Alex Hutchinson: I think the big question that underlies the whole pursuit of limits is when I push to what feels like my limit is that everything that my body has to give?
And there is an idea that's called the central governor these days thanks to a scientist named Tim Noakes who proposed this idea in the 1990s, somehow we're hardwired not to be able to push all the way to the point where we sort of keel over on the savannah while chasing the antelope and die, some sort of circuitry that prevents us from pushing all the way to our physical limits.
Now this idea wasn't just invented in 1996 when Tim Noakes started talking about it. People have speculated about it for decades and probably for centuries. But it's only in the last couple of decades that people have started to try a little more systematically to measure this idea of: can we squeeze every bit out of the lemon or is there some sort of limit that prevents us from getting there?
Peter Frick-Wright: Certain things never get old. Pushing the limits of the human body… is kinda one of them. So, over the next few weeks, with the help of Outside columnist Alex Hutchinson who you just heard from, we’re revisiting some of our favorite stories from the last few years. Don’t worry, we’ll have new stuff soon, but it’s not quite ready yet, so while we’re ramping that up, we’re going to be looking back at some of our favorite episodes, ever, and how they came to be.
This week, it’s an episode that had such a roundabout path to existence that it’s hard to believe that it made it on the air at all. And that it’s one of my favorite things that we’ve done. It’s the story of two guys dueling for the world record in pull-ups in 24 hours.
It came out of a reporting trip to a super remote tropical island, where I had followed an obsessive climber for Outside’s print magazine. And while we were there, he mentioned another guy who actually made his climbing obsession look kind of pedestrian: a guy named John Orth, who had devoted his life—at least for a while—to the pull-ups record.
This was right around the time that Outside columnist Alex Hutchinson, who you heard from at the top of this episode, published a book called Endure, which explained a lot of the science behind these kinds of attempts at world record endurance.
And you can’t tell while listening to the final version of the episode, but going into this story, we thought it was going to be entirely about John. We didn’t know that there was another guy going for the record. Who had made an attempt but was still waiting to hear back from Guinness about whether he’d been successful. And then while we were making this piece I just happened to be traveling within about an hour of where this kid went to school, so I dropped into the fitness center, where he worked, and we did an interview right there, in his office.
I think the reason I like this episode so much is that it’s hard enough to tell one story, much less two at the same time that weave together. And this one was done on the fly, we were just improvising. It’s a points-for-difficulty kind of thing that ended up paying off.
So here’s me. Almost eight years ago.
We’re going to kick things off with a story about a very hard, very hated exercise. The pull-up. Hanging off a bar, arms overhead, and pulling yourself up so that the bar is below your chin. It’s a movement that the average American can’t do more than one or two before hitting muscle failure. The average reasonably athletic Outside podcast host with a pull-up bar in his garage? About five.
The pull-up is difficult because the muscles involved just aren’t all that strong. The latissimus dorsi, teres major and minor, infraspinatus… they’re tiny. At least compared to the glutes, quads and hamstrings, the muscles that normally move us around.
But call it a testament to just how much the human body can respond to training, the world record for pull-ups in 24 hours? It’s in the thousands.
Last September, we heard about a guy in Colorado, named John Orth was going to go for the record again. He was the reigning world record holder, but his number had just unofficially been beaten. John was going to defend his title with another record attempt, which meant that over the course of 24 hours he was going to be pushing himself right up against his limits. So naturally, we asked if producer Robbie Carver could come watch.
Robbie Carver: When John Orth does pull-ups, he does them very, very, fast. I mean, listen to him. It sounds like his first set. In fact, those were pull-ups 3,600, 3,601, 602, 603, 604, and 3,605. He does them faster than I can say them. And he’s been doing them for 6 hours straight.
John Orth: Hi I'm John Orth I'm 43 years old. I am a violin maker and the chair of the fine woodworking department at Red Rocks Community College. I’m the current world Guinness World Record holder for the pullups in 24 hours.
Robbie: John is 5’10, 147 pounds. He’s a luthier—a violin maker, and teaches woodworking at Red Rocks Community College. He’s compact, with a tightly woven upper body and legs so skinny they belong in a geriatric ward, not on a world record athlete. There’s not an ounce of wasted body mass on him–if it doesn’t help him do a pull-up or keep him alive, he’s shed it as excess weight. You might call him a little obsessive.
