87 Hours On an Indoor Bike

cycling, RAAM, Race Across America, spinning record | UltraRob | Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

Last Saturday night George Hood finished riding an indoor bike for 85 hours straight to set a new Guinness World Record. Actually the elapsed time was a little longer because the rules allow for 5 minutes off the bike for every hour ridden. He was riding to raise money for Illinois COPS.

On Monday John Jurczynski started riding for a planned 50 hours to raise money for the American Diabetes Association. John is training for solo RAAM this year. In December he had done 50 hours to raise money for his local Children’s Santa Fund. When he heard of the new record, he decided to see if he could break it. Soon after midnight this morning, he made it to over 87 hours with an elapsed time of 89 hours. That means that in over 3.5 days he was only off the bike for about 2 hours! Since he decided to go for the record at the last minute it may end up being unofficial because he wasn’t sure what was required to get into the Guinness World Records Book. One thing that Biking Bis mentions is that the whole time has to be videotaped.

In 2004 while training for the Race Across Oregon, I did a training camp with the race directors and 2 others where we rode the 535 miles in 4 days. One of the other riders was Italian Alessandro Colo. Over New Years he had done a massive spinning session that was a little under 200 hours as I recall. Over New Years of 2005, he did another spinning session that was 201 hours and was reported by CyclingNews. Alessandro’s English was rather broken so it was a little hard to carry on a conversation with him but I talked to him a fair amount over the 4 days. One of the nights we shared a room. As I recall he took some short naps during his record attempt in 2004. That would be possible with the rules if he saved up his 5 minutes per hour for several hours and then took them at one time. Biking Bis says Alessandro’s record isn’t in the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records but I thought he was trying to get it in. He used to have some English pages on his website but now it seems to all be in Italian. Babel Fish didn’t help me very much.

Update 12/15/07: John “Blue Dog” Jurczynski and Mike “Mad Dog” Gallagher have pushed the Guinness spinning record to 113 hours!

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