Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  1

  Meet Ashrita, Record Breaker for God

  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 farther 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 thirty 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 bestselling 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 preteens 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, mustaches, and fingernails. Like most kids, Ashrita dreamed 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 thirty years later, the book has become a contemporary reflection of Ashrita: its focus has dramatically turned toward 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 fervor of a religious zealot, then sprinkling in his sense of humor 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 fifty 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 thirty 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 closet in a modest pile. The only one he has on display is his 100th, a special certificate the book made him to honor 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 longtime Keeper of the Records, the lofty title the English concern bestows upon its top rules official. As of January 2008, Furman held seventy-two current records, his most recent being part of a group effort: he and an international team with members from fifteen different countries, all motivated by their extreme religious devotion, spent two weeks constructing the world’s largest pencil. They shaped 8,000 board feet of wood and 4,500 pounds of graphite into a seventy-five-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 seventy-two 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 weight lifter Vasily Alekseyev, the previous champion of champions, who had set eighty 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, sixteen minutes, and two seconds at England’s mystic 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 26.2-mile course in five hours and fifty-five minutes—and in decidedly childlike 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 specialties, 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 fifty-four, 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 tank tops 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 glasses, 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 closet 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 Europe 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 thirty 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 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, 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 twelve-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 ages 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. 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, Queens, where he basically had his own neighborhood, 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, since eating meat is prohibited. Several other Chinmoy-associated businesses, including a florist and the health food store Furman manages, give these few square blocks 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 twenty 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 colorful 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 weight lifter, he completed numerous marathons and ultramarathons, and in 2004, at age seventy-three, bettered his personal record by lifting 146,931 pounds in one day. In 2002 he lifted 1,000 lambs over his head during six days in New Zealand, and the following week hoisted 100 cows. In 1988 he launched a program called “Lifting Up the World with a Oneness-Heart,” to honor people he felt had made a notable contribution to the world or humanity. For the next six years he took the program’s name quite literally, and lifted 7,027 such honored 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 11,000 miles and eighty 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, thirty 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 honor 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 tank top 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 store 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 traveling the world with them, slipping in record breaking feats along the way, often at the same exotic locations he dreamed 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 Web site, 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 twenty-four-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 5'10" and 165 pounds, and practicing no physical activity, he had low expectations. Little did he know that fueled by an inner spirit discovered during the race, he would complete a stunning 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 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 twenty-four 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.