Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  Hungry for Breasts: Where else but in Berkeley, California, would mothers—a lot of mothers—celebrate World Breastfeeding Week by trying to break the Guinness World Record for mass breastfeeding? On Thursday, August 3, 2006, organizers asked babies citywide to latch on at exactly 2 PM. Sucking its way into Guinness was no mere pipe dream for Berkeley: four years earlier, the city had first set the breastfeeding record by satisfying the needs of 1,130 hungry babies. The city mothers rested on their laurels, until the certificate was shipped off to the Philippines in 2006 after 3,738 nursing mothers displayed solidarity in Manila. If such slights are worthy of counterattack by folks like Ashrita Furman and his rivals, why should nursing mothers be any less driven by pride? The gauntlet had been thrown down and Berkeley women responded like any other displaced Guinness Record holder would, by taking up the challenge and picking up lots of babies

  Pub Trivia—Without the Trivia: The book itself is the result of pubs and pub patrons, so it is only fitting that it contains a pub crawl record for mass bar hopping. It is even more fitting that the record is rekindling the heat of barroom disagreements. In 2005, residents of Maryborough, a small city in Australia, invented the category and set the first record by enlisting 1,198 drinkers to blitz all of the town’s seventeen pubs. The next year, the city went after its own record and found 2,237 participants who consumed about 50,000 drinks throughout Maryborough. The numbers are staggering, or maybe just Guinness-worthy, at an average of more than twenty-two drinks per person. Rules stipulate that each participant consume at least half a pint of beverage in each of at least ten different pubs. The drink can be nonalcoholic, but having spent a fair amount of time in Australia, I don’t imagine a lot of record setters chose that option. In fact, one of the organizers told a local newspaper that part of the logistical difficulty in the bid is getting the drinkers to fill out and return their “crawl cards,” noting that “It’s a problem getting them to hand them in at the end of the crawl when they’re ‘tired and emotional,’ shall we say.” This problem was demonstrated in 2006 when rivals in London tried to wrest the title away from Maryborough and reportedly got 2,700 patrons to visit ten different pubs, but apparently were unable to sort out the paperwork and get approval from the book. Since Maryborough’s record still made the 2008 edition, it seems more than a few of the English pub crawlers also had trouble completing their cards. While this news probably went over well in the rural city that mocked its more famous rival for a poor showing, given London’s population of 7 million compared with Maryborough’s 25,000, the Aussies will not be sitting back and awaiting the next threat. They have decided to make the record-breaking pub crawl an annual event, to be held on the weekend of the Queen’s birthday, and I hope to make it Down Under one of these years and do my best to turn in a card.

  There Is No “I” in Team: When EchoStar Communications Corporation, which operates the DISH Network satellite television service, pit eight American football fanatics against each other in a survival-of-the-fittest sleep deprivation contest, the corporate types forgot one thing: football fans love teamwork. After winning contests to represent their favorite teams as “Ultimate Football Fans,” the eight contestants were put in front of the TV in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for TV watching, which was 69 hours and 48 minutes. The last man standing, or in this case sitting, would win a luxury trip to the NFL Pro Bowl in Hawaii. But after one of the eight left early on, the remaining seven did something the organizers had not expected: they came together as a team, helping each other fend off sleep so they could all break the record together. “We decided early on that we could all work together to break the record, so we set aside our personal goals to join in this pact so everyone would turn out a winner,” said Chris Chambers, representing the Dallas Cowboys. Sitting next to one another in a single row of reclining chairs and watching nothing but football, the remaining seven banded together, ignoring the rivalries of their preferred teams and encouraging each other. When they had broken the record and made it to a full seventy hours, they followed their agreed-upon plan and all turned their heads and looked away from the screens simultaneously, ending their bids at exactly the same time—in a tie. So moving was the unexpected camaraderie that the DISH Network decided to award all seven contestants the Hawaiian trip, as well as the reclining chairs, large high-definition television sets, and a satellite receiver. Some of the record attempts I pored over made me want to cry in despair, and while this one did not quite move me to tears, if it had, they would have been tears of joy at the feel-good nature of the result. By the standards of the Guinness World Records, it qualifies as pretty touching stuff.

