Читать книгу Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book - Larry Olmsted - Страница 7

Some things in life are best left unexplained. Ashrita Furman is one of them. This man is an athletic phenomenon whose ability is exceeded only by his imagination.

- JUST FOR THE RECORD (AUSTRALIAN TELEVISION)

I’m trying to show others that our human capacity is unlimited if we can believe in ourselves. I hope that after reading this you are inspired to attempt some feat of your own. The particular event is unimportant as long as it gives you the opportunity to dance on the edge of your capacity. But be prepared - the benefits could be both illuminating and far reaching.

- ASHRITA FURMAN, IN HIS ONLINE BLOG

For proof of the old adage ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, one need look no further than Ashrita Furman. If Ashrita did not exist, the marketing folks at Guinness World Records would have to invent him - but even the most imaginative ad person could not conjure up a character like Ashrita, who has now been intimately involved with the book for far longer than any of its staff. In the 30 years since he began breaking Guinness World Records, the men who invented the book have all passed away, its editors have come and gone, the book itself has been bought and sold and sold again, and throughout all of these changes, during the Age of Ashrita it has become the best-selling copyrighted book in world history, and by some accounts the second most widely read book of all time - behind only the Bible.

Fortunately for the more than 110 million readers who have purchased a copy of the Guinness World Records, Ashrita does exist, and no one in the book’s half-century has had the kind of impact on its pages that he has or has done more to spread its gospel. Furman was once just like the millions of other adolescents who buy the book every year and have made it an annual New York Times best seller for decades. Like his peers, Ashrita studied its pages, and pored over images that are now iconic to generations of readers: pictures of the tallest and shortest and fattest men and women, those with the longest beards, moustaches and fingernails. Like most kids, Ashrita dreamt of being in its pages, but unlike most kids he has lived out that dream to epic proportions. After a life-changing revelation, Ashrita got his own picture into the book in 1979 and has never slowed down since, continuing to get into Guinness at a frenetic pace with increasingly bizarre feats of stamina, strength and creativity. Ashrita Furman is ‘The Book’ taken to its logical, if such a word can used in the same breath as Guinness World Records, extreme, the mother of all record breakers. Paradoxically, he began as a contemporary reflection of the book, part of its target audience, and 30 years later, the book has become a contemporary reflection of Ashrita: its focus has dramatically turned towards him and his kin, featuring more and more self-invented records, which in many cases seem as difficult to think up as to execute. More than anyone else, Ashrita helped turn the Guinness World Records book from something people simply read to something tens of thousands of people each year strive to get into, and he has done so with his own unique and appealing style. By taking every child’s fascination with the book and marrying this passion to the fervour of a religious zealot, then sprinkling in his sense of humour and showmanship, this soft-spoken man from Queens, New York, has become nothing less than the greatest Guinness record holder of all time.

Yet despite all his success, he remains a humble servant of God. “ People magazine called me to be on their ‘50 most eligible bachelors’ list,” Ashrita, who has taken a pledge of celibacy, told the New York Times. “I told them, ‘There’s only one problem: I don’t date.’” The celibate vegetarian has also never driven a car (though he holds a record for pushing one). He has lived in the same apartment, with few possessions, for most of the last 30 years. Even his stack of Guinness World Records certificates, the largest such collection outside of the company’s headquarters, sits on the floor of his wardrobe in a modest pile. The only one he has on display is his 100th, a special certificate the book made him to honour the accomplishment, the only one of its kind ever printed.

“Ashrita is by far the most prolific record breaker,” Stewart Newport told the New York Times. Newport is the book’s long-time Keeper of the Records, the lofty title the English concern bestows upon its top rules official. 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 and science.” Chinmoy said, “Our goal is to go from bright to brighter to brightest, from high to higher to highest. And even in the highest, there is no end to our progress, for God Himself is inside each of us and God at every moment is transcending His own Reality.”

