Life

The World's Biggest Couch Potato

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Suresh Joachim is a man obsessed. Why else would someone watch television non-stop for 69 hours and 48 minutes straight? All ABC shows, without sleeping or talking, not even turning to look at others in the room?

 

And after that why would be start ironing clothes non-stop, standing at an ironing board for 55 hours? Well, Joachim has made it his life’s mission to break existing Guinness World Records, and has already broken 16 of them! He’s other records include balancing on one foot (76 hours, 40 minutes) and bowling for 100 hours.

He says he does this to attract awareness for children’s causes and helps raise funds through sponsorship of his attempts. Watching nonstop TV may sound like paradise, but has to be more of a pain because the stringent rules stipulate that you can take only a five-minute break every hour and a 15-minute break every 8 hours. No running every now and then to the refrigerator or the bathroom!

The TV watching marathon was conducted on the Live with Regis and Kelly show during their Guinness World Record Breaker week, while the nonstop ironing was at a shopping mall in Brampton, Ontario, to beat the previous record of a woman who completed 40 hours of ironing 228 shirts, all at one go. Here too the rules were ironclad: Ironing must be continuous and a break of no more than 30 seconds is allowed between items. Only one iron and one ironing board may be used during the attempt. Items must be ironed to a satisfactory standard. After ironing, each item must be inspected by stewards; if two consecutive items are judged by the stewards not to have been ironed to an adequate standard, the attempt fails.

Joachim hopes to raise a billion dollars through his World Peace Marathon next year in which he plans to travel through 88 cities. Currently he’s participating in the longest static cycling marathon in UK and his future plans include singing Elvis songs for 100 hours, swimming from Mexico to Cuba in 35 hours and driving a car in reverse for 800 km over 10 hours. Sure beats working at a 9 to 5 job!

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