Robbie(Interview) : so how does one become an endurance pull up athlete?
John: In this case it was purely by accident. … I was in a local climbing store..and they were hosting a competition. Whoever did the most pull ups on these ice tools would win the ice tools. And I thought you know I'm a climber. I'm good at pull-ups and so I'm gonna win them. And I didn't, and I was sort so mad at myself that this is completely honest that I thought I'm going to train all year and I'm gonna win the next year.
Robbie: So he trained, figuring that it would be no contest this time. Problem was, he was right. There was literally “no contest” the next year.
John: And the following year they didn't do a pull up competition and I had trained so hard. So I went to the gym and I spoke to the director and I said How about letting me do this 24 hour event. And he said yes so I trained for six more months and went for it.
Robbie: Which raises the question, how on earth do you prepare your body to do pull-ups for 24 hours straight? Well, it’s not so much about strength as stamina.
John: I started working with an assist machine. Most people are familiar with like the hoist assist machine in most gyms and I started doing pull ups on the assist as I would on a rowing machine. I would just do pull ups for a half hour straight with half my body weight.,… I would just pull and pull until, I guess after a couple of months of doing that I realized my endurance was where needed to be. Now I've got to get the strength up and my comfortable routine now is 12 to 14 hundred pull ups a day and I can easily do that in two hours or less.
Robbie: Most of us know the high school version of how our muscles get stronger. Do hard enough exercise and you start tearing muscle fibers. During rest your body then rebuilds those fibers, and adds a few more, just in case. Repeat this exercise enough times, and you see results .
And for pure, one-and-done strength moves, that understanding is more or less sufficient. But if you want to repeat those moves over and over and over, things get a little more complicated. From a purely muscular point of view, what’s the difference between being able to do a hundred pull-ups, and a thousand?
Dr. Markus Amann: Well there is a there is a there's a number of structural changes that happen over time with with chronic exercise, so exercise that is done every day or several times a day.
Robbie: This is Dr. Markus Amann, who studies fatigue and the central nervous system at the University of Utah. Dr Amann says that it’s not just about the raw strength of the muscle, but how efficiently the body learns to deal with something called metabolites.
Dr. Amann:: So if you and I do five pull-ups we might accumulate a huge amount of metabolites simply because we are not used to that type of exercise. Our body hasn't figured out the best way to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the muscle cells that are used there right now.
Robbie: We’ll talk more about metabolites later on, but basically they are the chemical byproducts of muscle contraction, particularly when the muscles are in oxygen deficit. For a number of reasons, too many of them can gum up the works and make the muscles less responsive to signals from the brain, producing what’s called peripheral fatigue. Without conditioning, your body simply doesn’t know the best way to get muscles the oxygen they need. It’s kind of like the first time you try to navigate a new city. Sure, you’ll get to the store eventually, but it might take you a few wrong turns to get there. But give it a week, and you’ll arrive in no time.
Dr. Amann: So when you ride your bike 200 watts or three hundred watts you have a certain amount of metabolites in your legs and then you go back and you train for three months, and then you go back in in the lab and you do the same 300 watts on the bike again. The metabolites that you will find in your muscle are less. And this is simply because the muscle has become more efficient.
Robbie: Once you have the strength to do one pull up, doing them for 24 hours is entirely about efficiency. And over the past decade, a handful of athletes have shown just how efficient muscles can get. It’s been a slugfest. In 2011, Britain’s Stephen Hyland recorded 4020. Two years later, David Goggins, in his third attempt, eked it up to 4025. Then an Australian, Caine Eckstein, added 200 more. And in 2014, 54-year old Mark Jordan pushed it to 4321. He says focusing on 4-3-2-1 was what enabled him to get there.
But 2015 was the real Battle Royale. Over the course of the year, four different people set four new records, pushing the number up to 6800. It felt like the record was reaching its upper limits. Until, in May 2016, a high school kid named Andrew Shapiro stepped up and showed everyone, nope. The limits were still a long way off.
