Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  Ashrita’s résumé of records has grown far too long to list, but it includes numerous odd combinations of and variations on his “childlike 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 fifty-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 backward. He has claimed backward records in unicycling and 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 structure, the CN Tower in Toronto (twice), “climbing” all 1,899 steps in under an hour. The first attempt was captured on film for Record Breakers, a popular British Broadcasting Corporation 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 preeminent 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, even 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 forty 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 center? 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 here.

  Perhaps the oddest choice of landmarks on Ashrita’s scenic record world tour was in front of the locally famous dog statue of Greyfriar’s Bobby, in Edinburgh, Scotland. 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, forty-eight 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 favorites. 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 practicing 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 twenty-five meters with a full-grown tiger on a leash, 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 thirty years of breaking records. His only two significant injuries have been in training: he cut his hand seriously with broken glass while practicing 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, aluminum 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 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 miles, but most of the time, it’s wherever I am traveling 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, since his record-breaking velocity has picked up. In 2006 he set thirty-nine different records, and then added thirty-six more in 2007, a pace that shows no sign of slowing down. In historical perspective, it took him eighteen years to notch his first fifty records; just eight years for the next fifty; and in the two years since he has added seventy-seven 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 gotten much more permissive about new, invented records. Twenty years ago, in all likelihood, 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, period.

  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 percent [actually, about 8 percent 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 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 furthest 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 onetime 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 Ashrit
a’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.