Strength that surmounts strange hurdles

New York / DPA

Ashrita Furman started out with 27,000 star jumps — an exhausting exercise
used by military fitness instructors — moved on to somersaults along a 20-kilometre route, and then to underwater pogo stick jumping.
Furman, now 61, has set 621 records to the standards of the Guinness World Records, and 206 of them are still standing, he says. Since setting his first record in 1979, Furman has balanced a running lawn mower on his chin, climbed peaks in the Andes on stilts, sack-raced against a yak in Mongolia and blown a postage stamp along a 100-metre course.
His latest bizarre stunt was blowing out 72,000 candles on a birthday cake. “I try to transcend my own limitations,” Furman said in New York, where he lives and runs a health-food outlet for a living. His aim is also to inspire others — he runs a meditation group that he takes on trips around the world.
Meditation is the source of his strength to surmount the strange hurdles he sets himself, helping him concentrate and overcome fatigue and pain, Furman says.
He fits in two half-hour sessions a day. Furman is the son of a Jewish lawyer and once studied at New York’s prestigious Columbia University. But his course in life was set when he met the Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007) as a teenager and embarked on a quest “for life’s deeper sense.”
It was then that he changed his name from Keith to Ashrita — Sanskrit for “protected by God.” Seen by his school comrades as a swot and being slight of build, Furman was bullied “right from the first day at high school.” Instead of going to parties or thinking about his future career, he fantasized for a year as a teenager about crawling into a cave.
Sri Chinmoy taught him how to find inner repose and freedom through physical exertion at the highest level. “Happiness does not come from success, but from inner progress,” Chinmoy told him. Furman acknowledges that many of his records are bizarre. “Crazy” was the word his mother used, but he was undeterred. “I’ve retained my childish mentality,” he says. His relaxed manner and infectious laugh bear that out.
It is not yet clear whether the birthday candles will make the grade, as it takes a while before the Guinness organization announces its decision, although it has acknowledged Furman’s astonishing efforts.
This particular stunt was dedicated to Chinmoy. The records, along with descriptions and photographs of the locations where he set them, are shown on his own website. Those locations are spread across all seven continents, from the ice-bound wastes of Antarctica to the plains of
Mongolia.