Peter: Andrew Shapiro didn’t start out looking for the fame and notoriety of setting a world record. When he started out, like a lot of high school kids, he just wanted to get on TV.
Andrew Shapiro: I used to be really into that show American Ninja Warrior. So I figured if I did this to like build a resume kind of for myself. They've let me on the show easier. So that's why I chose pullups.
Peter: Andrew is in college now at the University of New Hampshire. He’s on the shorter side, with shaggy hair under a fly fishing baseball cap. Sweat pants, plaid shirt, and a low-energy, sunday afternoon kinda vibe. He looks like a college kid. Not a world class pull up artist.
Peter (interview): Tell me a little more about that like how did you decide. How did it how did the pull up record first come across your life.
Andrew: I don't know how I first saw it or why I looked it up but I saw one day and I thought that like that number didn't think it was like 5800 the time for 24 hours and I didn't think I was like completely unachievable.
Peter: To do 5,800 pull ups in 24 hours, you’d have to do about 4 pull-ups a minute for a whole day. Which, actually, when you put it like that, 4 pull ups doesn’t sound COMPLETELY impossible. It’s just a matter of putting your head down and building up endurance. Doing the training. And Andrew’s pretty good at that.
Andrew: I didn't I didn't have a whole lot of friends, I kind of like stuck to myself when I'm hiking fishing about myself stuff like that. So I mean I didn't have a huge effect on me when I started spending all my time just working out.
Peter (Interview): OK. So so when you talk about a pull up workout it's just pull ups.
Andrew: Yes it's pretty much boring as it sounds. Up down up down for two hours like 20 second breaks in between sets.
Peter: Back in high school, training days went like this: In the morning, Andrew woke up, did his homework for the day, and went to school. When he got home, he took a nap, and then did pull ups late into the night. 10 pull ups a minute. Five pull ups every 30 seconds.
Andrew: I would keep my own clock except from the timer and every time I hit 21 seconds I'd do a set of five. Then every time it hit 51 seconds I'd do a set of five. How I came up with those numbers I don’t know.
Peter: The goal was to keep the same pace, and the same rest, for as long as possible.
Andrew: When I first started I can only do five minutes often a minute and then at the end of seven months of training I could keep that up for five hours 30 minutes.
Peter: Basically that’s 5 more minutes than last time, each training day. Or, adding about 50 pull ups every workout.
Andrew: Like what I did as I just made a big Excel spreadsheet plan out every work out from day one today like 200 something. And I would see like what I'm supposed to be. And if I was below that I'd be like Oh you've got to work harder and if I was ahead of that guy you're doing pretty good. Maybe take a little break this time.
Peter: He kept building up and felt good about his fitness, so on May 14th, 2016 he made an attempt at the record. His dad was a cancer survivor, so he partnered with a Relay for Life event, put up a tent, put a pull-up bar inside, and got started.
Andrew: and it was not ideal conditions I was outside in a tent like a big lake almost wedding tent type of thing. And they didn't have power cords out there so we had to run this really loud generator so I can listen to music or do anything.
Had this really annoying humming going on the whole time. It's kind of deafening. So and then we also it was blazing hot during the day is like upper 80s. And then at night is cut down like felt like upper 50s is pretty chilly. And then there's also a thunderstorm that day and the wind almost knocked the tent over a few times. It's just not ideal but you're after like stop doing pull ups like fix the tent like fix something. I kept trying to like help hold down the tent but then the people around me were like No Duchin you do we got this. So. It was kind of cool seeing people support me. It was almost like a weird feeling.
Peter: He did pull-ups for 18 hours straight. And the limiting factor turned out to be his hands.
Andrew: Like no matter what type of oven mitts or pads or whatever you want to try to use like your hands are not meant to be on a bar for the majority of the day.
Peter: In his basement, his hands would get blistered, start bleeding, and then get infected. He kept training, however, so they never really healed. He figured out a better system for the actual record attempt, but still, by the end, they were completely trashed. He quit six hours early. The tissue under his fingernails swelled up and turned purple and black.
Andrew: My prom date junior year thought I paint my nails to match her dress. I didn't. But I heard a lot of stuff about that. [00:18:02][24.2]
Peter: In total, without even using all 24 hours, he had done 7306 pull-ups. It was a new record. But it wouldn’t even last a month.