  The World Walk: This one did move me to tears, and will remain my personal favorite Guinness World Record, in large part because setting the record was of no concern to Steven Newman when he undertook an extremely challenging endeavor that severely tested his will and beliefs, and was almost abandoned several times. From 1983 to 1987, Newman went on a truly amazing journey, which landed him in the pages of the 1988 Guinness—for all the right reasons. As he recalled telling his bewildered parents in his touching memoir Worldwalk, “On the first of April, 1983, I will step out the front door to start a journey never before made by anyone…. What I am trying to do is walk around the world…alone.” Newman didn’t do this to get into Guinness, which happened later as a by-product of the publicity he received, because the aspiring journalist found a newspaper that wanted him to file a weekly column documenting his four-year, 15,000-mile journey through twenty countries. Newman, who worked for several years at a dangerous and menial job as a uranium miner in Wyoming to save up the money for the trip, had never even been abroad before starting his journey, and the only foreign language he spoke was high school Spanish. His parents understandably found the idea, which he sprung on them after nearly two years of secretive planning, hard to fathom, so he explained his real motivation:

  This walk is something I must do if I am ever to get a true sense of what the world and its peoples are like. I want to do this as a learning experience, to find out what all those other people’s dreams and hopes and fears are, but also as a test to see if the world is still a place where love and compassion prevail. And a place where romance and adventure abound as much as they did in the days of Marco Polo and Sir Francis Drake. I want to do it alone, without sponsors, so that I can have total freedom to do anything and go anywhere I want to. Except for a librarian or two who’ve helped me find the right maps, I’ve done everything alone on this project. I’ve done it because I want to show others, particularly the young, that an individual can realize his or her dreams without outside resources. I will have only a backpack to carry my supplies, so that I will have to depend upon the generosity of others to help feed and shelter me. Hopefully that will get me into many homes, so I can see what their everyday life is like…. Because if they don’t, I’ll probably never last. You see, I’ve set two conditions for myself: never to pay for any accommodations, except if my health is in jeopardy or I am way behind on my writing, and never to eat in any restaurants fancier than a sidewalk café or teahouse.

  Newman was also surprised to experience the kind of fleeting celebrity so synonymous with the book. After he completed the first leg of his overland journey, from Ohio to Boston, where he planned to board a plane to Ireland, he instead found himself headed back to the place he had just spent weeks walking from, New York. This time he covered the distance by plane, to appear on the CBS News. As Newman recalled, “So from canned baked beans and peanut butter sandwiches and sleeping on the bare ground in a ragged blanket that rightfully belonged in a back-alley Dumpster, I was whisked away—still grimy and sweaty from the day’s walking—in twenty minutes from Boston to New York over the same countryside I had taken a month to cross on foot…. When I landed at Kennedy Airport in New York, I had less than five dollars in my pocket. Yet what followed for the next twenty hours was chauffeured limousines, a two-hundred-dollar room at the Parker Meridien Hotel i
n Manhattan, and room service on spiffy trays—all at CBS’s expense. I couldn’t eat at the restaurant in the hotel because I had no tie and jacket. It was the closest I had ever been to feeling like a celebrity or millionaire.”

  If anyone deserves a place in Guinness, it is Newman, who despite challenges and self-doubts, succeeded and did so spectacularly, staying in the homes of dozens of well-meaning strangers, and being wined and dined by American farmers and Australian Aborigines. Even the poorest denizens of Africa and desert Bedouin took him in, fed him, and sheltered him. His is what we would like more Guinness World Records to be: amazing in a way that goes beyond shock value, impossibly difficult in its commitment, and truly one of a kind, with a barrier to betterment that even the most banal Guinness World Records rules cannot begin to hint at. Instead, Newman imposed his own set of rules, ones that undermined his attempt and made it much more difficult—and dangerous—than it had to be, and by doing so he found self-redemption and won admiration from the world’s citizens and readers of his fine book recounting the journey. Worldwalk is now out of print, but a used copy would be an excellent investment. To cap his touching story, his four-year odyssey even resulted in finding love. He married a schoolteacher he met on a national tour visiting schools and telling students about his walk.

  Appendix 2

  THE LONG WAY INTO GUINNESS: AN ODE TO DRUDGERY

  The main thing that record holders share is their stubbornness.

  —NORRIS MCWHIRTER

  After spending 147 days buried in a coffin six feet below the parking lot of a Mansfield, England, pub—eating, breathing, and excreting via a nine-inch-wide plastic tube—GEOFF SMITH emerges triumphant, having broken a buried-alive record set by his mother, Emma, in 1968.

  —OUTSIDE, JUNE 2004

  The title of this book is Getting into Guinness, because that is what both the book and our culture have evolved toward, reaching a point where the goal is usually not lofty achievement or exploring the limits of the human condition, but rather of getting one’s name into print for a host of often selfish reasons.

  But not every record is undertaken to get into the book. Some are the result of higher purposes, some of a mental defect, some of religious passion. What many of the records that are apparently not the result of record seeking have in common is that they are endeavors of the longest kind. This is an–est not seen as frequently as fastest, tallest or strongest, for the very real reason that the longest records take the longest time to set. While reading and contemplating thousands of records and nonrecords for this book, I began to mentally sort them in groups by theme. One theme that especially impressed me were those records based not on danger, or whimsy, or giant food, but on drudgery. These are the ones that are often pursued for some other reason than the book, because frankly, no fifteen minutes of fame or local hero syndrome is enough to make up for years and sometimes a lifetime of toil. While serial record setters like Ashrita Furman might devote decades to breaking dozens or hundreds of different records, this unique personality spends the same vast lengths of time on a single feat. Whether they require not cutting one’s nails for half a century or walking around the world—more than once—these records are, by the nature of the scope involved, the most difficult to break. I call these “drudgery records” because their main distinction is in the single-minded devotion they require. So before we close the page on all things Guinness World Records related, I would like to pay a short tribute to some very long achievements.

