Think Small: Eric Peters’s tale is the opposite of Garside’s declining glory. Instead of being met with a hero’s reception that turned into disbelief, he began with disbelief and eventually proved his way into Guinness. Peters was a poor Englishman who spent two years while on the dole converting a fiberglass barrel less than six feet long into a sailboat. Then, armed with only nuts, olive oil, and some water, he spent forty-six days at sea piloting the smallest craft ever to be sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, from the Canary Islands to Guadeloupe. It seems that the doubt surrounding his effort was, in large part, due to his lack of sponsorship, prenotification, or marketing of his effort, and for a while Peters was penalized for simply doing it the old-fashioned way and going about it alone, through grit and determination. But both Guinness and the seafaring community became convinced, with the book’s spokesman Colin Smith reporting that “Our experts are satisfied. There is no question at all,” which in turn prompted London’s Times to coin yet another important term in the lexicon spawned by the book when it described Peters as “Guinless no longer.”
Eight if by Land, None if by Sea: Combining the spirits of Newman, Peters, and Blessitt was George Meegan, a British merchant seaman who found that his talent on land exceeded that on water when he walked nearly 20,000 miles from the southernmost point in the Western Hemisphere, Tierra del Fuego, to the northernmost, in Alaska. It took him a full seven years and involved a lot of towering mountains, frigid conditions, extremely rough terrain, and often very limited infrastructure, but when he was done he had amassed a whopping eight different Guinness World Records with his one stroll. These included the Longest Walk of All Time (now held by Blessitt) and First Crossing of the Western Hemisphere on Foot.
Interestingly, Meegan fathered two children with his Japanese wife during the walk, giving one the name Ayumi, Japanese for “walk,” and the other the middle name Susumu, which appropriately translates as “keep going.” When he finally reached the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska after 2,426 days on the road, Meegan said, “I thought ‘Oh my God it’s over. The end of my dreams.’ It was a terribly sad experience. It was a bereavement.”
Frequent Flier Miles: Few road warriors, even the most harried, can relate to Charles Veley. When Veley stepped onto unoccupied Bouvet Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean in 2003, a journey that had first required him to be lowered from a helicopter onto a research vessel, he made Guinness World Records history. It was the 350th different country, enclave, island, federation, or disputed territory Veley had visited in his barnstorming, whirlwind tour that made him the World’s Most Traveled Man. No one has visited as many places as he has, and amazingly, he did it all in just three years of nonstop travel, spanning nearly 1 million miles. Veley was already accomplished, a Harvard graduate who flew F15s in the Navy’s Top Gun program and then built a multibillion-dollar software company before embarking on his journey. His motive? His parents had not liked to travel, and as a child he never had a vacation. A million miles later—and a million dollars out of his own pocket—Veley got into Guinness.
Bums, but No Bum’s Rush: When I first met Ashrita Furman, he reminded me of the many ski bums I know, folks who have managed to build their life around doing the activity that gives them endless pleasure. For ski bums or surf bums, it is the slopes and waves that make life interesting, and for Ashrita it is setting Guinness World Records. For Rainer Hertrich and Dale Webster it is both. While an extremely avid skier might boast of getting in a hundred-plus days in a season, Hertrich skied his way into Guinness by racking up over 1,000 consecutive days of skiing without missing one. British skier and respected journalist Arnie Wilson had previously set the standard by skiing every day for a year, 365 in a row, carefully planning flights and drives across oceans and continents so as to never be too far from the slopes and getting in at least a single run each day. Sometimes that meant climbing the hills at night or in the predawn darkness, when lifts were not operating, in order to get in a run before an early flight. His adventure was as much travel-based as skiing, and it took him to countless resorts around the globe. While Hertrich has kept it up for more than three years, he keeps the logistics a bit simpler by spending the entire North American winter season in Colorado, where he works at a ski resort, the shoulder season in Oregon, where he works on the always frosty slopes of Mount Hood, and then he heads to South America, where stunned locals have dubbed him “Gringo loco de Guinness,” keeping his record streak entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It still was not easy: Hertrich has kept the streak alive by skiing with a separated shoulder, bruised ribs, and a wrenched thumb, and venturing out into temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. He also eschews single-run days, working as hard at accumulating hours as years: he has racked up well over 30 million vertical feet, and in the average day skis a height greater than Mount Everest. His single-day best is an unbelievable 115,000 vertical feet. As impressive as Hertrich’s streak is, Dale Webster, who was featured prominently in the renowned surfing documentary Step Into Liquid, puts his land-based peer to shame. As of mid-2006 he had surfed for more than 11,200 straight days—more than thirty years. He goes through about one wetsuit and one board annually, and has surfed through tropical storms, frigid water and weather, and even with painful kidney stones. Both Hertrich and Webster have made it into Guinness, and neither seems to know when to stop. After breaking the record, Hertrich posted the following message on his online diary: “Great day, snow, and fun!!! I think I’ll have to wake up alive one more time and ski tomorrow.” And he did. And he still does. Likewise, Webster said, “I could stop and end the damn thing tomorrow, but I know I won’t.”
