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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ despite his middle of the night inner-reflection while cycling and the ah-hah moment when he realized his calling, the book, for a time, would elude even his best efforts.

      It wasn’t that easy. It took a few trials and errors before I actually got in. The first thing I tried was pogo-stick jumping because it was the one thing I was good at as a kid. But it was crazy because I had that incredible experience with the bicycle and figured ‘okay I can do that again with no training’. So a few months later I had found out the rules for pogo-stick jumping and got a bunch of pogo sticks and called the media and went out there with no training. The record was 100,000 jumps. It was crazy but I had so much faith in the system, the chanting, the visualization, all these things I had done on the bicycle, so I just went out there, and after three hours everything was hurting. I had decided to do 24 hours of pogo stick jumping because my teacher had done a 24-hour painting marathon and I wanted to honour that. It just shows you my faith, that I was going to go out there for 24 hours with no training. It worked. I did it, the record was 100,000 jumps in 15 hours and I passed that in just 13-and-a-half hours, and then I kept going, because at exactly the moment I broke the record, I started hearing these screams, very weird noises in the park. It turned out they were peacocks in the Central Park Zoo, and it was very eerie because in Indian mythology peacocks represent victory and at the exact moment I broke it they started. The peacocks weren’t anywhere near us, there is no way they could have heard us. It was like a cosmic moment. I was in a lot of pain but I kept going.

      He did 131,000 jumps in those 24 hours, but afterwards record officials disallowed his attempt on a technicality. As with many marathon endeavours, rules stipulated that Ashrita was allowed a five-minute rest break after each hour. “Since I accomplished the record in an hour and half less than [the] guy before me, because I was jumping a lot faster, I took too much time off after I passed the record. I wasn’t aware of the way the rules were applied.”

      His next attempt also met with rule-induced failure. “Then I did juggling. Sri Chinmoy had done 100,000 paintings and I wanted to juggle a 100,000 throws to honour him so I went to Grand Central Station and just started juggling, went all night and did 100,000 throws.” It was only after he submitted proof of the feat that Ashrita learnt there was no category for continuous juggling - and Guinness didn’t want one. “I still had no idea about the whole process, getting approval in advance, and in those days especially, they were very much less open about new categories. If you wanted to get in the book you kind of had to pick something that was already in there.”

      The third time proved to be the charm, when Ashrita tried jumping jacks. “By that time I’d realized that ‘okay, you’ve got to pick something that’s in the book, you’ve got to train for it, find out all the rules and then do it.’ So I did.” In 1979 he completed 27,000 jumps. “I knew right away I was going to continue to do them. It gave me so much joy and I really saw it as such a positive experience. You’ve got to remember that for me, using my body to accomplish things was new. My whole childhood I grew up not doing sports so this was incredible, like, ‘I’m actually an athlete, I can do stuff.’ It was like a journey and basically there are no limits - pretty much anything that anyone else can do you can do if you have enough determination and spirituality.” It was his third attempt at a Guinness record, his first success, and from then on, he was totally hooked.

      “I think most people, once they get one record or two, or whatever, they are pretty satisfied. There are people who are serial Guinness record holders, but for the most part people are satisfied with that one and the 15 minutes of fame or whatever. But for me it was a totally different reason, because I am really doing it as a way to sort of live out this philosophy of transcendence that Sri Chinmoy teaches. That’s the key and the whole reason I kept doing it.” But even Furman concedes there is more to it than inner peace. “I have to admit, when I first saw my photo in the Guinness book, right next to the awesome gymnast Nadia Comaneci, I got pretty excited.”

      For the next few years he was lulled into a false sense of record-setting security by a series of feats that are now among his most mundane: team stretcher carrying, hand clapping, creating the most expensive floral wreath, and bettering his own jumping-jack mark (33,000). He was off to a good start, but it was not until 1983 and his seventh world record that his amazing athletic prowess would shine and the Golden Age of Ashrita began.

      Milk-bottle balancing does not sound as sexy as, say, the javelin throw. But like many Guinness World Records, when the reader understands and appreciates the rules, the true difficulty begins to sink in. Milk-bottle balancing, according to Ashrita, requires use of an old-fashioned glass milk bottle, full of milk, balanced on your head while you walk continuously. As with most marathon-style endurance records, there are prescribed rest breaks, but while you can stop walking to rest or eat, the bottle can never leave your head, although you are allowed to adjust it twice an hour. For Ashrita’s seventh record, he kept that bottle on his head for 38.6 kilometres (24 miles) of endless loops on a high school track, wearing, as he always does for record attempts, a Sri Chinmoy singlet, while never letting the full glass bottle slip from his head. Ashrita himself concedes that the record, one of his all-time favourites, looks funny, but actually doing it for all those kilometres is no laughable accomplishment. With this, he raised the bar for weird endurance Guinness feats, both for himself and others. His record was soon surpassed, and like many of his specialities, milk-bottle balancing would go through a hotly contested period. As a result, he has held this particular record at ever increasing distances no less than seven different times. When competitors take on Ashrita’s records, they merely awaken a sleeping giant, often causing him to eventually take the standard to a point where no one can match it and thus giving it an air of permanence. At first this back-and-forth tug of wills moved in small increments, with Ashrita claiming a marathon-length, 42.1 kiloometre (26.2-mile) milk-bottle balance three years later, and 52.9-kilometres (32.9 miles) two years after that. But in 1998 he took milk bottle balancing to an entirely new level, one that has remained uncontested for a decade, when he walked 130.27 kilometres (80.95 miles) with that glass bottle on his head. The vast majority of people, even fit recreational athletes, cannot walk that many kilometres, full stop. “When I started, some clown [literally, a circus clown] had done it. This clown had done 18 miles, and I did 24, then 26, then someone did 30 and someone did 33 and it just kept going back and forth, 40, 44, up and up until I did almost 81 and no one has done it since. It is a major commitment and it is a gradual process. You don’t just go out and do 23 hours of milk-bottle balancing. It would be a pretty big jump for someone to go out and break that record.” Milk-bottle balancing is one of his favourite records, and one of mine as well, because it is every bit as absurdly difficult as it is absurd. It is also one of the oldest of the more than 70 records Ashrita currently holds, having stood for ten years.

      The gradual competitive process he describes has become standard fare for Ashrita, especially as his growing fame has made his records more and more coveted by Guinness World Records devotees. The 24-miler marked the point at which Ashrita went from spur-of-the-moment, would-be record holder to serious athlete. He began a well-rounded fitness routine of aerobics, running and strength training, but has since come to realize that his specialities require event-specific training. To be good at things like long-distance milk-bottle balancing you have to practise them - often more complicated than it sounds - and this is one of the reasons he does much of his work on a local high school track, free of traffic and outside interference. He recounts the difficulty of training for the milk-bottle record on his website:

      The reactions I get while walking through the streets practising for this record are precious. In Japan, people politely pretend that nothing is wrong, but once I pass them I often hear muffled giggling. In New York, bystanders openly laugh, cheer, jeer or even throw rocks to try to knock the bottle off my head. One kid even used a slingshot [catapult]! The most unique reactions were in Cancun, Mexico, as I walked along the main boulevard in the tourist district. Onlookers would frequently try to startle me into dropping the bottle…teenagers would drive by in their cars screaming and honking their horns. One imaginative fellow snuck up behind me and barked like a dog in my ear! But the best was the city bus driver who crossed over to my side of the road, СКАЧАТЬ