Some people train their whole lives to earn a Guinness World Record. For others, picking one up is a happy accident. After all, the more than 40,000 records currently maintained by Guinness run the gauntlet from fastest marathon (an impressive 1hr 59min) to the largest number of hotdogs eaten in one minute (six, including the bun).
So what motivates someone to pursue a world record – and what happens to your life after you get one? To find out, we spoke to five record holders, past and present.
‘Definitely the coolest thing to ever happen to a 10-year-old’
Michelle Boyle – lowest limbo in roller skates
For a hot minute in the 1980s, Michelle Boyle was a world leader. Then a child, Boyle held the Guinness World Record for lowest limbo in roller skates, managing to get under a pole raised just 5.25 inches (13.35cm) off the ground.
“It’s a pretty obscure, strange thing to do,” she laughs. “But that’s what it was.”
Rollerskating was all the rage in the 1980s. One day at the roller rink she would frequent during school holidays, Boyle made a friend who invited her to join her roller-skating team. She did – and before long that team was tackling the Guinness record.
She and her teammates each took turns making the attempt in an empty Sydney shopping mall after hours “because the floor there was really smooth”. On one of her last attempts, Boyle – a “very small” human at this point in time – successfully limboed at the record height, a feat a few of her teammates equalled that day. A Guinness adjudicator was there to verify her attempt and Boyle remembers the nod they gave her after she successfully went under without knocking the pole.
“It was definitely the coolest thing to ever happen to a 10-year-old,” Boyle says. Her parents took her to McDonald’s on the way home to celebrate and the mayor of her local council presented Boyle with her Guinness certificate at school.
Being a world record holder, however, has not had a particularly lasting impact on her life.
“I’d like to say that I went on some kind of motivational speaking circuit or something like that. But, no, I didn’t,” she says. “It really put me up there in terms of coolness at primary school for the next couple of years. Then I got to high school and I aged out of limbo roller-skating, because it’s not something you can really do once you hit puberty.”
Boyle didn’t really skate again until Covid lockdowns, when she bought a pair of inline skates for a cheap thrill. Now it’s just a fabulous party tale, perfect for rolling out after a few drinks.
“It’s just a feel good 80s story, really, isn’t it?”
‘I could hardly imagine a better adventure’
Chris Turnbull – fastest run from Perth to Sydney
It takes 41 hours to drive from Perth to Sydney. To run it, it took Chris Turnbull 39 days, eight hours and one minute to run between the two cities.
As the 40-year-old ultramarathon runner tells it, he didn’t explicitly set out to smash the Guinness World Record in 2023. Turnbull really just wanted to tick off the 3,856km run because it seemed like a cool challenge.
“It was really more about an interesting way of experiencing Australia, seeing the sites, meeting the people – as well as seeing how fast I could do it,” he says.
Turnbull spent about four months in endurance training and logistical preparation to get ready for his run across Australia’s most remote stretches. When he set off, he was joined on his journey by crew cars, who carried food, water, camping supplies and satellite phones. He ran for an average of 13 hours a day, with no rest days, his alarm going off at 4.30am each morning. He had dodge passing trucks on the way, as the sealed highway was the only manageable terrain on which to run.
Turnbull remembers the mix of fulfilment, relief and satisfaction that came over him when he saw the ocean at Manly Beach finally come into view. Overwhelmed with emotion, he “sat down on the stairs of an apartment block and burst out in tears”. Turnbull stayed there and cried for about a minute, took another five to compose himself, then got up and ran the final few hundred metres to the finish line where friends, family and news crews were waiting to greet him. He was sprayed with some celebratory champagne then promptly “just laid down on the ground”, before heading off to the pub.
But it was a long road back for his body. Turnbull couldn’t sleep when he first got home – his limbs in too much pain to allow it – yet battled a waking fatigue so intense it was also difficult to get out of bed. He dealt with both nerve damage and muscle atrophy in his first months after finishing. Between training and the run he’d lost 8kg. And he had significant sun damage on the left side of his body, where the sun hit every day (the only way to describe it, he says, is “lizard skin”).
All told, it took about six months for his body to get back to normal functioning – though Turnbull has now returned to running a comparatively easy 24km a day, to and from his job as an engineer. But it sure was an interesting experience.
“I could hardly imagine there being a better adventure,” he says. “It was incredible. I have the most intense and vivid memories of things so different from normal life. I went there for a lifesize adventure, and absolutely got it.”
‘Changed my whole world’
Anthony Kelly – most arrows caught by hand in one minute (and about 60 more)
Anthony Kelly was watching the 1985 movie The Last Dragon when he had the idea that changed his life.
In that film, a karate student is tasked with catching an arrow with his bare hands. Kelly, a martial artist who often did demonstrations like “board-breaking or smashing concrete with my head”, felt inspired to try and catch an arrow himself. So he decided to attempt the feat at the Chinese restaurant in his home town of Armidale in 1991.
