Almost Nobody Alive Can Finish The Race That Never Ends

thanks to today's sponsor fast hosts if you're based in the uk you have the chance to win the ultimate tech bundle including your dream pc setup worth up to 5 000 pounds if you can answer my techie test question that is link in the description and i'll explain more later on in the video hey 42 here people run for all sorts of different reasons some are in it for the competition and the chance to prove they're the fastest others want to keep fit with one eye on the track and the other on their waistline and still others just want an excuse to be incessantly smug and use their athletic feats to make their friends feel fat and ugly but some people run for reasons that are far less fathomable take the inhabitants of brockworth a village in gloucester for example who perhaps thanks to an insatiable appetite for dairy products gather yearly to chase a four kilogram wheel of double gloucester cheese down a hill so steep that it makes actual human running pretty much impossible the first one to catch the cheese gets to keep it good as reason as any for risking both your life and your dignity i suppose and common techniques for retaining maximum speed on the way down include the sideways roll the bump scoot also known as the coccyx splitter and the always popular but never planned attempts to actually run before face planting with enough force to swallow your own teeth of course that can only be one winner but the supply of horrific injuries is unlimited to help make up for that broken bones from brutal falls are the most common maimings but rumor has it the great cheese chase of 1990 saw a 58 year old granny knocked out cold by the cheese itself then there's the mount everest treppen marathon that sees competitors given 24 hours to climb the height of earth's tallest mountain up a single set of steps in saxony germany it's hard to know exactly why anyone would willingly inflict this experience on themselves but i suspect it may come out of a suppressed desire to achieve the world record for the youngest person in history to undergo knee replacement surgery those hoping to complete the entire course must climb a grand total of 79 400 steps during the 24-hour period in sankayavi finland some young men run out of a sense of nostalgia for the good old days when finding yourself a wife was as simple as jogging off to a nearby village grabbing the prettiest girl you could find and sprinting back home with her flung over one shoulder in the modern day version of this event known quite fittingly as wife carrying male competitors carry their female teammates over a 252 meter obstacle course with the winners the first couple to cross the line popular carrying methods include the classic piggyback the time-honored fireman's carry and the intriguingly named estonian style which is a bit like the piggyback but upside down distinctly unhygienic if you ask me and then there's the sri chinmoy self-transcendent race named for the indian spiritual leader who founded it back in 1996 which might just be the weirdest and the most extreme race held anywhere on planet earth tree chimney was born in chittagong district in what was at the time british india but is today part of bangladesh though he spent most of his adulthood in the u.s during his lifetime he amassed some 7 000 students across 60 different countries and when he wasn't busy being all spiritual and that he was a prolific author an avid painter and he played the flute but what he was most famous for bizarrely enough is lifting people up and no i'm not speaking metaphorically here he specialized in literally picking people up off the floor during his prolific human hefting career mr chimnoy is said to have had a go at hoisting nelson mandela desmond tutu muhammad ali sting eddie murphy susan sarandon roberta flack yoko ono jeff goldblum richard gere helen hunt billie jean king a group of 20 nobel laureates a team of sumo wrestlers and the entire ac milan football team you have to hand it to him the guy has a hell of a lot of a-lift celebrities on his cv the reason for this frankly bizarre spate of human hoistings to show his appreciation for the achievements of the people he lifted apparently something to think about the next time you meet someone you respect in all sri chimney is thought to have lifted over 7 000 people in his lifetime but doing anything 7 000 times is bound to get annoying which is probably why sri like to keep things fresh by lifting things besides human beings including a helicopter a car an aeroplane and even an elephant you may not be able to lift an elephant but you can win a computer if you're based in the uk and you're looking to start a blog or maybe launch your business then fast hosts is the place to go regardless of your experience fast host provides all the web hosting products services and tools you need to bring your project to life and establish your web presence fast host's powerful and reliable hosting offers smart ssd storage and unlimited bandwidth in uk data centers with 24 7 specialist support on hand you'll never have to worry about server outages again i get through mountains of data every week creating these videos but it's important to me that i never lose any of it i'd recommend fast host cloud backup to seamlessly backup your data and should the worst happen you can recover it in minutes test it out by getting five gigabytes of cloud backup absolutely free uk viewers have the chance to win the ultimate tech bundle including your dream pc setup worth up to five thousand pounds if you can answer my techy test question they asked me to write as of 2020 what's the name of the world's longest fiber optic cable visit the link in the description to answer my question and enter the competition today more than anything sri chimnoy was a firm believer in the power of athletics as an aide to spiritualism and it was this that led to the development of the self-transcendence race but just what is so special about it well let's start with the most obvious bit the sri chinmoy self transcendence race is the longest foot race run anywhere in the world just how long well to most people your everyday bog standard marathon is the benchmark of a lung grace i mean the word marathon literally means long right but sri chimney was a man who lifted elephants up just for the hell of it he laughed in the face of marathons the first time the self-transcendence race was run in 1996 the course was those of you with asthma might want to grab an inhaler and find a nice comfortable spot to sit down two thousand seven hundred miles long at the inaugural event the male competition was won by latvian george germaladjevs and no female athlete managed to complete the course mr chimnoy was unperturbed during the medal ceremony for the event he apparently decided that george didn't look quite close enough to death for his liking so he got hold of a microphone looked his champ squarely in the eyes and announced that next year's course would be 3 100 miles long the self-transcendence race has been competed over