Bucket List: How We Broke A Guinness World Record

Bucket List: How We Broke A Guinness World Record


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I’ve always wanted to break or set a Guinness World Record ever since I found the 1994 edition in the school library. The only problem was I couldn’t run the 100 meters under 10 seconds, juggle 4 one-eyed rabbits, or hop on my big toe for 48 hours straight. And then I got an email from Chris Guillebeau ahead of the World Domination Summit saying that they would be attempting to break the world record for the longest floating human chain. I had no idea what that meant, but I was in.

On July 5, the sun decided not to come out, but over 700 of us, most of whom were attending WDS, lined up to grab float tubes and a life jacket.

Tubes WDS World Float Guinness World Record

Despite the less than appealing invitation to enter the cold water of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, seeing hundreds of other colorful tubers was motivation enough to join the pack of lemmings.

WDS World Float Guinness World Record

One by one, we dropped into the water, relieved that it wasn’t as cold as we thought, and began to pull ourselves across the buoy line until we formed two long straight lines.

WDS-World-Float-Guiness-World-Record-2

Despite the wait for instructions in the cold water , people were actually in pretty high spirits. Conversations were had while we did our best to keep the sandals from falling off of our feet.

WDS World Float Guinness World Record

A team of kayakers would paddle to make sure everyone was in line, with linked hands, to ensure that the record, once attempted, to be easily verified.

WDS World Float Guinness World Record

With two lines of floats stretching beyond our sight lines, we all held up our linked hands for 5 minutes while a drone did a fly by to record the entire thing. In fact, holding it up for that long was the hardest part of the whole thing.

WDS World Float Guinness World Record

And like that, we took the record away from 542 folks in Italy. Check that off the bucket list.

Kien Lam WDS World Float Guinness World Record

Photos courtesy of the World Domination Summit.

Updated on October 29, 2023

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