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 him at his house in Queens, and he appeared on a show whose host he described as ‘The Jay Leno of Bulgaria’ - during which he leapt onto the host’s desk and began doing deep knee bends.

      Ashrita’s curriculum vitae of records has grown far too long to list, but it includes numerous odd combinations of and variations on his ‘child-like pursuits’, such as jumping rope while on stilts or pogo-stick jumping underwater (he calls this variation ‘aqua pogo’). He has crafted a whole genre of juggling records: while pogo-stick jumping, hanging upside down, even underwater. One of the more demanding combos is ‘joggling’ - juggling while jogging - and Furman says he trained harder for his first joggling marathon record (an impressive 3:22) than any other attempt. He still holds the ultramarathon 50-mile joggling record. Like so many of his feats, it sounds wacky but passes the test of ‘if you think you can do better you should try it’.

      Another now-common approach to Guinness record setting that Ashrita helped popularize is to take some existing feat and do it backwards. He has claimed backwards records in unicycling and (ten-pin) bowling, scoring a very respectable 199 with his back to the pins. Likewise, he takes old-fashioned exercises such as jumping jacks, squats, crunches and sit-ups, and adds a twist. He’s done them in the baskets of hot air balloons, while balancing on exercise balls, even on the backs of elephants. “I love elephants, so naturally, it’s been my lifelong dream to do a Guinness record on the back of an elephant,” he said, as if any explanation were necessary.

      For the past two years he has averaged more than three records per month, which is logistically extremely difficult. To do so, Ashrita has piled up certificates not only with odd combinations of skills but also by doing the same activities for varying lengths. He has revisited his unassailable skill at milk-bottle balancing by substituting the fastest mile for endurance. Besides pogo sticking up Mount Fuji (twice), he set records for the pogo-stick 10K, the pogo-stick mile (on the same Oxford University track where Roger Bannister first broke the four-minute mile AND at Australia’s iconic landmark, Ayers Rock AND near the South Pole), and the vertical record for pogo-stick jumping up the stairs of the world’s tallest free-standing structure on land until 2007, the CN Tower in Toronto (twice), ‘climbing’ all 1899 steps in under an hour. The first attempt was captured on film for Record Breakers, the popular BBC show based on the Guinness Book. Longtime Record Breakers producer Greg Childs recalls the shoot.

      One of the nicest guys, but crazy, is Ashrita Furman. The terrible dilemma of being a record-breaking producer is not knowing the outcome. But with Ashrita you sort of know: if he says he can do it, he does. We had him on at least a half a dozen times during my time at the show. He is part of a sort of cult, and we never would have dealt with him if he didn’t seem so nice and above board. He stays with people from the cult wherever he goes, so it really kept the costs down, which BBC loved. He did a fantastic thing where he pogo sticked up the stairs of the CN Tower in Toronto, the world’s tallest free-standing building. We filmed the whole thing. He went so fast the crews couldn’t stay with him. Then we tried to get him to forward roll the entire course of the London Marathon, but there was no way we could get permission.

      Furman’s use of wondrous settings has taken him from that humble start at Mount Fuji to numerous landmarks and all seven continents. The most difficult trip, logistically, was the time he hitched a free ride on an Argentinean Air Force cargo plane for a brief landing in Antarctica, where he barely had time to rush out, measure off a mile with a surveyor’s tape, and then pogo stick the frozen distance in record time. He did his somersault mile on the Mall in Washington, DC (prompting random passerby and renowned campaign strategist James Carville to tell him, “You’re not crazy. Kidnapping a school bus, that’s crazy. You’re not crazy. Maybe half a quart low…”). He has detoured from the Middle East to Iceland to break a record there, and his most memorable record-breaking sites include Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the ruins of Tikal in Guatemala, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser, the Amazon (underwater pogo-stick jumping), the Great Pyramids, St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, Ayer’s Rock, and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Indonesia’s Borobudur, Asia’s two pre-eminent ancient temple complexes.

      “I’m always trying to be creative and come up with interesting places and ideas, but a lot of times it is a struggle. One thing here and in a lot of Western countries is the insurance issue. Places don’t want to take the risk and they don’t see a benefit from the publicity. They are totally worried about the risk. Radio City I thought was a cool idea [he wanted to break a high-kick record on the Rockettes’ famous stage but they turned him down]. The sit-up record I wanted to do at the Atlas statue with the famous abs in Rockefeller Center but they said no.” Even Ashrita’s fabled pogo-stick assault on Canada’s CN Tower was the result of the Empire State Building, World Trade Center and Eiffel Tower all turning down his request. Yet foreigners, including the Canadians, seem to get it. “In some other countries they are eager. The book’s pretty well known and widespread here, but in some of the Asian countries,” he rolled his eyes in amazement.

      Like I was in Malaysia last year, and they are totally into records, it’s just incredible. I was a celebrity in Malaysia and I didn’t even know until I got there. That juggling with the sharks thing I did? There were like 40 people from the media there. For me it was great because I had my pick of wherever I wanted to do the records. They were like “sure, so what if there are sharks and you might not come out alive? That’s fine, go ahead. You want the convention centre? City Hall? Sure.” Pretty much anywhere I wanted. In India it is really big, and some of these other Asian countries, like Singapore. I saw this article in India about how Guinness World Records there are like Olympic medals. They don’t do well in the Olympics for some reason but they take their Guinness records to that level. In the article this guy, who had done some impressive athletic feats, and he was, I think, a mountain climber, he said “yeah, I want to break that Ashrita Furman orange record and then maybe I’ll get some respect.” It’s kind of funny because here you don’t get much respect for it.

      Perhaps the oddest choice of landmarks on Ashrita’s scenic record world tour was in front of the famous canine statue of Greyfriar’s Bobby, in Edinburgh. This reflects another of Furman’s deep and heartfelt passions, animals. “I love animals. I set the record in New Zealand with the shark [underwater juggling, 48 minutes, the record he was later attempting to better when a different shark collided with him]; the one on the elephant; last year in Malaysia I did a record for hopping on one leg and I hopped with an owl. The dog one is one of my very favourites. Guinness came out with a new record, they invented it, not me, the most jumps on a pogo stick in one minute. I knew I could do it, so to make it even more challenging I decided to hold a dog in one hand. It was so exciting! I had to have a vet on hand. That was my hundred-and-first.”

      If exotic locales and animals are good for record setting, then it only stands to reason that exotic animals are even better. “So, a few days before I was scheduled to go to Mongolia,” Ashrita blogged, “I began thinking about what kind of exotic animal I could meet in Genghis Khan’s homeland. And then I remembered reading that Mongolia has the second-largest population of yaks in the world, after Tibet. Now you can’t get more exotic than a yak! I don’t think I had ever even seen a yak in a zoo. So with yaks on my mind, I boarded the plane to Ulaan Bataar, and somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, the idea came to me. I had been practising for the sack-racing record - why not race a mile against a yak in a sack?” The actual record attempt was for the fastest mile jumping in a sack, so it didn’t really matter if he beat the yak or not, yet Ashrita’s competitive streak came out and he edged the animal at the finish line. But his fun with Mongolian animals did not stop there. Having already run the fastest mile on a conventional pair of stilts, he had been planning to conquer the same distance on stilts made entirely of cans and string, the kind children make from empty cans, its own separate Guinness record category. Inspired by his yak victory, he impulsively lashed the cans to his feet and returned to the mile course, this time leaving a Mongolian camel in the dust.

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