Clearly, Webster has the Guinness spirit. There is something inspirational about endeavors that span years or decades rather than hours, and walks or runs more easily measured in continents than miles. But even in the lofty world of drudgery, where most of these accomplishments were not done primarily for the book, there is still the occasional attempt at what might be called ultramarathon Guinnessport. While the book rejected the presumably (especially when considering his attention span) long effort of a ten-year-old who wrote out the letter A some 17,841 times, they were moved to include the world record for typing all the numbers from one to one million. It was harder than the A thing, because Les Stewart, the Australian who did it, not only spelled out each number in words, rather than numerals, on a manual typewriter, he also did it all with just one finger, a result of being partially paralyzed in the Vietnam War. It took him nearly 20,000 sheets of paper and sixteen years. Similarly, in a fitting nod to itself, the 2008 edition of Guinness World Records includes perhaps the most extreme case of Guinnessport ever. The record for Books Typed Backwards, is held by an Italian who typed fifty-seven books in reverse order—and in their original languages—beginning in 1992 and entering the current edition as a new record, presumably taking about fifteen years for the effort. Titles included such classics as The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s plays, and of course, the 2002 Guinness World Records.
Appendix 3
SO YOU WANT TO BE A RECORD BREAKER?
So you want to be a record breaker? Or maybe a record setter? As long as your goal is to get into Guinness, it doesn’t matter much, because many of the logistical steps you will need to take are identical. Just remember before embarking on any record quest the two cardinal rules of world recordom:
Setting or breaking a world record is always harder than you think. They may seem silly or inane, but most people do not, and never will, have a world record. Even the world’s top record holder, Ashrita Furman, failed in his first few attempts.
Do all the research in advance. Thousands of records have been rejected because they didn’t get advance approval. Some were simply wasted time, because they never would have been approved, but others would have set records, except that they were not conducted under official rules. If you do the most push-ups in an hour but don’t have the right number of witnesses, it won’t matter. The only thing worse than failing
in an attempt to get a Guinness World Record is succeeding and still not getting one.
How should you go about it? There is no easy answer, because why and how some records are accepted and some rejected are subjects of mystery and often, it appears, whim. Some seemingly normal activities, like tug-of-war, will be deemed too dangerous, while seemingly suicidal ones, like jumping out of a plane in the hopes of catching up to a free-falling parachute, or “banzai skydiving,” are allowed. Make no assumptions about how Guinness will react to a proposal.
For that reason, it is easier, at least logistically, to break existing records. There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as printed records that have been retired, which is why you always have to remember rule 2 above. You do not want to end up like Englishman Tony Wright, who relied solely on what he had read in a copy of the book when he stayed awake for 266 straight hours to break the record of 264 set more than forty years earlier. Had Wright checked, he would have found the reason for the record’s longevity: it was retired and deemed unbreakable for health and safety reasons. He may be named Wright but he took the wrong approach to getting in. Don’t make that mistake. It also gives you a greater chance of being in the book if you break a record that is already printed. Let’s face it, everyone would rather be in the book than just have the certificate at home on the wall. So for the most part, if you can find a record in the book that you can break, that is the single easiest path to being a world record holder. So let’s call that Plan A.
PLAN A
Find a record in the book you think you can break. This is not that easy to do, but Ashrita finds ten or more of these a year. The book indicates, usually with red stars, which records are new in the current edition. These are often the easiest to surpass.
Go to the book’s website, www.guinnessworldrecords.com. The layout changes periodically but you will find a button titled something like “Become a Record Breaker.” Follow this link and fill out an e-form stating which record you intend to break, giving them all the information they ask for.
Unless the record has been retired, they will send you a form by e-mail (if it has been retired they will just say no at this point) in several weeks. You will need to sign this and return it to London by fax or mail. It is basically a legal agreement, giving them permission to use your image and name, and protecting them from lawsuits. Once you sign and return this, in the neighborhood of four to eight weeks you should receive the rules under which you can undertake your attempt, and the requirements for documenting it, including the number and nature of witnesses, and probably video, photographic, or media evidence as well. In some cases other materials will be required, such as airline boarding passes were for my travel-based record. Follow all these instructions to the letter.
Assuming you have gotten advance permission, then break the record and document it properly, and after you mail in all the required information, you should be a world record holder and receive a certificate to that effect in the mail in a few weeks or months. Unless someone else breaks the record around the same time, or unless you get unlucky like the Thai cobra kisser that Ripley’s Entertainment president Robert Masterson recalled, the one who got permission and broke an existing record under the required rules only to be told afterward that the record was too dangerous to break. Just remember that those things happen.
