National Public Radio: All Things Considered (June 15,1993)
LINDA WERTHEIMER, Host: Over the weekend, on a high school track in Jamaica, in the borough of Queens, New York, a 37-year old health food store manager named Ashrita Furman, walked 64 miles in 18 hours and 10 minutes with a 9-pound brick pinched between his fingers. This feat added yet another to Furman’s dozen Guinness Book world records, from 27 hours of continuous yodeling to 307 games of hopscotch played in 24 hours. Bob Garfield spent some time with Furman recently while he was training for the brick-carrying record attempt. He has this report.
BOB GARFIELD, Reporter: [The idea is to hold the brick, palm down, thumb on one side, fingers on the other side, and you have to keep it in the same hand, you cannot drop it, and walk as far as you can.] Ashrita Furman is about to sit down to a steaming pre-workout serving of fried tofu at the `Smile of the Beyond’ luncheonette, but first he is explaining his technique for world-class ceramic building material carrying.
ASHRITA FURMAN: It’s very tough. I mean, after a while you just stop losing your grip. But the idea to me is to concentrate on using different fingers, different muscles, until the point where you do
that for 5 to 6 hours and eventually for 17 hours. So, it’s tough, it’s really tough.
GARFIELD: It’s not just tough, though, it’s something more than tough, Ashrita. It’s really, really stupid.
FURMAN: [laughter] Yeah, it is. But, you know, what can I tell you. This is how I get my kicks.
GARFIELD: He doesn’t mean longest since brick pinching perse, he means any display of unimaginable stamina in unimaginably pointless athletic endeavors. During the past 14 months alone, he has done 1659 squat thrusts in an hour, performed 3000 plus deep knee bends in an hour in a hot air balloon, and for the second time established the endurance record for juggling cannon balls under water in scuba gear for 65 minutes. He might have done more, but he got a nasty case of dysentery while traveling, possibly while pogo sticking for three hours and forty minutes with a snorkel eyeball deep in the Amazon River.
FURMAN: I had a rope tied to me just in case the piranha’s attacked. The piranha’s were there like 30 feet away, but it was great. It was so much fun, it was a great adventure.
GARFIELD: Digging into his tofu is a broad-shouldered muscular 38- year old athlete, arguably one of the greatest athletes in the world. Hard to believe that 20 years ago Furman was a clumsy, bookish weakling.
FURMAN: Your typical nerd, I mean, down to the plastic pen holder in my pocket. In fact, I got beat up the first day at high school, because I was such a wimp. And I really- I mean, as far as I was concerned I really didn’t have much of a life.
GARFIELD: That’s when he was Keith Furman, a nice Jewish boy from Queens, who everyone assumed would follow his father’s footsteps in corporate law. In high school, however, he began to believe that there was something of importance beyond the National Honor Society. He read Sedartha [sp] by Herman Hesse, which led him to Eastern philosophy which lead him to transcendental meditation which lead him a mile from his house to a Jamaica street called Parsons Boulevard. There he discovered an enclave of disciples of Sri Chinmoy, an Indian holy man who teaches a particularly strenuous path to spiritual enlightenment.
SRI CHINMOY: He knows philosophy, the physical and the spiritual must go together if we want to achieve something, and more achievement if we want to inspire people, then we have to renew in the inner world of inspiration as well.
GARFIELD: Along the way to self transcendence, Sri Chinmoy’s students combine spiritual and physical culture. They run ultra marathons, climb the mountains, and swim the English Channel in pursuit of inner peace. In 1970, Keith Furman, now Ashrita Furman, decided this would be his path. By 1979, having accepted Sri Chinmoy’s teachings of self denial and celibacy, he was ready to tap his dormant capacities. Marathoning seemed a bit quixotic, but he had always been a pretty good pogo sticker, so into Central Park he ventured determined to break the endurance record of 100,000 pogo jumps in 15 1/2 hours. Remarkably, despite excruciating pain and unbearable fatigue, he reached 100,000 within 13 hours.
FURMAN: For me it was like a spiritual experience, because right at the moment that I broke the record of 100,001 jumps, I was in Central Park and this peacock started like screaming at 3 o’clock in the morning, and like in Indian mythology that’s like a victory cry, kind of. It was like a very kind of cosmic thing.
GARFIELD: Or maybe just peacock indigestion. Ashrita went on to do 130,001 pogos and submitted his feat to the Guinness Book, which informed him that he had taken his rest periods at improper intervals and summarily disqualified him. But, Ashrita was undeterred, he simply changed events and, after another false start, did 27,000 jumping jacks in July 1979 to finally break an established Guinness mark. He has been doing it ever since and, because he also arranges tours for Sri Chinmoy disciples all around the world, Ashrita gets to break records in exotic places such as Zurich where he established my favorite Ashrita record for walking distance while balancing a pint bottle of milk on his head – 61 miles, 15 hours. A feat exceeded in its difficulty only by its ridiculousness and also, perhaps, by a certain kind of vanity that at first blush seems out of place.
FURMAN: Maybe there is a certain part of me that enjoys the attention, I’m not going to deny it. OK, I’m trying to lead a monkish, spiritual type of life, but I’m a human being and also there is a way for me to get something of a message as far as meditation to people. I, I really believe in it and I like to tell people about it and I think they’re wasting their own capacities if they don’t practice meditation.
GARFIELD: Clad in his orange silk doti [sp], Sri Chinmoy is presiding over his Friday hour of meditation. The session ends with a chant of Sri Chinmoy’s own composition where upon he walks serenely into an adjoining room to contemplate Ashrita’s achievements. His favorite is the milk bottle walk, too.
SRI CHINMOY: Because it demands constant, constant attention. If he left even for a fleeting second then the bottle will drop and he is disqualified. Concentration is of paramount importance, we cannot succeed without it in any field.
GARFIELD: Ashrita, we’re walking around the track, you’re carrying a 9-pound brick in your hand, are you getting closer to God?
FURMAN: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s, you know, very gradual, let’s put it that way, but, yeah, I think it does intensify my spiritual life. For instance, after 10 hours of this you’re almost forced to like start praying to God, or you try to feel God inside of you.
GARFIELD: You’re sure that’s just not cramping?
FURMAN: [laughter] No. I really do believe that my body has the capacity to go a certain distance, let’s say, and after that it’s sort of like my mind, or you might say my soul or whatever, my deeper part, takes over.
GARFIELD: As it turns out, take control his deeper part would. After 64 miles and 18 plus hours of cramping, shin splints, and bloody blisters, Ashrita would own another record – self transcendence, yet again. Inner peace achieved, at least for a while. There’s a backwards unicycling record out there – 46 miles – and by September it will have to be broken.
I’m Bob Garfield.
[The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it has not been proofread against audio tape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to the accuracy of speakers’ words or spelling.]
(TRANSCRIPT), Ashrita Furman Breaks World Records To Train His Mind. , All Things Considered (NPR), 06-15-1993.