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 making. He decided to try to break the 5K skipping mark at the Wat Pa Luangta Yanasampanno Forest Monastery in Thailand, where Buddhist monks care for injured and orphaned tigers. His plan was to skip the first 25 metres with a full-grown tiger on a lead, despite the handlers’ worries that he might get mauled. He ended up breaking the record unscathed, but Sri Chinmoy was very unhappy with his pupil because of his strong belief that a life is valuable and should not be risked unnecessarily.

      While Sri Chinmoy supported most of Ashrita’s non-tiger record attempts, even he drew a line somewhere between sublime and absurd. According to the New York Times in 2003, several years earlier Ashrita had begun eating a large birch tree near his home in Queens after he learned that someone else had set the world record for tree eating. He was trimming branches and grinding them up in a kitchen blender, when his teacher found out. “He heard about it and said: ‘That’s absurd. Tell him to stop.’”

      In the case of the tiger, Ashrita may have gotten carried away by his own name. In Sanskrit, Ashrita means ‘protected by God’. The name, given to him by Sri Chinmoy years ago, has served him pretty well, both with animals and his 30 years of breaking records. His only two significant injuries have been in training: he cut his hand seriously with broken glass while practising balancing a huge stack of pint glasses on his chin, severing a nerve and requiring hand surgery. Later, he broke a rib while training with a giant, aluminium hula hoop (another niche in which he holds several records). “Sri Chinmoy, when he looks at a person, rather than seeing the outer form he gets the feeling of their inner quality. Everybody has a soul and they are all different and express different inner qualities, so after you’ve been a student for a while he’ll give you a name that is descriptive of your inner qualities. Most people, their name doesn’t mean anything, it’s just something their parents gave them. It reminds you of your soul’s mission, because everyone has a mission in life. So he gave me that name, and of course, I’d much rather use that name, so I made it my legal name. My father wasn’t that happy about it.”

      That was not the first time. The deeply religious elder Furman was very upset when his son abandoned Judaism for what he saw as a cult, and the two did not talk, on and off, for years. Interestingly, Ashrita thinks that it was his pursuit of Guinness World Records that ultimately led him to reconcile with his father. “The Guinness thing actually helped because it was something he could relate to. He couldn’t relate to my joining this group, and he thought I was giving up my religion, even though I had already become totally disillusioned. When I started getting media attention, it was something he could understand and it really helped a lot. He came when I set a jumping-jack record, but then he said it was too painful to watch and that was the only one he came to.”

      Over the years, Furman has amassed an impressive list of record-breaking locales, but like the ski bum, he has worked out a lifestyle to do it on the cheap. “The travel sounds better than it is. My teacher holds these free concerts and I organize the trips and get a tour conductor’s ticket, and I also get air miles. There are times when I specifically go to a place, like Egypt, because I wanted to set a record at the Pyramids and I use air miles, but most of the time, it’s wherever I am travelling with the band. Last year we went to Turkey, Bulgaria and Thailand and I didn’t have to pay. Also you always need witnesses and that can be hard in other countries but on our concert trips we have all these people who are credible witnesses for Guinness, like professors and doctors, so I’ll use them.”

      The last few years have been especially intense, because his record-breaking velocity has picked up. In 2006 he set 39 different records, and then added 36 more in 2007, a pace that shows no sign of slowing down. In historical perspective, it took him 18 years to notch his first 50 records; just eight years for the next 50; and in the two years since he has added 77 more. Part of this has been the self-fulfilling prophecy of his success: the more he does, the better he gets at logistics and fitness, and the more he can do. But structural changes at the book have also made it easier. Whereas early on he scoured the pages for existing records he could break, in recent years Guinness World Records management has grown much more permissive about new, invented records. In all likelihood, 20 years ago, the existence of pool-cue balancing would have precluded the acceptance of his baseball-bat balancing, and Hula Hoop Racing While Balancing Milk Bottle on Head, Fastest Mile, would never have been accepted, full stop.

      Ashrita recalled how the many changes in the book over the past three decades have affected him and his spiritual quest.

      The Guinness book was a reference book, an encyclopedia, a place where you could ask “what’s the most push-ups anybody has ever done?” and then open it up and it would be there. It was like that for years and years and years, until maybe 1996. Around then it changes. It stopped becoming a reference book and it became just a list of fascinating facts. That affected me in a number of ways. It is more difficult to find records. They cut out a huge chunk of records and everything is in a database that the public does not have access to and that’s a problem because you really are in the dark, you don’t know if there is a record. There is a tiny percentage of all the records, something like 2 per cent [actually, about 8 per cent of all official Guinness World Records are published in the book each year]. That allowed them to expand the categories and changed the philosophy from having to do something that was already in the book to get in, and I think that was a good thing, because now they are much more open minded about new categories. It’s a tremendous opportunity for me and I am having a great adventure, but there is some feeling of loss, because it’s no longer a book where you can go through it and say “wow, let me try that, or that would be great to break.” That’s the major change. But I still go through the new book as soon as it comes out. I devour every new edition and I think I’ve already broken eight or nine records from the 2007 book.

      He told me this in March 2007, just six months after the book had hit the shelves.

      The other change for me personally is that because all the records aren’t published in the book anymore, each record is not as competitive. Someone could do a record, like one I just saw for throwing the Guinness book the farthest distance. I would never have known about that if I hadn’t read an article about it. That guy threw the book, and it was accepted. Okay, so you are supposed to have media coverage, but let’s say his local paper covers it and it never shows up on the Internet. He’s got the record, he gets the certificate, it’s not in the book, I have no idea, and no one is going to try to break it so he could have that record for ten years and no one knows. I don’t know what the solution is, and I’m not complaining, but it changes things. That definitely diminished the level of competitiveness and maybe the standards somewhat.

      Competitiveness is a huge factor in the book’s appeal and history, but most would-be record breakers are simply competing against essentially faceless opponents. They are, in fact, named, but for all purposes are anonymous to readers who do not actually know them. Not Ashrita. He is a prized target, and by virtue of his all-time Guinness champion status, his records carry more cachet, both for the one-off record breaker and for a handful of challengers who have emerged over the years to make a run at the King of World Records. “I love some of the rivalries,” says Ben Sherwood, former executive producer of CBS’s Good Morning America. Sherwood is also a longtime Guinness World Records fan, and author of the Guinness-inspired novel The Man Who Ate the 747. “Ashrita has some great rivals. There’s some dude in Morocco who walks farther with a brick than he does, so one year it’s him, and the next year Ashrita has to walk five miles farther with the brick without putting it down, and then the next year the guy in Morocco walks five more miles than that. There are those kinds of funny rivalries over who can walk the longest distance with a certain kind of brick without putting it down. But in Ashrita’s case it has a lot to do with his faith, and that’s an unusual thing and he is not typical.”

      Ashrita admits that records can become somewhat personal possessions, and losing them hurts, but at the same time he makes himself an easy target. Knowing that records actually published in the book are much more likely to be broken, as СКАЧАТЬ