Thursday, November 2, 2023

It's official! Fastest mile on a climbing wall (male) record

 Guinness has just approved my record from July for fastest mile on an indoor climbing wall (male), officially at 1:42:57.95. For technical details and links to video, see my writeup from July.

Thinking about this made me realize just how much this was a team effort. I am grateful to everyone who made this possible, especially:

  • My family for encouragement and patience with me over the summer as I trained for this.
  • Benjamin Sadler doing the official measurements of the route, correcting for the angle of inclination.
  • Mitchell Minyard and Libby Regnerus for being witnesses for the route measurement.
  • Madelyn Hayden, Dominic Pruss and Gabriella Williams for being in charge of my safety during the attempt and/or outside-of-regular-Rock-hours training sessions.
  • Rock staff for watching out for my safety during regular hours, for extending the route so that 112 climbs would be enough for a mile, and constant encouragement.
  • Rich Eva and Libby Regnerus for spending 1¾ hours of their Saturday holding stopwatches to provide an official time.
  • Mitchell Minyard and Gabriella Williams for witnessing the attempt and working hard to log the start and end times of each of 112 climbs. 
  • Gym management staff Rachel Burduroglu, Zac Huston and Cody Schrank for much encouragement, practical help, patience with many requests, and especially allowing me to use the facility outside of hours.
  • The audience (notably including President Linda Livingstone and First Gentleman Brad Livingstone) for their great encouragement.
  • All the members of the Baylor rock climbing community for being such a welcoming community over the past eight years, and having taught me pretty much all I know about climbing.
  • Baylor Moody Media Lab for lending me equipment for recording the attempt.
  • And Guinness World Records for patiently answering all my nitpicking questions and taking the time to review a massive amount of evidence in a fair and trustworthy way.

8 comments:

scott said...

Congrats!

Gordon said...

Congratulations!

Dan Bonevac said...

Excellent! Well done!

Walter Van den Acker said...

Congratulations.

Gordon said...

Congratulations!

Heavenly Philosophy said...

You did an amazing job. Congrats!

James Reveley said...

As we say in Oz, you are a gun!

Alexander R Pruss said...

Thanks, all!

BTW, someone without a conflict of interest might want to edit my wikipedia entry to reflect this. :-)