The Human Need to Break Records

By Frank Trippett

When Albuquerque Businessman Maxie Anderson, 45, and his son Kris, 23, completed the first nonstop transcontinental balloon flight in May, the four-day voyage of 2,818 miles from Fort Baker, Calif., to Ste. Felicite, Quebec, set a world record for overland flight. Another, more esoteric record was achieved in April by Jerry Dietrick, 56, of Florence, Ky., who became the first pilot to fly solo from Cincinnati to London to Munich in a single-engine plane of the 3,850-lb. to 6,414-lb. class.

Such record-setting news scratches up a brief twitch of public interest and a flurry of deserved hurrahs. Yet the tidings of singular achievement seem less and less to arouse genuine excitement. New records come along so frequently, and in so many categories, that it is impossible to work up the appropriate celebratory mood for every one of them. The exceptional is in danger of becoming commonplace.

Three volunteers at Duke University in Durham, N.C., set a world record this spring when they spent 28 days in a pressure tank to simulate a dive 2,132ft. into the sea. To raise money for the American Heart Association, Ohio State University students played a 4,378-seat game of musical chairs last month and broke the old record of 3,728 chairs.

The business of setting and topping records has got completely out of hand in the 20th century. Merely keeping track of records requires the toil of a considerable industry and the regular publication of hundreds of thick books with fine print. Scores of thousands of new records are claimed every year. There would be a surfeit even if the world of sports did not chip in its promiscuous confetti of records.

And quasi records: Pete Rose of the Philadelphia Phillies walked and then stole his way around the bases a few games ago, becoming the first National League player to do that since Harvey Hendrick of Brooklyn in 1928.

Every other day somebody does something that has never been done before. Or else repeats some improbable feat--only faster, deeper, higher, with different equipment or at a different age. The act of dying is one of the very few human activities that do not stir up competitive fever among people. "After Sir Edmund Hillary," says Boston Globe Columnist M.R. Montgomery, "you can climb Everest on a pogo stick without attracting envy or admiration." But, in fact, once the notion of climbing a mountain by pogo stick has been conceived, it would not be surprising if somebody had a go at it.

At 57, Coca-Cola Heiress Frances Woodruff of Atlanta is said to be the oldest woman ever to ride and fly a hang glider. In Pampa, Texas, Plumber Ronnie Farmer, 29, ate 100 hot jalapeno peppers in 15 minutes, destroying the previous record (94 in 111 minutes) and probably his innards as well. In Japan, Hideaki Tomoyori has learned to carry the mathematical formulation pi (3.141 etc.) to 20,000 places, putting to shame his own earlier record of 15,151 places.

It was not always this way. While it is true that St. Simeon the Younger, the 6th century Syrian monk, perched on a stone pillar for 45 years, he did it not to claim a record but to elevate his soul. It was not until late in the 19th century that the notion of setting a record even occurred in sports literature. Only in the 20th has record-consciousness grown into a worldwide obsession. Scholars say that record keeping took hold mainly because of the scientific revolution's tendency to quantify and rank everything. The preoccupation with records, and the breaking thereof, pervaded sports early in this century and spread, much too quickly, to virtually every other field of endeavor. A North Carolina youth, Lang Martin, holds the record for balancing golf balls vertically: he stacked up six of them. A Northeast Louisiana University student, Arden Chapman, caught in his mouth a grape thrown the longest distance--259ft. It is easy to understand the performer's urge to do the improbable, the difficult, the unique, the best. Claiming a record, any record, provides massage to the ego, varnish for the pride and a tic of celebrity. To hold a record, in the words of Allen Guttmann, professor of American Studies at Amherst College, "is a uniquely modern form of immortality."

Johann Heinrich Karl Thieme of Aldenburg, Germany, dug a record 23,311 graves during a 50-year career as a sexton. Though he entered his own final resting place in 1826, he lives on--if nowhere else--in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The Guinness Book is proof that spectators, no less than performers, have been thoroughly infected with the obsession of recorditis. The public avidly eats up records of just about everything or earth: the biggest or highest or fastest or heaviest or deepest or oddest of natural or manmade wonders. Just such a Guinness Book has offered since it first came out in 1955. It has now sold 40 million copies in 23 languages worldwide, 25 million in the U.S. alone.

Inspired by Mark Gottlieb of Olympia, Wash., who set a record for playing the violin under water, Japan has come up with an entire underwater orchestra, a first. To raise funds for a local charity, a man and a woman in Des Moines lovingly sat in tubs of vanilla pudding for 24 hr. 34 min. 20 sec., the only record ever set for a pudding sit-- but one that will no doubt be challenged.

The urge to do something better, something distinct, is the very essence of human nature. Constant individual competition is only one manifestation of the impulse that is, in its deeper workings, nothing less than the engine for the advancement of the species. This was no doubt so even in unrecorded ages. Now that society has become so proficient at keeping records as a way of celebrating the competitive trait, it is no wonder that people get so carried away in the making and breaking of them. Moreover, the likelihood is that in the future, well . . .

Stanley Cottrell, 37, of Atlanta sprinted out of New York City in mid-May, intending to run the 3,049 miles to San Francisco somewhat faster than the 53 days that it took Irishman Tom McGrath in 1977. One wondered whether Cottrell's path might cross that of Joe Bowen, 36, who is currently walking on stilts from California to Kentucky, and has already broken the distance on set by another stiltwalker who strode 1,830 miles on the sticks from Paris to Moscow in 1891.

The future thus seems clear. The reaching for new records will never let up. Moreover, it should not be put down just because it leads to some ridiculous results. It would make as little sense to disparage the artistic impulse only because it produces, along with much that is noble, a great deal that is silly.

In the end, the constant striving of people to do better than others--or than themselves-- arises out of whatever sets the human species apart. All creatures compete, but for most the contest is only for the food and space to survive, to hold their own. Only humans striving for more than mere survival have elaborated competitiveness into the cultural imperative that it is. The obsession with setting records in finally inextricable from the human determination to rise above the past. -- Frank Trippett

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