Robbie: Twenty-eight days later, On June 11, 2016 in Golden, Colorado, John Orth made his own attempt, and… also had problems with his hands. He was 16 hours into his record attempt when the pain became unbearable.
John: I had to quit because I had lost most of the skin on my hands and it was just awful. The thought of grabbing the bar one more time was miserable. My hands took weeks to heal months to get back to normal.
Robbie: And not just his hands. His whole body had ripped itself apart from the effort.
John: I couldn't even lift my body off the ground for over a month.
Robbie: But, in those 16 hours, John had done 7600 pullups. And he says that if his hands had not been in such terrible shape, he knows he could have gone further. Much further. And that’s eaten at him ever since.
John: From the minute I stopped last time I regretted it. I knew I had more in me. I knew I trained harder than I performed. That regret has sat with me ever since.
Peter: So two attempts, two world records, and two athletes who both felt like they had unfinished business with the pull-up. Like, if their hands hadn’t given out, they could have done a lot more. And what’s kind of remarkable is that these two guys actually didn’t have any real rivalry going. They were in different parts of the country, unaware that the other was training on basically the same schedule, hitting the same numbers, and after that first attempt they both set their sights on a number that would have been pretty much unthinkable just two years earlier. 10,000 pull-ups. That would be 25% more than anyone had ever done. Was that even possible? More after this break.
[Advertisement]Robbie: So here we are, at the Earth Treks gym in Golden Colorado. John’s about to begin his attempt at 10,000 pull ups in 24 hours. A pair of volunteer judges sit at a table, ready to mark every rep. Another table has a stoner’s delight of munchies for John. Bits of bacon, mini hot-pockets, nutter butters and doritos. Despite the spread, John is meticulous about his diet, even weighing himself every twenty minutes to ensure he’s taking in enough fluids. That bacon is not an indulgence.
John: Bacon is everything I need for an ultra endurance event. Chop it up into very tiny bits and it's the fat it's the salt it's everything I feel like I need for fuel while at the same time I can just throw up my mouth and swallow it. You know this is a very singular event where I have to lift everything I consume.
Robbie: But the snacks are all in place. So with little fan fair, John begins.
Guinness World Records has a very specific definition of what qualifies as a pull-up: no jumping up to the bar, and no dropping off the bar until your arms are fully extended. During the pull, your arms must break 90 degrees, your chin must clear the bar, and your arms must fully extend again before the next pull. Legs straight. No kipping.
And here’s a key point — you don’t have to stay on the bar the whole time. In fact, John only does five pull-ups at a time, one set every 28 seconds.
John: Five is a no I don't have to count it so normal now that I just do them and let go at the bar and that interval is a pace that I can maintain for a really long time.
Robbie: There’s a couple of reasons for this.
John: It's extremely difficult to keep your hands held up over your head for so long. Even if you had incredible endurance and strength and you could pull sets of 10, the amount of time those extra few seconds that your hands are above your head, the blood is draining out. They start to tighten up very quickly.
Robbie: And tight hands can’t grip the bar. This is why John can bust out 900 pull-ups in an hour, 5 at a time, but the record for most pull-ups without dropping off the bar is a measly 238, by Jan Kares in 2017. Kares stayed on the bar for 34 minutes, taking plenty of rests where he hung from one arm while shaking blood back into the other. Simply put, staying on the bar has rapidly diminishing returns. But there’s also the danger of staying off the bar too long.
Andrew: So if you take too little rest you're not going to give your muscles enough time to recover. But if you take too long rest they can get cold essentially and you won't keep that pace. So I've kind of tried to find a happy medium between the two. Where my muscles stay at it like a constant warmness but also don't get too tired from taking too little rest.
Robbie: This is why both John and Andrew barely take any breaks during their attempts. Like clockwork, every 28 seconds John steps up to the bar, does 5 impossibly fast and smooth pull-ups, and then drops back down. He stretches a bit, maybe takes a bite of bacon, chats and laughs and sings a few lines of whatever 80’s rock anthem happens to be playing, then jumps back on.
He follows that routine for the first hour
John: I’m going a little faster than planned, feeling great
Robbie: And the second
John: Trying not to sing too much and settle in for long haul.
