What some will do to get
into the Guinness Book, am I right?
Aurora, Illinois, resident George Hood, Jr. is trying to
spin his way to bookdom. On a stationary bike in a Burr Ridge sports
club (called the Burr Ridge Sports Club), George is hoping to “spin”
for 100 hours to break the previous 82 hour record.
Halfway across the world, real bikers are peddling movable
bikes across the French Alps. Do we cover the bikers riding moving
bikes? No! Because most of those bikers are laced with steroids yet the
spinning guys trying to get into the Book are laced with Guinness. We
didn’t realize you had to buy Guinness in order to qualify for the GWR
but if so, all we can say is “Brilliant!”
Here’s how this particular World Record works. You are
allowed five minutes of break for every hour on the bike. George, Jr.,
whose dad is also named George and happens to be the mayor of Indiana,
which is weird because where I come from we have a Governor, has the
strategy of staying on the bike for days at a time to accumulate big
breaks when he needs it. He started Tuesday and by Thursday he had spun
60 hours without sleep.
No sleep but plenty of hallucinations which, when you’re spinning,
takes on a whole new turn, in a round about way. Not to draw this out,
as if in a long tale, but George has been imagining himself in a mouse
suit inside one of those cage wheels. You know what I mean? Going
around and around but not really going anywhere? Like a rat race on
crack. And just when he thinks he may get out of the whirly cage,
another whirly thing shows up outside the first rotating thing and
then… Pat Sajak comes on the T.V. and the contestant is Ezekiel. So
every time Pat asks Zeke to take a you-know-what, Zeke reaches inside
the big wheel to rotate a smaller wheel and it confuses the curls right
off Vanna. So much so, that instead of moving letters, Vanna has
tassels spinning from her chest, Gypsy-Rose-Lee like, which flips out
Ezekiel but still he solves the song puzzle with, of course, “Big Wheel
keeps on Spinning.” This is when George’s eyes start revolving counter
clockwise with the whole room twirling around him, except for the
ceiling fan, which is just shaking because it has a loose bearing.
“My bottom’s a little sore,” George blogs (not
surprising since he saddled up in a town called ‘Burr Ridge’), “and I’m
staying at 12.2 mph.” The 12.2 mph is important because Guinness
requires a minimum of 12 mph. Here is also what we’re thinking… really,
really sore bottom, very sore bottom. We’re surprised George’s bike
seat isn’t padded like Debra Messing’s bra or that he didn’t line up
Anusol as a major sponsor. I’m sure they’d have jumped aboard. After
all George is raising money for Kiwanis Kids. (What? The Rotary has no
kids?) Get it? Rotary… wheels? By Friday morning George has over 78
minutes of stored break time. At the 72 hour mark George stops to
listen to an inspirational presentation from Brett Eastburn, a man
without arms, legs or as he says, disabilities. Brett’s speech is
titled “What goes around comes around.” By Friday afternoon Hood beats
the 83 hours. He stops for applause which, more surprisingly, comes
from Brett Eastburn. Pat Sajak stops “Wheel of Fortune” to look into
the camera straight at George, whose blog doesn’t tell us whether
Sajak’s camera turn was planned or a hallucinatory co-incidence… or
whether wheels were spinning when this happened.
