New World Record!

After many long weeks of practice, I have officially set the new World Record for the most skips on a unicycle in one minute. Check the video below:

So here’s the behind the scenes info…I felt awful today. Not just bad, awful. Yesterday I had an early flight to Atlanta and drove 4 hours up to Huntsville for a show. It was a great night with a fun group of people (also found out that there were a few Brits who have settled down in the area, which was a fun surprise). After the show was over I hopped back into the rental car (which I paid for a Hyundai and ended up with a brand new Mercedes so that was nice) and drove back to Atlanta. I arrived at my hotel at 1:30AM and had a 7AM flight back to Houston. Needless to say, I was tired.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re beyond exhausted, it can be hard to sleep? That was certainly the case last night. I laid there wide awake until 4:45 when I finally dozed off for 30 minutes. I zipped back to the airport and hopped on my flight. I had left my cameras and computer with a friend for safe keeping so I picked those up (and my dad who had decided late Monday that he would fly down from Alaska to watch) and headed to the school.

I spent a fair amount of time getting sound and cameras set up so that everything would be ready to rock when the students arrived. I had a couple people from USA Jump Rope volunteer to count the event (thanks to Becky and Miranda). They showed up early and that took a stress off my mind. Then it was show time. The only thing was…I have been fighting a very sore throat for the past few days and it was feeling terrible. With no time to reschedule, I decided to suck it up and let’s do the record regardless of how I felt.

I started my show like normal and was glad I waited as one of the local TV stations showed up a bit after I started. It worked out where he was there to film the record attempt. With all the training I’ve been doing, one thing that worked in my favor today was that I always did my unicycle attempts at the end of a 2-3 hour workout when I was tired. Working off 30 minutes of sleep and a sore throat, this was going to be tough.

The first 30 seconds went great, but the last half I found that I was slowing down way more than normal. Not good. Most times when I did this in training, I found that I didn’t slow down much at all during the final half. Sickness was working against me. However, I was very surprised when I saw the score…240. No way! My best to date had been 232 and I blew past that. After the show we went ahead and did a critical review of the count and found that by watching it in slow motion, it ended up being 237. Still, my best yet!

I’m very happy with the results, I would have loved to actually hit 240, but I can’t complain with beating the current record by 17. Not bad for a sleep deprived guy. Now I’ll be sending everything off to Guinness to get it on the books for real. Thanks to Moorhead Junior High for hosting this for me. The staff was awesome and I really enjoyed chatting with students after we finished. One thing left…I’m going to sleep and maybe I will actually accomplish my goal tonight.