One really, really long plank

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/02/2020 (2041 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Imagine getting down in the push-up position, your weight resting only on your forearms and toes, while holding the rest of your body as straight as a plank of wood.

Now imagine maintaining that painful position for an astonishing eight hours, 15 minutes and 15 seconds.

Well, that’s precisely what George Hood, a 62-year-old former U.S. Marine and Drug Enforcement Administration officer, did on Feb. 15, shattering the world record for the Longest Male Abdominal Plank.

His record-breaking fitness feat, officially announced by Guinness World Records last week, made headlines around the world. The previous record for a men’s plank was set by Mao Weidong of China, who in 2016 held it for eight hours, one minute and one second.

“Holy coffee table, Batman! That’s a long time to be in the plank position,” Forbes magazine wrote of Hood’s achievement. “Can you think of any single thing that you can do for over eight hours? Sleeping perhaps? Maybe pining, wallowing, or being Emo?… Think about it. Hood held a low plank, for longer than the entire final season of the HBO television series Game of Thrones.”

The ex-Marine trained every day for an average of seven hours for the 18 months leading up to the big day. His next goal? Set the world record for most pushups in one hour, which currently stands at 2,806.

Hood deserves our applause, but folks on this side of the border are definitely not strangers to strange achievements, as we see from today’s patriotic list of Five Weird World Records Held by Canadians:

5) The weird world record:

Longest female plank

The Canuck record-breaker: You are no doubt still in awe of American George Hood’s recent world record, but it raises a question: who is the female record holder for the longest abdominal plank?

Well, prepare to feel warm and fuzzy all over, because that honour goes to Dana Glowacka, a mother and yoga instructor from Montreal. Glowacka cemented her spot in the Guinness World Records on May 18, 2019, at the First International Plank Training Conference in Naperville, Ill.

She held her body in the punishing position for four hours, 19 minutes and 55 seconds. That feat of endurance smashed the female record — Maria Kalimera of Cyprus held the previous title for her time of three hours and 31 minutes in 2015.

The Canadian athlete — a prominent vegan who frequently posts pictures of her plant-based fuel online — set the record in front of cheering friends, family and a group of Guinness World Record officials. “I’m so grateful,” Glowacka wrote in her Instagram post following the 2019 event. “Truly, if you put the whole of you in what you believe, you gonna make it!”

She told CTV News: “When it gets uncomfortable, I just close my eyes and get reconnected.”

The yoga instructor was inspired by her son, who told her: “Mum, you can do this!” Before breaking the record, Glowacka’s last post on her website revealed her personal best plank time was four hours and one minute — meaning she beat her personal best by 19 minutes. She began training in 2014 under the supervision of men’s champ, Hood.

Her first attempt lasted a mere four minutes, but Hood inspired her to keep going. Gushed George: “Dana Glowacka is a good friend of mine. I worked with her for years preparing her for what she ended up doing here last spring here in Naperville, Ill … So she’s Canada’s sweetheart, no doubt.”

4) The weird world record:

World’s largest snow maze

The Canuck record breaker: We are just going to come right out and say it — no one in the world embraces winter with more gusto than Friendly Manitobans. When the mercury plummets, we hop off our couches and head outdoors in search of frosty fun, which means it’s not a big surprise that so many people brave Prairie winter winds to flock to a snowy field south of Winnipeg to visit a 2,789-metre-squared snow maze located just north of St. Adolphe, which achieved the Guinness World Record honour during its first season open last winter.

It took roughly six weeks, 150 semi-truck loads of snow and 12 people working 10-hour days to create the record-breaking masterpiece last year. It was proclaimed as the largest snow maze by Guinness World Records after being measured on Feb. 10, 2019.

Owner Clint Masse told reporters that sections of wall are about two feet wide and more than six feet tall, making them appear almost as thick and dense as the walls surrounding medieval castles. The maze is built on top of the Masse family’s other big summer attraction — A Maze in Corn. The giant corn maze, hay bale pyramid and petting zoo have been running on the family’s property for more than 20 years.

A colleague told Masse about a massive snow maze in Thunder Bay — which is at Fort William Historical Park and measures 1,696 square meters — and he figured, with a corn maze already established, it would be natural to go even bigger.

“One of my staff members showed me that snow maze and he said how big it was,” Masse told CNN, which happily picked up the story. “I said, ‘Glen, it’s gonna be a ton of work but I think we can pull it off.’” And they did. At 2,789.114 square metres, Masse’s record-setting maze had room to spare. The actual build size was pretty close to the original design projection, which was a surprise. “When you build in the snow, it’s difficult. It’s not steel,” he said. It takes about 30 minutes to weave your way through the snow maze, something around 20,000 people did in the snow structure’s first record-breaking season.