What, you might ask, is the downside of Plan A? Well, records in the book attract a lot more attention and if you found one that seemed easy to break, you can bet other people, maybe a lot, maybe even Ashrita, did too. Furman talked about the orange pushing record getting harder and harder to break by the week or month as he trained for it; this can be a major disadvantage and must be weighed against the major advantage of Plan A—that it is most likely to get you into the book. If the record itself is more important than an entry in the book, try Plan B.
PLAN B
Find a record not in the book that you think you can break. Not a day goes by when a record is not set, and almost all of these make the news somewhere. Journalists have access to global media databases of articles such as Lexis-Nexis. If you cannot get access to such a network at the office or through friends, try a public or college library. Many of them, especially at educational institutions, have free access to periodical databases. I regularly visit my local college library and run searches for terms like “Guinness World Records,” “Guinness Records,” and “World Records,” and there are new stories almost every day. Ashrita did this and found out about a new record for throwing the Guinness book itself the farthest, one that never appeared in print. On average these kinds of records are just as easy to break as those in the book, but receive much less competition. You might be the only one to try and break it. If you do break it, there is more chance it will last. The downside is that the editors have already decided this record is not book-worthy and probably will not change their minds, though they do bring records back or publish older ones for the first time, on occasion. If you go with Plan B, after finding a vulnerable record, simply follow steps 2–4 above.
Paradoxically, setting a new record is both easier and more difficult than breaking an existing one. It is difficult because you need pre-approval, to essentially convince Guinness World Records of the worthiness of your proposed feat. If they go for it, however, it is often easier because the threshold is lower, since no one else has done it before, and let’s face it, you probably should not be proposing feats you cannot do…or you don’t deserve to get into Guinness. They probably would accept the first man to fly without mechanical assistance, but you probably won’t get off the ground by flapping your arms. So one key is to walk a fine line and make the record sound as impressive as possible while still being within the realm of possibility, or what Norris McWhirter called “at the edge of possibility.” Setting a new record will be Plan C, and requires all the same steps as Plan A above, except that in step 1 you have to provide more description and justification of your intended record when you fill out the form online. Think of this as a bit of an essay contest, an opportunity to convince the jury. For example, here is an actual claim proposal for a new record I submitted to Guinness World Records:
ATTEMPT DETAILS
Attempt Title: Most Bicycle Ascents of the Alpe d’Huez in One Day
Attempt Date: Monday, July 25, 2005
Attempt Location: France
Details: The Alpe d’Huez is the most famous bicycle mountain ascent in the world, a normal fixture on the Tour de France, and the site of last year’s Tour Centennial individual time trial won by Lance Armstrong. Bicycle enthusiasts come from all over the world to do the climb, which is approximately 14 miles long and has 21 famous switchback turns, ending at a ski area atop the pass in the French Alps. The vast majority of cyclists climb it once and are satisfied they met the challenge, as do the racers in the Tour de France. Some gluttons for climbing punishment make it a point to climb it twice in one day, which is considered a badge of honor. I intend to climb it at least five times in the same calendar day, a feat which I can find no evidence of anyone ever having done. This is the bicycling equivalent of Mount Everest. I intend to do it on my own, or I may do it with a cycling friend, Mr. James Offensend, but in that case we would still both complete all the ascents individually and would be happy to be co-record holders. We would drive back to the start after each ascent, which any challenger could do, but the entire ascent, following the Tour de France time trial route of 2004 (which is the standard climb of this ride) would be human powered. As a current holder of two Guinness World Records I am very familiar with your policies and standards and would be prepared to provide witnesses and other required information, and I think this certainly is a qualified goal, especially since there are so few bicycling records. In addition, it meets the sporting concept of being eminently breakable and easy for other enthusiasts to challenge. I thank you in advance for your consideration. Lawrence Olmsted
First off, there were several things I attempted to do in this claim. I made th
e following very clear: that the Alpe d’Huez, a mountain pass in France, is the most famous climb in the most famous bike race on earth, the Tour de France, and one that puts me on the same plane as a true champion like Lance Armstrong. I also made it clear that avid cyclists from around the world come on pilgrimages to climb it, and made sure to describe it as cycling’s equivalent of Everest, a mountain the folks at Guinness know well. I did this to establish the traditional quality of the climb, just as the English Channel is the traditional standard for open water swimming. Then I had to set a threshold, at the very “edge of possibility,” one that would seem much more impressive than the twice-in-a-day climbs, and after much deliberation, I chose a minimum of five, having learned from my poker attempt that it is better to shoot just a bit below your maximum potential, which I thought would be six. Knowing it would be an easier ride with company, I left open the option of doing it with or without a regular riding partner of mine. Finally, I felt they would give me more consideration as a two-time record holder, or at least take the idea more seriously.
They said no.
Getting into Guinness Page 27