that distance ever since now 3 100 miles is a pretty long way for context the distance between the most northerly point of the uk jonah gropes and the most sovereignly point lands end is a measly 603 miles in a straight line or around 874 miles if you travel by road which means that if the self-transcendent rate was run in the uk athletes would have to run the equivalent of the entire length of the kingdom around 3.5 times in order to reach the finish line the distance is quite frankly absurd in 2017 the legendary le mans 24 hours race was won by timo bernhard brendan hartley and earl bamber during the race the team completed 367 laps of the track and covered 3107 miles exactly seven miles further than competitors run in the street chimney cell transcendent race impressive stuff but of course they were driving a car and not just any car a 900 horsepower porsche 919 hybrid with a top speed of over 200 miles per hour runners in the self-transcendence race cover this outrageous distance alone and entirely under their own steam and whilst they do have rather more than 24 hours to complete the course they don't have as much time as you might think for a foot race covering more than 3 000 miles the course is open between 6 am and midnight for a grand total of 52 days that's 7.5 weeks to run the distance between london and moscow twice to see just how ridiculous this race really is let's do some quick maths in order to complete the entire course within the allotted time of 52 days participants have to run a minimum of 59.62 miles per day most people train months on ends to run a single marathon but to finish the street in my self-transcendence race you have to get yourself in good enough shape to run comfortably more than two marathons a day for 52 consecutive days and remember that's the minimum requirement to scrape home on the final day of the race like some kind of unfit bum if you actually want to stand a chance of winning this thing you're going to have to set your sights a little higher the current course record was achieved by asperhanol alto a finn who crossed the finish line in 40 days 9 hours 6 minutes and 21 seconds that's the equivalent of 76.78 miles per day or just short of three full marathons every day for 40 days straight in order to cover such a mind-boggling distance most participants sleep a maximum of five hours a night and have to eat around 10 000 calories in an attempt to maintain their body weight wondering how you might go about taking in 10 000 calories when you're spending every waking second running ultrarunning legend william sichul from scotland who completed the race in 2014 overcame this calorific challenge by chugging ice cream three liters of the stuff per day pre-melted for ease of swallowing the event even takes a toll on the wardrobe with some runners getting through as many as 20 pairs of shoes during the course of the race and most runners will require at least one haircut mid-race considering all of this hardship it is perhaps no surprise that in the 23 years the race has been held at the full distance of 3 100 miles just 44 different people have managed to actually finish it within the allotted time now the elephant in the room here or should that be the elephant perched precariously on tree chimney's shoulders right next to the ghost of nelson mandela is the fact that i failed to mention one apparently key element of this bizarre event the location in which it's held you're probably thinking that the one plus side to this near endless running madness is the chance to take in some incredible scenery along the way after all if you're running 3100 miles you're almost certainly covering a wide variety of spectacular terrain mountains valleys forests beaches and spanning multiple countries probably even an entire continent well not quite the street chimney self race is actually run in just one place jamaica now you may well be thinking that isn't so bad jamaica is a lovely country after all and there's no doubt plenty to see there sure a small caribbean island just 150 miles across seems like a slightly odd choice for a 3 100 mile race but at least you'll get to know it pretty well over the course of your 52 days but no because the self-transcendence race does not in fact take place on the caribbean island of jamaica every single mile of it is instead run in the neighborhood of jamaica in the borough of queens new york in fact the entire course is made up of the single city block occupied by the thomas a edison career and technical education high school a single lap of which runs to a grand total of 883 metres for any non-savants watching that means participants must run around the same unremarkable city block a meniscal cartilage melting 5649 times in order to the race and what does the almost certainly clinically insane human being who wins such a race take home as his reward a big fat check a small pile of diamonds the secret to eternal life and the signed first edition of old tractors and the men who love them yes that's a real book no it's even worse winners of the longest foot race ever conceived by mankind are usually awarded a t-shirt or sometimes a dvd i'm not even kidding if all this seems too bad to be true then believe it or not you're actually kind of getting it because that's exactly the point the key to this whole sadomasochistic nightmare is the self-transcendence part of the race's name this race exists for the sole purpose of pushing those brave enough to compete in it to the very limits of what a human being is capable of both physically and mentally the almost comical distance the strict time limit the lack of sleep the utter trudging monotony of running around the same featureless city block over and over again day after day week after week it's all designed to help competitors transcend what they recognize as their own limits many runners make use of meditation to overcome the mental and physical hardships of the race and out-of-body experiences are not uncommon and as insanely challenging as this race undoubtedly is many competitors come back again year after year eager for another dose of mental and physical torture record holder asperahanol alto who we heard about earlier has completed this most ridiculous of races 15 times winning on nine occasions that means in total he's run some 46 000 miles around thomas a edison high school in jamaica new york the equivalent of running twice around the world i can only imagine the students must be sick of the sight of him so the next time you're coming to the end of your evening run puffing and panting but feeling pretty bloody proud of yourself for knocking out a respectable five miles without puking up just think only another 620 more of those and you'll have completed the world's longest foot race thank you for watching you can now pre-order my brand new book sticker flag in it on amazon the link is in the description thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 544,057

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Id: Ya3gZ2MJxaQ

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020