Chinmoy had a colourful athletic past of his own, and to demonstrate what the heart’s ceaseless yearning could achieve, he embarked on a series of Guinnessesque feats throughout his lifetime, minus the certificates and official recognition. An avid runner and weightlifter, he completed numerous marathons and ultramarathons, and in 2004, at age 73, bettered his personal record by lifting 66,647 kilograms (146,931 pounds) in one day. In 2002 he lifted 1000 lambs over his head during six days in New Zealand, and the following week hoisted 100 cows. In 1988 he launched a programme called ‘Lifting Up the World with a Oneness-Heart’, to honour people he felt had made a notable contribution to the world or humanity. For the next six years he took the programme’s name quite literally, and lifted 7027 such honoured individuals over his head - always with one arm. It is easy to see where Ashrita gets his inspiration from, not just spiritually but also for creating wacky feats of strength. His teacher also organized a biannual World Harmony Run to promote peace, a relay that spanned some 17,700 kilometres (11,000 miles) and 80 nations, undertaken to create goodwill between the people of the Earth. Chinmoy’s torch has been passed on during the run by the likes of Sting, Carl Lewis, Muhammad Ali, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II.

Chinmoy was equally earnest about art and writing, and claimed to have completed more than 100,000 paintings in less than a year, including more than 16,000 in one day. Likewise, he is responsible for countless volumes of poems, essays and plays. To spread his message, Chinmoy hosted concerts, lectures and public meditation sessions, like the one Ashrita first attended, all free of charge.

Sri Chinmoy’s affect on Ashrita was profound, and even today, 30 years after his first taste of limitless physical and spiritual prowess, Furman prefaces almost every comment with ‘my teacher believes’, ‘my teacher showed me’ or ‘to honour my teacher’. In fact, the serial pursuit of Guinness World Records has been Ashrita’s platform to publicly promote Chinmoy’s spirituality and draw attention to his cause - and he has been very successful at it. He wears a Sri Chinmoy T-shirt or singlet for every record breaking attempt and rarely fails to give credit to his teacher. For this reason, his job is as a manager of a health food shop in Chinmoy’s domain, where he is given exceeding flexibility. For years he has moonlighted as the travel manager of his guru’s orchestra, organizing concert tours and travelling the world with them, slipping in record-breaking feats along the way, often at the same exotic locations he dreamt of as a young boy.

Shortly after attending that first meditation with Chinmoy, Furman became a devoted follower, eventually dropping out of both Judaism and Columbia University to pursue spiritual fulfillment. On his website, Ashrita recalls his early experiences. “Sri Chinmoy radically altered the way I looked at things…. My teacher’s philosophy of self-transcendence, of overcoming your limits and making daily progress spiritually, creatively and physically using the power of meditation, really thrilled me! However, I was a bit unsure about the physical part in my case due to my lifelong commitment to nerdiness!” Sensing Furman’s reluctance to use his mind to expand the limits of his body, in 1978 Chinmoy told him to enter a 24-hour bicycle race through New York’s Central Park. As Furman told me, “It was basically ‘just participate, you don’t have to do great.’ I was in my early twenties and I had never been athletic my entire life, so I figured okay, I’ll participate.” At 1.8 metres and 75 kilograms (five feet ten inches and 165 pounds), and practising no physical activity, he had low expectations. Little did he know that fuelled by an inner spirit discovered during the race, he would complete a stunning 652 kilometres (405 miles), with no training, far more than most avid amateur cyclists could accomplish even with preparation and today’s much better equipment. In fact, while Ashrita had no idea, he had actually made a pretty impressive run at the 1978 Guinness World Record for all-day cycling, at just under 766 kilometres (476 miles).

My whole discovery of this revolved around that bicycle race. It was really a life-changing time for me, and I learned that it had nothing to do with my body. I learned that I could use the body as an instrument, as a way to express my spirit and also to make spiritual progress. The idea of using the spirituality to make progress at another level was just totally foreign to me, so this was a major breakthrough. That was the moment, when I kind of stumbled off the bicycle after being on the road for 24 hours, and I just remember making a commitment that I was going to break Guinness records, because it had always been a goal of mine as a kid but I never thought it was possible to do that. Not for my own ego, but to tell people about meditation, and that’s where it all started.

