22min 41sec

When I brought up GWR’s work with Berdymukhamedov, Glenday admitted this had been a misstep, because of Turkmenistan’s human rights record. The company is now more careful about its association with anything where it thinks there’s “some political angle”, he said. “If you’re a school, and you come to us from Turkmenistan and want to do a record attempt, that’s totally fine. But if it’s organised by the minister of culture, then you start to think well, wait a minute. Why?”

At the core of GWR lies the work of its 90 or so adjudicators. It is their duty to separate fact from fiction and, insofar as the institution can be said to have dignity, they must preserve it. Each one must wear a special jacket at every event, no matter the weather. They are not permitted to eat or drink alcohol while on the job, and they can’t fraternise after hours with the record-setters. The adjudicators bring the certificate, framed, to each record-breaking attempt, and if you fail they take them away to be shredded, because sometimes people have gone through the Guinness bins to steal them.

It used to be that GWR adjudicators needed to be present for any record attempt – in the early days, this usually meant Norris McWhirter himself. Mick Meaney, an Irishman who attempted to beat the world record for longest live burial in 1968, lived in a coffin under a builder’s yard in Kilburn for 61 days. He survived on “steak and cigarettes” delivered through a tube, and defecated in a specially fitted extraction pipe. But he forgot to invite a GWR adjudicator to verify his attempt in person, and so was denied his place in the book. “One adjudicator flew to Sydney to weigh a risotto, and then got back on the plane again. That’s a lot of time out of the office,” Glenday said.

Today, most adjudications take place remotely, with video evidence being scrutinised. If you want to have an adjudicator present at your attempt, either in person or by video link, you would have to pay £6,000. This would also get your record attempt fast-tracked for approval. Otherwise, you would have to submit video evidence of your attempt to GWR through its online portal, and wait a few months to hear whether it was satisfied that you had broken the record.

Glenday has undertaken the official adjudicator’s training. This takes about a week, and involves media training, public speaking guidance, codes of behaviour and a crash course in how to use various types of measuring equipment, such as a sound meter to record, say, the loudest burp by a male (112.4db). Adjudicators are often sent across the world on little notice, and aren’t told what the attempt is until they have accepted the mission. Every record has to be treated with the same gravity. Adjudicators speak gravely of the disappointment of having to deny certificates to people who fail their attempts. It especially breaks their hearts to refuse records to schools and charities – but sometimes, it must be done.

Beyond the regular people, who have a particular record they want to break, and the businesses, which want to break a record for publicity, there is another category of record breaker: people who have turned record breaking into a discipline in its own right, with its own rules and skillsets. These are the super record-breakers, the gods on the Mount Olympus of GWR.

Super record-breakers are the kind of people who try to break a record a week. David Rush, a teacher in Boise, Idaho, broke his first record – the longest duration juggling while blindfolded – in 2015, and since then has broken more than 250 more. No human in history has caught as many marshmallows fired from a homemade catapult in the space of one minute (77), nor has anyone put on more T-shirts in 30 seconds (17). “Not only can you get better at anything,” Rush h told me in a Zoom interview, “but the belief you can get better at something mething dramatically improves your ability to do so.”

One of Rush’s direct competitors is Silvo Sabba, a gym owner ner from just outside Milan and the man who currently holds the most Guinness world records: 193. Sabba’s particular genius is in identifying what are known as “soft records”: ones that most people would be capable of breaking, if they approached it in the right way. For Sabba, recordbreaking is not primarily a physical feat but a strategic one. In his 13 years of record breaking, he has learned never to smash a record, but to break it just a little, so that if anyone subsequently bests it, he can go back and surpass their attempt without too much additional training. “I do like to defend the records I hold,” he told me.

Almost all the super record-breakers spoke of the camaraderie they shared with their peers; they were a community. Many used the word “family”. And if record breakers are a family, there is a clear patriarch: Ashrita Furman, record breaker for four decades, and inspiration to many of the younger generation. Rush has a childhood memory of seeing Furman break a world record on television by balancing 50 pint glasses on his chin. Andre Ortolf, a 29-year-old German who specialises in eating things very quickly (the more liquid the food the better, apparently), said that his first GWR book was the 2004 annual. On page after page, he saw Furman’s name. “I realised, OK, this guy’s breaking nearly everything. So I can break one.”

FURMAN, WHO IS NOW 68, lives in Jamaica, New York. When I arrived at his house last summer, I found him on his front porch. He invited me to go round the back of the house to the garden, and then went inside, jumping the four steps of his porch in one smooth leap. Furman keeps his GWR certificates, more than 700 of them, in a box in his wardrobe. He has so many that he has stopped even applying for the certificates when he breaks a record. He pulled out his copy of the first Guinness book, evidently well-thumbed, and read me the quote in the foreword about turning heat into light with the reverence an evangelical might quote a passage from the Bible.

Furman’s journey started when he was 16 and disillusioned with life. One day he met an Indian spiritual teacher living in Queens called Sri Chinmoy. He decided then and there to follow him for the rest of his life. Ashrita is not his given name – that is Keith – but a name he chose for himself, a practice adopted by all followers of Sri Chinmoy. A few years later, some of his followers were training for a 24-hour bicycle race around Central Park, as a way to achieve self-transcendence through physical exercise. Furman, having been unathletic all his life, hadn’t wanted to compete. But he began to feel guilty for shirking and signed up a week before the race. The night before, the competitors gathered to meditate with their teacher. “And he said, just for fun, how many miles do you think you’re going to do in the race? The best riders thought they could do maybe 300 [480km], 325 miles. And my teacher says, so Ashrita, how many miles? 400 miles?”

The following day, with no training, he cycled 405 miles, and tied for third place. He did it – “simply”, he says – by meditating. “As soon as I stumbled off the bike, I connected to the Guinness book, because I’ve always been a big fan. I thought, if I could do this, then I can break a Guinness record. And I want to do it not to get my picture in the book, but to tell people about the power of meditation.”