Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
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 is the direct result of the chance interaction between two animal species, bird and man. The birds in this historic case were a grouse and golden plover, and the man Sir Hugh Beaver, a corporate titan whose improbable animal name was a perfect one for the father of the Guinness Book of Records.
The original 1955 edition of the book has a notable entry for another business genius associated with animals, Walt Disney, whose claim to fame was for having won the most Oscars, some two dozen of them. After achieving unparalleled success in creating one of the world’s best-known brands and a diverse entertainment empire worth billions, Walt Disney was famously quoted as saying, “My only hope is that we never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by a mouse .”
It is easy to forget such humble beginnings when a brand goes global and becomes a household name transcending borders and languages. Walt’s surname, Disney, is just such an iconic name, one instantly recognizable in all corners of the earth. Whether it is employed to refer to a man, a company, a library of cartoons, a film studio or a collection of theme parks, everyone knows Disney. Very few brands have achieved this level of universal pervasiveness and The Guinness Book of Records is one, enjoying Disneyesque global recognition - and for good reason: it is the best-selling copyrighted book in the history of mankind and is available in the native languages of most citizens of the world. Amazingly, it may have even surpassed the brand recognition of the famous brewery and stout for which it was named. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone, anywhere, who does not recognize Guinness records, yet at the same time, the famed collection of superlatives and astonishing feats remains cloaked in mystery and misinformation. Everyone knows what The Book is, but almost no one knows much about it. While Walt Disney’s hope remains fulfilled, and everyone understands that ‘it was all started by a mouse’, who recalls that the Guinness Book of Records was all started by a pair of birds?
The mid-fifties were the dawn of the Golden Age of Trivia on both sides of the Atlantic, represented in the United Kingdom by the explosion of interest in pub trivia, and in the United States by the many ‘quiz shows’, beginning with The $64,000 Question, first aired by CBS in 1955. The show’s popularity has never since been equalled on network television. “It was the first and only pre-Regis Philbin [an American game-show host on US television famous since the 1950s] game show ever to be the nation’s top rated television programme,” according to Ken Jennings, the all-time winningest player in Jeopardy! game show history, and the author of Brainiac, a history of trivia. Jennings goes on to state that “America’s crime rate , telephone usage and theatre and restaurant attendance would all drop measurably on Tuesday nights, as an astounding 82 per cent of viewers were tuned to CBS.”
In 1955,