It did not take Ashrita long to make his mark on the book: with just his eleventh record, set in 1987, he earned a special and unique spot in the 1988 edition, a title he still holds that no one else ever has. His website reprints the original telegram from the book’s first editor, Norris McWhirter, congratulating him. It reads “ASHRITA FURMAN OF JAMAICA, NY HAS ESTABLISHED A VERSATILITY RECORD BY SIMULTANEOUSLY HOLDING GUINNESS RECORDS IN TEN UNRELATED CATEGORIES. WARM CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ELEVENTH RECORD.” This was his decathlon, a feat not lost on the media. In an article titled ‘In pursuit of excellence, sort of’, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper recognized the feat but noted, “On the other hand, we hear the nitpickers say querulously, this could turn out to be the dumbest decathlon of all time. Admittedly, it is difficult to think of any situation calling for any more than two of Mr Furman’s accomplishments at one time.”

Most of Ashrita’s copious press since has been more flattering. The Toronto Star called him the ‘King of World Records’. The New York Times dubbed him Guinness’s ‘King of Strange Feats, All for Inner Peace’. It was the Christian Science Monitor that chose ‘Mr Versatility’, the nickname that has stuck and continues to grow ever more accurate year after year.

If there is one thing the book’s weird history has demonstrated time and again, it is that no matter how eccentric the intent, getting into Guinness is never as easy as it sounds, even for Ashrita, who despite clearly being the best at it, still fails now and again. Like the time a shark crashed into him while he was attempting to break his own underwater juggling record - in full scuba gear. Cracking the pages of Guinness certainly was not easy at the outset, and despite his middle of the night inner-reflection while cycling and the ah-hah moment when he realized his calling, the book, for a time, would elude even his best efforts.

It wasn’t that easy. It took a few trials and errors before I actually got in. The first thing I tried was pogo-stick jumping because it was the one thing I was good at as a kid. But it was crazy because I had that incredible experience with the bicycle and figured ‘okay I can do that again with no training’. So a few months later I had found out the rules for pogo-stick jumping and got a bunch of pogo sticks and called the media and went out there with no training. The record was 100,000 jumps. It was crazy but I had so much faith in the system, the chanting, the visualization, all these things I had done on the bicycle, so I just went out there, and after three hours everything was hurting. I had decided to do 24 hours of pogo stick jumping because my teacher had done a 24-hour painting marathon and I wanted to honour that. It just shows you my faith, that I was going to go out there for 24 hours with no training. It worked. I did it, the record was 100,000 jumps in 15 hours and I passed that in just 13-and-a-half hours, and then I kept going, because at exactly the moment I broke the record, I started hearing these screams, very weird noises in the park. It turned out they were peacocks in the Central Park Zoo, and it was very eerie because in Indian mythology peacocks represent victory and at the exact moment I broke it they started. The peacocks weren’t anywhere near us, there is no way they could have heard us. It was like a cosmic moment. I was in a lot of pain but I kept going.

He did 131,000 jumps in those 24 hours, but afterwards record officials disallowed his attempt on a technicality. As with many marathon endeavours, rules stipulated that Ashrita was allowed a five-minute rest break after each hour. “Since I accomplished the record in an hour and half less than [the] guy before me, because I was jumping a lot faster, I took too much time off after I passed the record. I wasn’t aware of the way the rules were applied.”

His next attempt also met with rule-induced failure. “Then I did juggling. Sri Chinmoy had done 100,000 paintings and I wanted to juggle a 100,000 throws to honour him so I went to Grand Central Station and just started juggling, went all night and did 100,000 throws.” It was only after he submitted proof of the feat that Ashrita learnt there was no category for continuous juggling - and Guinness didn’t want one. “I still had no idea about the whole process, getting approval in advance, and in those days especially, they were very much less open about new categories. If you wanted to get in the book you kind of had to pick something that was already in there.”

The third time proved to be the charm, when Ashrita tried jumping jacks. “By that time I’d realized that ‘okay, you’ve got to pick something that’s in the book, you’ve got to train for it, find out all the rules and then do it.’ So I did.” In 1979 he completed 27,000 jumps. “I knew right away I was going to continue to do them. It gave me so much joy and I really saw it as such a positive experience. You’ve got to remember that for me, using my body to accomplish things was new. My whole childhood I grew up not doing sports so this was incredible, like, ‘I’m actually an athlete, I can do stuff.’ It was like a journey and basically there are no limits - pretty much anything that anyone else can do you can do if you have enough determination and spirituality.” It was his third attempt at a Guinness record, his first success, and from then on, he was totally hooked.

