a lifetime.

       2 The Greatest Record of All: Birds, Beaver, Beer and Sir Hugh’s Impossible Question

       The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

      - SAMUEL JOHNSON

       The original edition has an introduction by the chairman of Arthur Guinness & Co, Ltd, the Earl of Iveagh. What his Lordship wrote in October 1956 is very interesting, more interesting perhaps now than it was then.

       Wherever people congregate to talk, they will argue, and sometimes the joy lies in the arguing and would be lost if there were any definite answer. But more often the argument takes place on a dispute of fact, and it can be very exasperating if there is no immediate means of settling the argument. Who was the first to swim the Channel? Where is England’s deepest well, or Scotland’s highest tree, Ireland’s oldest church? How many died in history’s worst rail crash? Who gained the biggest majority in Parliament? What is the greatest weight a man has ever lifted? How much heat these innocent questions can raise!

       Guinness hopes that it may assist in resolving many such disputes, and may, we hope, turn heat into light.

      - THE INDEPENDENT (LONDON)

      Since its inception more than 50 years ago, the Guinness World Records book and its readers have always had an infatuation with animals. The very first edition applauded the exploits of a terrier named Jacko, a canine rodent-killing machine whose prodigious ‘ratting’ skills made him a record holder. Years later, Ashrita got into the book on the back of an elephant, skipping with a tiger, and pogo-stick jumping with a dog in his hand. Jackie ‘the Texas Snakeman’ Bibby became one of the book’s all-time icons by sharing a bathtub with poisonous rattlesnakes and dangling them from his mouth. It is only fitting that animal-related records have been such a mainstay of Guinness, because the book itself СКАЧАТЬ