Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
fits in with the child-like nature. I like doing these things. When people ask me how I choose what record to do, I always say choose something that you love to do, something that gives you joy, because you are going to have to practise it for hours and hours. There’s a record for eating an onion. I’m good at it, I’m a fast eater and I am within a few seconds but I can’t stand doing it. I tried it and I’m not getting any joy, so forget it, I’m not going to deal with it. There are so many other things I can do.
Like peeling and eating a whole lemon, which he must like better than onions, since he set the record in 2007, for the second time, at under 11 seconds.
Another thing Furman has become famous for is the locations he chooses to set records. His first seven, including milk-bottle balancing, were all done in New York City on a high school track or in Central Park. But his eighth was the start of something new in his spiritual and record quest. Despite having been thwarted in his initial attempt at getting into the record book, he tried the pogo-stick route again and became the very first person to jump up and down Japan’s Mount Fuji, on a rough hiking trail to and from its summit. This feat inspired him to begin choosing his record-setting locations carefully, but in one memorable case, perhaps not carefully enough. Following the Mount Fuji stint, his newfound focus on spiritually or historically significant settings would lead him to his longest-standing Guinness World Record and, in his mind, the most difficult ever. This record will almost surely never fall, because Guinness ‘retired’ it, in part due to the danger it entails. For his landmark tenth record, Ashrita took somersaults, or forward rolls as they’re known in Guinness-speak, to the extreme.
At the time, Ashrita still was not obsessed with record-specific training the way he is today.
Now I have a much better idea of how much I have to train for a record. In those days I really didn’t train a lot. I was basing it a lot more on my faith. Now I am pretty demanding as far my training and I won’t try a record until I feel like my body is there. In those days it wasn’t like that. I was planning on breaking the somersault record somehow. People magazine called and they wanted to cover the somersault thing, and there was no time to train, and I had only trained up to a few miles. I just went out and did it, and that all contributed to the difficulty. Plus, I never even looked at the course. It was a terrible course. I had only trained on a flat path and it was all up and down. I just said, “I’ll go out and do Paul Revere’s ride.”
This, of course, refers to the historic American Revolutionary War route Paul Revere rode on horseback at midnight between Charlestown and Lexington, Massachusetts, to famously warn the populace that ‘the redcoats are coming!’ As Furman recalled, “I sort of always had this idea of making the records more creative and more interesting. It started with Paul Revere’s ride, the somersaults. That was the first one where I picked a place, and that just happened spur of the moment.” In the case of the Mount Fuji run, Furman was in Japan for Chinmoy-related business, and once there, decided to try to set a record but had not travelled for that specific reason. Paul Revere’s ride came about because, as he puts it, after his People magazine interview, “I was just kind of stuck.” Paul Revere’s route spans some 19.66 kilometres (12 miles and 390 yards), much of it on dirty city streets. It took Ashrita ten and a half hours.
Even in his colourful litany of records, ten and a half hours of somersaulting stands out. Furman has since covered many miles by pogo sticking, sack jumping, unicycling backwards, juggling, stilt walking, carrying a person on his back and crawling while pushing an orange with his nose. But somersaulting Paul Revere’s ride seems the most impossible: the length is comparable to a hilly half-marathon, exacerbated by rolling over and over on your head - on pavement. He had to throw up several times along the way. “It is really like banging your head against the wall,” Ashrita said, grimacing and clearly not fond of the memory. “I find that when I train my brain is always dull for a day or two after. The Paul Revere somersault thing was the hardest one. The somersault thing was brutal.” Strong words from the eternally nonplussed meditation fan.
It took decades for the memory of the agony of the somersaults to wane enough so he would consider trying to break his own record; even in the hypercompetitive world of Guinness, with Ashrita’s records the most coveted, no one else bothered in the more than 20 years since. But when he submitted an application to try it again, Guinness refused.
I got this enquiry back saying “when you did it the first time, was it truly continuous?” and I had to say no, there were a few times I stopped to throw up. I don’t think you could literally do it continuously, because you do have to throw up. So they said “by the strict rules it wasn’t consecutive so if you want to do it now, it has to be the most somersaults in 12 hours.” So they are allowing what I did to stand, but if I want to break it, they redefined it and it has to be a new category. So I said “fine, let’s do that.” But then they must have had a meeting or something because they got back to me and sent me an e-mail saying “we don’t want to do that, we don’t want to have a category like that.” I think they thought it was too dangerous. I’m stuck. But that’s okay because there are so many other things I can do. I’m not going to go crazy about it because there are so many other challenges.
Like pogo sticking up Mount Fuji, somersaulting Paul Revere’s ride taught him the importance of location, and how a superlative setting could make a Guinness superlative even more so, and thus attract more publicity for his spiritual cause. This historic route endeared him to the media, and his non-stop record-breaking pace has made him the closest thing to a mainstream celebrity ever produced through purely Guinness World Records feats. Besides having the most records, he has many colourful, if sometimes bizarre ones, set in exotic places. His record breaking also travels well to the television studio, where he can break records live and on demand. For these reasons he has become a media darling, using his prominence to spread the word of Sri Chinmoy. Ashrita has been the subject of hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories, and a guest on numerous television shows, including those of David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers and Bill Cosby. As recently as late 2007, he was featured on the US television newsmagazine show 20/20. He has frequently appeared on the various Guinness-related shows in the US and UK, and these days is contacted at least weekly by radio, television and newspapers from around the world. Television crews from Japan have come to film 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,