Robbie: And the third
John: Perfect, about as good as can be
Robbie: It’s not until he’s done 2000 pullups that he takes his first break: 90 seconds to go pee. And the pull-ups keep ticking by. 2500. 3000. 3500. At 6 hours in, he shows his first sign of being anything other than a machine.
John: I’m at a low point, feeling stiff. Back is tight. But I’m still in a good mood, I just need to push through it.
Robbie: John hasn’t slowed down, or broken his pace. But he thinks that he may have started the event a little dehydrated, which meant his calculations on fluid intake were a bit low, and his muscles tighter than they should be. A pain in his back has been steadily growing. By midnight, 4400 pullups in, he’s visibly in pain, taking slightly longer breaks, or doing sets of four instead of five.
John: I’m tired but I wanted to be, I don’t want to have anything left.
Robbie: And then, he hits 6000. He falls to the ground, and starts to sob quietly. One of his friends massages his back while he’s curled on the floor. She tells me it feels like there are golf balls where his lats should be.
John: Now it hurts. So now we’ve gotten to that other part where it starts getting emotional. We just passed 6000, I don’t know what time it is, about 4 in the morning. I don’t know how I feel actually, I hit a bit of a low point there. I’m just trying to crank em out.
Robbie: I ask him: what’s hurting?
John: Life. (laughs)
Robbie: With 6000 pullups under his belt and 12 hours to go, John was still on pace to hit 10,000. He was only 1600 pullups away from his previous record. But the way John was looking, it was going to be a brutal 12 hours.
Peter: Let’s pause right here to talk for just a second about what’s happening in John’s body. We already heard about metabolites and how they build up in the tissue, but what’s actually happening when a muscle gets tired, or stops working? Or maybe let’s start with an even more basic version of that question.
Pete (Interview): How do muscles work?
Alex: Wow. That's a tough one. Let let me try and answer within the bounds of my knowledge.
Peter: This is Alex Hutchinson again, and he says basically, muscle contractions are complex chemical reactions that result in the shortening of a muscle fiber. But muscle failure actually has less to do with that chemical reaction, and more to do with the brain.
Alex: You know the muscle doesn't decide whether to move it. It all depends on a signal from the brain and not just the signal that comes from the brain but how that signal is transmitted down the spinal cord and eventually to the muscle.
Peter: This connection between brain and muscle is key. Lifting weights, running long distances, jumping as high as you can, these all require different signals from the brain to different muscles in the body. Working out is like teaching the brain which signal to send, and how to send it.
Alex: So when you when when it when I say I'm tired I can't lift this weight anymore. There's a lot of places along that train of events that that could be responsible for my my fatigue or my inability to lift it it could be that the brain is sending a weaker signal. It could be that the signal is being lost or blocked or diluted on the route from the brain to the muscle or it could be that the muscle is getting the signal but it just can no longer the muscle fibers are no longer able to contract in the way that they were aware was who they could when I was fresh.
Peter: The scientists who study this stuff have two categories for fatigue. Central fatigue means the signals coming from the brain are getting diluted along the central nervous system. Peripheral fatigue means that the muscles themselves aren’t responding very well to those signals from the brain that are making it through.
Alex: And when I should I should jump to the punch line which is it's almost impossible to distinguish one from the other it's not like there is this clear neat line between oh that was the brain and that was the muscles because it turns out that the signals from your brain their ability to travel to your muscles are affected by what's going on in your muscles. Because there's all sorts of nerve signals passing by a back and forth between your muscles and your brain. So if you're really tired if your muscles are damaged they're singen sending signals back up through your central nervous system which help block signals from the brain saying don't send me any more messages to contract. I don't want a contract anymore.
Peter: So the sensation we know as feeling tired, is really our brain’s inability to tell our muscles what to do. And that’s partly because our muscles have started blocking signals from the brain, essentially throwing static on the line to keep from receiving messages they don’t want to get.
For example, that burning sensation that happens when you exercise. You probably know it as lactic acid, but that’s not actually what it is.
Alex: And it turns out that you don't actually have lactic acid in your muscles and that lactic acid doesn't actually stop your muscles from contracting but your muscles do have sensors that detect the metabolic byproducts of hard exercise.