  I have already mentioned Steven Newman’s four-year trek by foot around the globe, which the Ohio native undertook as “a learning experience,” in order “to get a true sense of what the world and its peoples are like.” He did that beautifully, and anyone who reads his memoir Worldwalk will come away convinced that the Guinness World Record he received for his effort was perhaps the least important part of the process. In fact, Newman does not even mention The Book in his book, but his record is reserved for the book’s jacket as a marketing effort of the publisher. His may be the most moving such tale of drudgery, but it is not the only one. Consider these longests:

  A Cross to Bear: When evangelist Arthur Blessitt decided to carry a twelve-foot-long, forty-pound wooden cross on his back, he did not think small. Blessitt left California on Christmas Day 1969, with the intent of taking his cross to every nation on earth. Nearly forty years later he has visited around 200 countries and shouldered his load for almost 40,000 miles. His pilgrimage is nothing less than the world’s longest walk, according to Guinness. But the mileage was not the only challenge Blessitt faced: he endured standing before a firing squad, walked through war zones in fifty different countries, and as of 2002 had been arrested or imprisoned two dozen times. But there is no quit in Blessitt, who is still out there, somewhere, walking.

  World Run—or Not?: Having already been beaten to the World Walk by Newman, and the longest walk period by Blessit, the obvious goal left for Robert Garside was to become the first person to run around the world. So he left Piccadilly Circus with just a pack on his back and began running. This reflects the longtime Guinness World Records obsession with track sports and running in general, which has generated many different records from the ongoing quest to run the mile faster to the endless marathoning records (fastest, most, backward, juggling, pushing a baby carriage, dressed as Elvis, dressed as chain gang, and so on). But Garside stands atop this distinguished heap, at least according to London’s Daily Mail, which described his effort as: “HAVING outrun everyone in the history of mankind.” But had he? Almost immediately after Guinness granted him a place in its book, huge holes began to appear in Garside’s story, including photos posted on his own website that conflicted, often by thousands of miles, with his official diary of the run. A notable lack of witnesses did not help his cause. Then it was discovered that after being turned away at the Russian-Kazakh border, he simply flew to India, skipping 2,000 miles. Not only did he eventually admit having made up a dramatic story about being robbed in Pakistan, he had never even been to Pakistan. Yet he has shown the same kind of single-minded perseverance drudgery records require to finish in sticking to his claim. He put forth the simple explanation that due to such difficulties he voided the first yearlong leg of his trip, from London to India, and then began again, completing his global run the second time around in an additional two years. And Guinness World Records believes this. Marco Frigatti, the head of records told the Daily Mail that his team spent more than three years examining fifteen boxes of credit card receipts and hundreds of time-coded tapes, and making follow-up calls to independent witnesses, adding that Guinness also kept in close contact with Garside during every leg of the twenty-nine-nation journey across six continents. Along the way, his diary describes how he was shot at by Russian Gypsies, ran across battlefields in Afghanistan, was robbed at gunpoint (twice), jailed in China for suspicion of espionage, and survived by scavenging food and drinking water from streams, all done without any support crew.

  Still, his run has bred conspiracy theories within the long-distance running community, fueled by evidence of made-up visa troubles to explain suspicious flights, and an amazing seventy-mile-per-day pace from Mexico City to the American border described in his documentation. These smoking guns have inspired many doubters, including former Runner’s World editor Steven Seaton, who said, “I don’t care what Guinness says. To do what Garside claims, to run some of those South American routes at altitude, in the jungle, on broken trails, on his own and with a rucksack—not a chance.” It probably didn’t help that Garside had previously gotten sponsorship help from the magazine for the infamous Marathon des Sables, a hellacious endurance slog through the Sahara desert, and then never showed up for the race. Whether he did what he claimed or not, there is no doubt that Garside spent the better part of his three years traveling on foot through some exceptionally difficult landscape, and that certainly fits the drudgery category of effort. Interestingly, he also kicked off a bit of a journalistic marathon, as th
e English papers closely followed the unraveling of his story. The Daily Mail called him a “globe-trotting cheat,” but Guinness stuck by him, even after he admitted taking days off and cutting out hundreds or thousands of miles with flights, because rules pertaining to such epic journeys allow for rest days and traversing bodies of water by ship or plane. Taking a position that is the polar opposite of what I have seen as business as usual, and after dismissing many other claims for lack of paperwork, Guinness’s Stewart Newport explained the controversy away by saying, “There is a certain amount of trust.”