“I think most people, once they get one record or two, or whatever, they are pretty satisfied. There are people who are serial Guinness record holders, but for the most part people are satisfied with that one and the 15 minutes of fame or whatever. But for me it was a totally different reason, because I am really doing it as a way to sort of live out this philosophy of transcendence that Sri Chinmoy teaches. That’s the key and the whole reason I kept doing it.” But even Furman concedes there is more to it than inner peace. “I have to admit, when I first saw my photo in the Guinness book, right next to the awesome gymnast Nadia Comaneci, I got pretty excited.”

For the next few years he was lulled into a false sense of record-setting security by a series of feats that are now among his most mundane: team stretcher carrying, hand clapping, creating the most expensive floral wreath, and bettering his own jumping-jack mark (33,000). He was off to a good start, but it was not until 1983 and his seventh world record that his amazing athletic prowess would shine and the Golden Age of Ashrita began.

Milk-bottle balancing does not sound as sexy as, say, the javelin throw. But like many Guinness World Records, when the reader understands and appreciates the rules, the true difficulty begins to sink in. Milk-bottle balancing, according to Ashrita, requires use of an old-fashioned glass milk bottle, full of milk, balanced on your head while you walk continuously. As with most marathon-style endurance records, there are prescribed rest breaks, but while you can stop walking to rest or eat, the bottle can never leave your head, although you are allowed to adjust it twice an hour. For Ashrita’s seventh record, he kept that bottle on his head for 38.6 kilometres (24 miles) of endless loops on a high school track, wearing, as he always does for record attempts, a Sri Chinmoy singlet, while never letting the full glass bottle slip from his head. Ashrita himself concedes that the record, one of his all-time favourites, looks funny, but actually doing it for all those kilometres is no laughable accomplishment. With this, he raised the bar for weird endurance Guinness feats, both for himself and others. His record was soon surpassed, and like many of his specialities, milk-bottle balancing would go through a hotly contested period. As a result, he has held this particular record at ever increasing distances no less than seven different times. When competitors take on Ashrita’s records, they merely awaken a sleeping giant, often causing him to eventually take the standard to a point where no one can match it and thus giving it an air of permanence. At first this back-and-forth tug of wills moved in small increments, with Ashrita claiming a marathon-length, 42.1 kiloometre (26.2-mile) milk-bottle balance three years later, and 52.9-kilometres (32.9 miles) two years after that. But in 1998 he took milk bottle balancing to an entirely new level, one that has remained uncontested for a decade, when he walked 130.27 kilometres (80.95 miles) with that glass bottle on his head. The vast majority of people, even fit recreational athletes, cannot walk that many kilometres, full stop. “When I started, some clown [literally, a circus clown] had done it. This clown had done 18 miles, and I did 24, then 26, then someone did 30 and someone did 33 and it just kept going back and forth, 40, 44, up and up until I did almost 81 and no one has done it since. It is a major commitment and it is a gradual process. You don’t just go out and do 23 hours of milk-bottle balancing. It would be a pretty big jump for someone to go out and break that record.” Milk-bottle balancing is one of his favourite records, and one of mine as well, because it is every bit as absurdly difficult as it is absurd. It is also one of the oldest of the more than 70 records Ashrita currently holds, having stood for ten years.

The gradual competitive process he describes has become standard fare for Ashrita, especially as his growing fame has made his records more and more coveted by Guinness World Records devotees. The 24-miler marked the point at which Ashrita went from spur-of-the-moment, would-be record holder to serious athlete. He began a well-rounded fitness routine of aerobics, running and strength training, but has since come to realize that his specialities require event-specific training. To be good at things like long-distance milk-bottle balancing you have to practise them - often more complicated than it sounds - and this is one of the reasons he does much of his work on a local high school track, free of traffic and outside interference. He recounts the difficulty of training for the milk-bottle record on his website:

The reactions I get while walking through the streets practising for this record are precious. In Japan, people politely pretend that nothing is wrong, but once I pass them I often hear muffled giggling. In New York, bystanders openly laugh, cheer, jeer or even throw rocks to try to knock the bottle off my head. One kid even used a slingshot [catapult]! The most unique reactions were in Cancun, Mexico, as I walked along the main boulevard in the tourist district. Onlookers would frequently try to startle me into dropping the bottle…teenagers would drive by in their cars screaming and honking their horns. One imaginative fellow snuck up behind me and barked like a dog in my ear! But the best was the city bus driver who crossed over to my side of the road, charged his vehicle through a huge puddle and drenched me in a shower of warm muddy water.

None of this fazes Ashrita, because faith is on his side. He laughs such incidents off, and occasionally it takes such an encounter to make him remember that his lifelong passion is still odd to others. One of his many unusual records involves pushing an orange one mile with his nose, which at a world-record pace requires swatting it with your face so that it rolls as far as possible, and then scrambling after it and doing this again and again. This record is one that is almost harder to practise than to actually break, especially since when he broke the record, a long passageway in New York’s JFK airport had been cordoned off for his attempt, while his practice sessions took place in city parks. Over lunch he told me, “It sort of epitomizes the Guinness records: it’s nuts and if someone looked at you during it they’d think you really lost it. I remember when I went to the park to practise I’d look at everyone having picnics and think to myself ‘do I really have the guts to do this? To get down on my hands and knees and start smacking an orange with my nose?’ When you’re part of the regular world you see how crazy it must seem.”

The year 1983 began a watershed period for Ashrita, who would string together five defining records over a three-year period, beginning with the milk-bottle balancing, taking his quest into the realm of the extreme. As evidenced even in the 24-hour pogo-stick failure, his unique ability to ignore pain and do things for very long periods of time would become the backbone of many of his greatest achievements. He also carved out a niche with a handful of specialities that, when combined, account for the bulk of his records, which he describes under the umbrella category ‘child-like pursuits’.

Many of the records involve child-like activities such as juggling, hopscotch, unicycling, pogo-stick jumping, somersaulting, yodelling and balancing objects on my head or chin. You know how children are so close to their parents? That’s how my teacher Sri Chinmoy says we should be to God; you should feel like a child with affection and sweetness towards God. That 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, 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.

On one occasion, Ashrita’s fondness for animal records led to questionable decision 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 public knowledge makes them easy targets, Furman could keep the bulk of his 170-plus records, nearly half of which are current, out of the public eye simply by not mentioning them. Perhaps five to ten of his records are printed in the book itself each year. But his regularly updated website offers a detailed chronological list of his feats - along with advice on how to go about being a record breaker. This supports what he claims is the real purpose of his mission, to inspire others, and he cannot do that by hiding his records.

When my records are broken there is a part of me that says “oh no,” especially if it is one of the longer ones that takes weeks or months of training, but it doesn’t really bother me, I’ve really come to a good place about it. Now I really see it as an opportunity. Because for some reason I don’t have the same motivation to break a record if I still have it. I think there is an innate push inside of everyone to make progress and I think this is progress. Why do people climb mountains or race cars? I think there is an urge to transcend. That is a lot of the motivation, to be the best and push past the limits. I’m not going against any person, but against the ideal. When someone breaks one of my records, I’m happy because he’s just raised the bar and, in some way, increased the level of progress of humanity.

He insists it never gets personal - at least for him. “It’s not about competing with someone else, it is about finding the talent within yourself, the inner strength, doing the best you can and making spiritual progress. But over the years there have been a few people who wanted a rivalry.”

Like Steve the Grape Guy, whose record for catching thrown grapes in his mouth Furman recently broke. Ashrita says the Grape Guy’s agent called, trying to set up a high-profile grape record showdown in New York. Ashrita passed. “I wished him the best of luck, but I’m not breaking his record. I’m not going against the person but against the record.” He says Suresh Joachim has also challenged him. Joachim is the closest thing in the world of Guinness to Ashrita, both in terms of numbers of records, types of records and stunning physical endurance feats. Despite still being far behind Ashrita in total records, Joachim is another leading example of the extreme of serial Guinness record setting. His website refers to him as ‘Suresh Joachim, The Multiple Guinness World Record Holder’, and he claims to have broken more than 30 different records, some of them mundane (riding escalators), some romantic (most bridesmaids and ushers at a wedding, his own), some mind-numbingly difficult (standing on one leg for over 76 hours). Ashrita recalled looking at Joachim’s website and reading about his intention to become the man with the record for having the most Guinness World Records, Furman’s most important ‘possession’. 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.