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

As of January 2008, Furman held 72 current records, his most recent being part of a group effort: he and an international team with members from 15 different countries, all motivated by their extreme religious devotion, spent two weeks constructing the world’s largest pencil. They shaped 8000 board feet of wood and 4500 pounds of graphite into a 75-foot-long, ten-and-a-half-ton writing instrument, an anachronism in this increasingly digital age. “It wasn’t easy,” Ashrita wrote, not on a giant legal pad but on his blog. “We had to make the pencil to scale, it had to look precisely like a normal pencil and it had to be made out of the same materials…we even manufactured a 250-pound eraser.” Those 72 records are just the ones he still claims, but overall Ashrita has set or broken 177 Guinness World Records in his lifetime, far more than anyone in history. More than twice as many, in fact: in 2003 he reached one of his many Guinness milestones when he passed legendary Russian weightlifter Vasily Alekseyev, the previous champion of champions, who had set 80 records in his vaunted career. To match Alekseyev’s lifelong tally, Ashrita demonstrated patience, stamina and, above all, stability, when he stood balanced on an inflatable exercise ball for two hours, 16 minutes, and two seconds at Stonehenge. Shortly thereafter, he moved into uncharted territory with his eighty-first world record, this one for the fastest full marathon ever completed by someone skipping the entire way, covering the 41-kilometre (26.2-mile) course in five hours and 55 minutes - and in decidedly child-like fashion. For the five years since he passed Alekseyev, Ashrita has stood alone atop the record world.

      Like his many incredible feats, Ashrita himself defies generalization. On one level he is reminiscent of a ski bum, except that he gets his adrenaline rush from breaking and setting records. Like the ski bum, Ashrita has structured his life and work in large part around breaking and setting Guinness World Records, and this enthusiasm has taken him not just to Stonehenge but to all corners of the globe.

      On another level, one could argue quite seriously that Ashrita is among the world’s greatest athletes. Among Olympians, the decathlon is viewed as the premier athletic event, and the best decathlete is widely touted as the world’s greatest athlete. If excelling in just ten disciplines warrants such respect, why not give credit to a man who is the very best in dozens of them? Ashrita has been called many things in his illustrious career, but the one nickname that has stuck is Mr Versatility, the superhero alter ego that many fans know him by (yes, he does have fans). Even if you throw out some of Ashrita’s more ridiculous specialities, like finger snapping, frog hopping or egg balancing, he has more than enough records that are truly astonishing feats of strength, speed and endurance to put the best decathlete to shame. Ashrita sternly maintains that while some of his records may draw more laughter than respect, each and every one requires a commitment to excellence and a great deal of determination, concentration and fitness. At age 54, when almost all competitive athletes are retired, Ashrita is at the height of his game, still breaking records at a staggering pace: he bagged more than three dozen in 2006 alone, his best year ever. Despite his frenetic pace over the past two years, averaging one record every ten days, Ashrita’s passion has never waned, and he says, “What I love about the Guinness Book is that I can just go through it and choose something that I’ve never done before, train for it, and become the best in the world at that event.”

      By any standards, Ashrita Furman is an incredible man. But unless he is wearing one of his many singlets in the midst of a record attempt, you wouldn’t notice his taut muscles. Nondescript, he is of average height and average build, with short hair and spectacles, not thin or fat but rather solid, and if you had to guess what kind of an athlete he was, gymnast would come to mind. He certainly does not look like the best in the world at anything, but in fact he is the best in the world at many things; he has come to define the upper limits of what Guinness World Records has made possible. He is living proof of the American Dream version of the Guinness story, the one often mouthed by the book’s staffers: if you try hard enough and dedicate yourself, anything is possible. He has also demonstrated the media side of record breaking, that if you do it enough you will get on TV and in magazines, over and over again. After all of this, his most prized paraphernalia are not the official certificates that sit on his wardrobe floor, but rather his scrapbooks, with a page for each and every record attempt he has ever made, illustrated with his own snapshots, alongside the occasional postcard and local news clipping. These are more like photo albums of a summer trip to the continent than the main documentation of a life’s purpose, and as he eagerly flips the pages, holding the book upside down to show me, the memories of various attempts and places come flooding back. It is a journey that has now spanned almost 30 years.

      The story of almost every serial record breaker and Guinness devotee begins with a childhood spent thumbing the book’s pages until well worn, and Furman is no exception. Born Keith Furman in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, he grew up in a Jewish household of extreme religious devotion. His father was the president of a Zionist organization, and young Keith attended synagogue regularly and was educated at a yeshiva (rabbinical school), where he described himself as ‘bookwormish’, becoming valedictorian. In between his studies, he found time to fall in love with The Guinness Book of World Records, at least vicariously. “I had this fascination about the book,” he told me, “but it was totally theoretical. I had no interest or ability in any sport.” That changed, and in the years since he has given the matter a lot of reflection.

      The target audience of the Guinness book is, I think, eight- to 12-year-old boys, and there are different theories as to why that is. Boys of that age group are trying to find their place in the world, or something like that, and whatever it is, I kind of fit into that pattern. Around that age I was just fascinated with the book. I used to scour it, I remember having it in camp and reading it under the covers with a flashlight [torch]. It’s not only the records, but the exotic places, like seeing the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids, because they are interspersed throughout the book, and that also became part of it, sort of fulfilling a dream of not only breaking records but doing it in exotic places.

      Like Stonehenge.

      The young Keith Furman may have been a successful student, but he was neither an athlete nor content with his place in the world. In high school, Furman considered sports “a complete waste of time”, and recalls getting “beaten up my first day of high school for being such a nerd”. Sports were not the only aspect of his youth that left him feeling alienated. Despite his upbringing, Furman never felt comfortable within the bounds of Judaism, and his continued search for meaning in his life led him to examine Eastern philosophy and begin studying yoga. This, in turn, led the teenager to attend a meditation class with guru Sri Chinmoy that forever changed his life.

      Until his death in late 2007, Sri Chinmoy was the spiritual leader to thousands of devoted followers worldwide, espousing not an organized religion but rather a set of beliefs, an examination of the inner spirit and paradigms for living a just life. He was based in an enclave in Jamaica, in the borough of Queens in New York City, where he basically had his own neighbourhood, a miniature kingdom of reflective followers much like a faith-based Chinatown or Little Italy. I met Ashrita here, at one of many vegetarian restaurants run by and for Chinmoy’s followers, because eating meat is prohibited. Several other Chinmoy-associated businesses, including a florist and the health food shop Furman manages, give these few square miles a surreal pervasive spirituality.

      Chinmoy’s way is not a religion per se, but rather a philosophy that emphasizes love for God, daily meditation and public service, with a broad religious tolerance and the Vedantic view that all faiths reflect divinity. An author, artist and athlete, Chinmoy gained fame for organizing vast public events, including concerts and races, to showcase inner peace and world harmony. Born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose in 1931 in what is now Bangladesh, he studied for 20 years at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, a spiritual community in India where he meditated, exercised, wrote and painted. In 1964 he moved to New York, and according to his official biography, Chinmoy “sees aspiration - the heart’s ceaseless yearning for ever higher and deeper realities - as the spiritual force behind all great advances in religion, culture, sports