3) The weird world record:

Most combine harvesters working a single field simultaneously

The Canuck record breaker(s): Some records involve athletes or vehicles moving at lightning-fast speed. Others involve things plodding along at the pace of large farm machinery, which describes the remarkable world record set in a farm field just south of Winkler, about 120 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, on Aug. 4, 2018.

That’s when an impressive array of 303 combines were counted and accredited working all at once in a field of winter wheat in a Harvest for Kids event staged to raise cash for the charity Children’s Camps International.

The 303 combines handily beat the previous record of 244 combines working in one field for five minutes that was set in 2012 through a Harvest for Kids project in Saskatchewan. The combines are required to work for at least five minutes to achieve the record and, on this day, the big machines rolled for seven minutes in the 125.5 hectare field, cutting 100 hectares of winter wheat.

“Thousands of spectators took in the sight of hundreds of combines at work in the one field to break the record. It is hoped the event raises enough cash, around $ 5 million, to send one million kids to camp through the ministry of Children’s Camps International,” according to allaboutfeed.net. Philip Robertson, Guinness World Record adjudicator, called the day “an extraordinary event that raised lots of money for a great cause… It was spectacular, 303 combine harvesters creating the most magnificent dust storm. It was wonderful to watch… They’re all giving up their time, money, and effort for the cause. That’s why I love this job. I love seeing attempts like this come together.”

Organizer George Klassen helped rewrite the record books by driving one of the combines. “That was just such a great feeling, sitting in that combine and realizing what all came together to make this happen. It’s fantastic,” he said.

2) The weird world record:

Longest non-stop Elvis impersonation

The Canuck record breaker: We know a lot of you have Suspicious Minds, but, please, Don’t be Cruel to Suresh Joachim. We say that because in January 2018, this Canadian actor, producer and professional world record breaker established the new standard for the longest non-stop Elvis impersonation: 55 hours in a Brampton mall.

Joachim’s marathon shattered the existing record of 43 hours and 11 minutes paying tribute to the King. According to The Toronto Star, there was a Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On at the mall, where the Canadian Elvis shook, sang and wiggled his hips for three days and two nights.

“Towards the end he was performing really well,” said his biggest fan, wife Christa, who took three days off work to cheer him on during mall hours. “He even kept dancing for the last full hour,” she said, adding that a sizeable crowd had gathered to see him reach the record.

He kicked off the record-breaking attempt sporting a white suit with gold trim, a wig and large sunglasses, warming up the crowd with one of Elvis’s ballads, Heartbreak Hotel. In the end, he sang a total of 41 songs over and over during the record attempt — the only Elvis songs he had learned in preparation for the marathon event.

“He didn’t even know any Elvis songs when he decided to do this, so he had to practise these ones a lot,” Christa said.

How did he celebrate his achievement? He went to bed. “He crashed as soon as he came home,” she said.

According to online reports, Suresh has broken more than 60 world records since he discovered the Guinness Book of World Records in 1991. His other records include drumming continuously for 84 hours, running on a treadmill for 168 hours, 10-pin bowling for 100 hours, and travelling 225.44 kilometres up and down escalators.

1) The weird world record:

World’s smallest national flag

The Canuck record breaker(s): Even if you are not the biggest patriot in the country, you are going to want to salute this teeny-tiny world record. In September 2016, a team of Maple Leaf-loving researchers at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing established a Guinness World Record for creating the smallest national flag ever measured.

According to Guinness and assorted news reports, they developed a Canadian flag that measures 1.178 micrometers (about 0.001 millimetres, or one one-hundredth the width of a human hair) wide and is only visible with the help of an electron microscope.

Institute engineers created the itsy-bitsy flag on a silicon wafer with the use of electron beam lithography. A Guinness news release stated: “The (smallest) flag is the national flag of Canada, and its colour was created by oxidizing a bare silicon wafer in a tube furnace in order to grow a layer of Silicon dioxide of a carefully chosen thickness. Thin film interference effects in the silicon dioxide layer gives the flag a red colour. However, the flag is too small for conventional imaging techniques, so the only images we are able to see of the flag are in electron-microscopy grayscale.”

The institute created the flag in celebration of Canada’s sesquicentennial anniversary, and to bring a spotlight to the quantum and nanoscale research being undertaken in Canada. The wafer it was created on was emblazoned with the Canada 150 logo.

In other small accomplishments, in 2017, McMaster University research engineer Travis Casagrande carved a microscopic, 3D Canadian flag on the face of a penny. The carving — one one-hundredth the size of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye — was meant to be a celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday. Casagrande used a focused ion beam microscope, which is able to cut and reshape metal, as well as give extremely detailed images of a material’s surface. And if you ran it up a flagpole, no one would be able to see it.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca