Endurance Facts

The most push-ups ever performed in one day was 46,001 by Charles Servizio.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes had a heart attack and a double bypass. Four months later, at 59, he ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, finishing the lot in roughly 26 hours of running. He has also sawed off his own frostbitten fingers with a fretsaw in his garden shed, discovered the lost city of Ubar, and summited Everest at 65. Guinness calls him the greatest living explorer.

A man called Dean Karnazes ran 350 miles in 80 hours with no sleep, ran a marathon in the South Pole in -25 °C temperatures without snowshoes, and ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days.

A 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young showed up at the inaugural 875km Sydney-to-Melbourne ultramarathon in work boots and overalls. The professional runners laughed - then slept the first night. Young had no idea runners were supposed to sleep, so he just kept going. He won by 10 hours. He gave $7,000 of his $10,000 prize to the other five finishers.

Plennie Wingo walked backwards out of Fort Worth in 1931, with mirrors fixed to his glasses and postcards at a quarter to pay his way, until Turkish police jailed him at the border and an American consul talked him into coming home from Istanbul. Guinness still lists the 8,000-mile trek as the longest walk ever made backwards.