Getting into Guinness Read online

  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 CONGRATULATION SONY OUR 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 flaky 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 twenty-four hours of pogo stick jumping because my teacher had done a twenty-four-hour painting marathon and I wanted to honor that. It just shows you my faith, that I was going to go out there for twenty-four hours with no training. It worked. I did it, the record was 100,000 jumps in fifteen hours and I passed that in just thirteen-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 twenty-four hours, but afterward record officials disallowed his attempt on a technicality. As with many marathon endeavors, 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 honor 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 learned 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 fifteen 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 twenty-four miles of endless loops on a high school track, wearing, as he always does for record attempts, a Sri Chinmoy tank top, while never letting the full glass bottle slip from his head. Ashrita himself concedes that the record, one of his all-time favorites, looks funny, but actually doing it for all those miles 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 specialties, 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, 26.2-mile milk bottle balance three years later, and 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 80.95 miles with that glass bottle on his head. The vast majority of people, even fit recreational athletes, cannot walk that many miles, period. “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 twenty-three 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 favorite 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 seventy 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 twenty-four-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 specialties require event-specific training. To be good at things like long-distance milk bottle balancing you have to practice 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 practicing 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! The most unique reactions were in Cancun, Mexico, as I walked along the main boulevard in the tourist district. On lookers 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 practice 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 practice 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 twenty-four-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 specialties that when combined, account for the bulk of his records, which he describes under the umbrella category “childlike pursuits.”

  Many of the records involve childlike activities such as juggling, hopscotch, unicycling, pogo stick jumping, somersaulting, yodeling 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 toward God. That fits in with the childlike 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 practice 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 eleven 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, since 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 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 traveled 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 twelve miles and 390 yards, much of it on dirty city streets. It took Ashrita ten and a half hours.

  Even in his colorful litany of records, ten and a half hours of somersaulting stands out. Furman has since covered many miles by pogo sticking, sack jumping, unicycling backward, 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 Reve
re 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 twenty years since. But when he submitted an application to try it again, Guinness refused.

  I got this inquiry 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 nonstop 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 colorful, 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 20/20. He has frequently appeared on the various Guinness-related shows in the United States and England, 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.