American’s world record: maximum records

LONDON - An American man who discovered yoga and meditation as a teenager holds the world record for setting the maximum number of 122 Guinness world records.

Ashrita Furman has walked 80 miles with a milk bottle balanced on his head, balanced a 93-pound stack of milk crates on his chin, and performed 9,628 sit-ups in an hour.

That’s not all.

He has hula hooped for the fastest mile at Ayers Rock in Australia and completed the fastest mile on a pogo stick in Antarctica, The Sun reported Friday.

Born Keith Furman in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954, he grew up with an obsession for the Guinness Book of World Records.

“I loved reading about these incredible achievements in such exotic locations. But I was not athletic and figured it would never be possible for me to get in with my own records,” he was quoted as saying.

His life changed when Furman discovered yoga and meditation at 15.

“I got a teacher who renamed me Ashrita which means ‘protected by God’ in Sanskrit - which is just as well as I’ve done some crazy things since like skipping with tigers and juggling with sharks!

“That teacher, Sri Chinmoy, showed me I could make progress in every field if I meditated - in sports, mental agility, everything.”

He added: “…I could achieve anything if I put my mind to it. After that I knew I could achieve my childhood dream of breaking a Guinness World Record.”

Furman, who broke his first record in 1979, said his record breaking has become an obsession and that he once spent weeks poring over the Guinness online database for new records to break.

“I would stay up until two or three in the morning, sifting through the 40,000 records on file for ones I had a shot at breaking - I came up with a list of about 1,000.

“When I got close to the 100 mark, it got even more serious. I would try literally anything to reach that number but now I’m scaling back on focusing more on longer, endurance-based tasks.

“I’ve broken over 350 records in my life and it hurts when somebody breaks mine but I just think, ‘Right, what would it take for me to win that one back?’”