“It blew out a lot bigger than I anticipated – the local news, the TV, everyone came down,” he recalls. “I ended up catching a few arrows and sent the footage over to Guinness … I thought they may be interested in it as a world record.”
They were – he was flown out to Madrid six weeks later to catch arrows again at a Guinness event. Becoming a record holder “changed my whole world”, Kelly says.
He went from never having been overseas to regularly travelling the globe to tackle other agility-based records. The profile Guinness gave him has led to martial arts demonstrations on the TV show Mythbusters and work as a forensic martial arts specialist in a murder case for the New South Wales police force. Along the way, he’s become friends with other world record holders, including the most pierced lady in the world (“who I speak to on a weekly basis,” he says). Kelly now teaches martial arts for a living.
Since that day in 1991, Kelly has attained over 60 further Guinness World Records, including most paintball bullets caught in two minutes (11) and most spears caught underwater in one minute (10). (He’s also bettered his own original record for most arrows caught by hand in one minute, taking it up to 17.)
“It just kept going and going and going,” the now 60-year-old says. “It’s not about catching something, but it’s about setting a goal to achieve a specific thing in life.”
But there have been some failures along the way as well. One time, while he had a Guinness adjudicator around to oversee another record attempt (the largest human wheelbarrow race, with 1,554 participants), he decided to tackle the title of most Ferrero Rocher chocolates eaten in one minute. Kelly didn’t bother practising ahead of time because he figured it would be easy to smash the current record of three. He was wrong.
“After you eat one, you have to clear your mouth, open your mouth, show the adjudicator, and then start the second one,” he says. The chunky almonds in the chocolate, he remembers, slowed him right down.
With TV news there to capture his big moment, he managed only three – failing to better the record. Kelly gave the large boxes of leftover chocolates he had bought, expecting to eat, to some schoolchildren who’d come to watch.
The chocolates came with a word of hard-won advice: “If you’re ever going to go for a world record, make sure that you practise first.”
‘It’s pitch black down there, and you’re just sinking alone’
Ant Williams – deepest dive under ice
Ant Williams was working as a psychologist for athletes involved in high-risk sports such as speed skiing, base jumping and moto GP when he had an epiphany: “I was a total fraud.
“I hadn’t done any sport … yet here I was teaching the world’s best how to tear down a racing track faster, or ride big waves, but it was all from a textbook.
“I decided that I needed to gain some lived experience.”
So Williams did what any dedicated professional would do: took up free diving so he could understand what it’s like to put your body on the line.
That was in 2001. By 2019, Williams had become so successful as a competitive free diver that decided to go for the Guinness World Record – not just for deepest free dive, but deepest free dive under ice.
He travelled to Kirkenes in far north-eastern Norway to go for the record, joined by a support crew. “It was one of the warmer days when we arrived, -36C,” Williams remembers. It took nine hours to cut a hole in the ice on a frozen lake. Once the hole was ready, he had to get out of his snowmobile and into the water within one minute, otherwise he risked hypothermia. Williams then had to retrieve a flag that had been dropped 70 metres beneath the water by the crew to secure the record.
The total dive time was only about two minutes and 40 seconds – but it was a terrifying couple of minutes.
“Once you go into the ice water it’s pitch black down there, and you’re just sinking alone, freefalling by yourself,” Williams says. So the feeling of successfully snatching the flag and getting back to the surface was more one of relief than anything else.
He has since launched a career as a keynote speaker. The glory of the record, he says, has “opened a few really nice doors for me”. But the biggest perk of the title was closer to home.
“At the time, my daughter was 10. She comes home from school one day and she goes, ‘Oh my God, Dad, I was at the library today with all my friends and you were on the inside cover of the Guinness World Record book. All my friends just freaked out!’ So that was a really lovely moment.”
‘I’m going to be the record holder as long as I am on this Earth’
Omkar Palav – fastest time to type the alphabet with nose
Omkar Palav isn’t an extreme athlete or a brazen daredevil. He’s an IT worker who, by his own description, “is very good at typing”.
For years, Palav had dreamed of claiming a Guinness World Record. He found appeal in the idea of having secured a clear, tangible achievement. So he started looking for a record he could claim without risking life or limb, and eventually set his sights on becoming the fastest person to type the alphabet using their nose.
After a lot of practice – the trick is memorising where each of the keys are located, he says – Palav did just that. On 20 July 2024, he managed the feat in 20 seconds and 51 milliseconds at a community centre in Adelaide.
He hasn’t had long to bask in the glory – there are other nose typists already plotting their own attempt, so Palav is planning to try and beat his own record soon so that he can retain the title.
“I’m going to try to be the record holder as long as I am on this Earth,” he says. Because the effort is worth it: “It’s not very easy to achieve. [But] achieving that gives inner happiness.”