Peter: Those byproducts are: lactate, which is a molecule related to lactic acid. Hydrogen ions, which are also part of lactic acid, and adenosine triphosphate or ATP, which is actually part of what the muscle uses as fuel.
Alex: And on their own none of those metabolites do anything bad to your muscles but you have sensors that detect when when levels of these metabolites are rising and if all three rise at the same time then that triggers an alarm bell that sends back a signal through these nerve fibers back to your brain which your brain interprets as severe discomfort. So your muscles are still at that point perfectly capable of contracting but they have detected worrying levels of of these metabolites are related to hard exercise and so they send back the signal that that that tries to change your behaviour. So it's not that your muscles are failing it they're trying to alter your behaviour and force you to slow down.
Peter: Curled up on the floor of the gym in Colorado, John’s muscles were very much trying to change his behavior. But he wasn’t up against any physical limits yet. 10,000 pull-ups is not an impossible number. We know this because, a month before Robbie shadowed John’s second attempt at the record, Andrew Shapiro DID 10,000 pull-ups. 10,020, actually, so that he’d still be above 10,000 even if the Guinness Book of World Records determined that some of them hadn’t counted. The record hadn’t yet been verified when we followed John, but unofficially, John’s old record was old news.
Andrew: There was a little portion of me that always thought my first attempt was a partial failure and that was just my obsessive like tendency to think of trying to push myself and push my limits because I didn't use a six hour portion of the 24 hours I had. They got thought like I could have broken ten thousand if I used that last six hours or something like that.
Peter: Andrew had started training again in late 2017, and found that in the year off, he’d actually lost ALL of his strength. He was in worse pull-up shape than the first time around.
Peter (Interview): Did you feel pressure to do this for some reason. Do it at all.
Andrew: The only pressure I felt was self self inflicted pressure guess they known was they my parents tried to talk me out of training so many times because they saw what it did to me last time they didn't wanna see me get injured or anything. But I mean I was smart about image hours like doing my stretching and stuff every day and my life is so like I could minimise or prevent injury. But they just like my mom especially she did not want me to do it.
Peter: The second time, his training regimen was largely the same. He worked out at night, and slowly increased the number of pullups. But this time he increased the pace to 12-a-minute—so two sets of six every minute—and he took rest days during the training cycle, which helped a lot. He got up to two hours at a time, then three. By August, he was doing 5.5 to 6 hours of 12 pull-ups a minute. That’s 4320 pullups. A couple days a week.
Peter: So in these training sessions you're approaching like a couple of the previous world records.
Andrew: Yeah I broke my six hour record a lot of times in training. And like because I'd when I hit five hours the record was broken with a 12 minute but yeah it was unofficial so…
Peter: On August 18th, 2018, he went for it again. And this time, he was in a gym, not a tent, with fans blowing on him, and music playing, and air conditioning.
And it’s worth noting that Andrew’s nutrition plan is totally different from John's. He just eats a big plate of pasta a few hours before the event and then drinks water when he’s thirsty, has a snack when he’s hungry, some caffeine when he’s sleepy.
Still, the first 7000 pull ups were no problem. But he wasn’t going for 7,000, he wanted ten.
Peter: So. So I mean it was sort of an arbitrary goal.
Andrew: Right.
Peter: The 10000 like what kept you going from her when did it start to hurt?
Andrew: Eight thousand I started noticing it like a lot people said I still look comfortable and I still look fresh around like seven thousand. Up until eight thousand. But after that like it just got exponentially harder and like the pain was awful like the mental side of it I never experienced that like just wanting to give up I've never had that before. Like yeah it was it was wild like I would have accepted death at that point. It was painful everywhere.
Peter: What kept you going then. Why. Why. I mean other than like the idea that you want 10000. What kept you going to make it through the attempt.
Andrew: I guess just looking back the past 10 months my life just like I'd put so much into it I'd sacrificed so much like during my whole freshman year I had a girlfriend and basically I'd say like one of the main issues in our relationship. We're not together now anymore.
Peter: Was it hard to explain to people why you're doing it. Like if they asked her if your girlfriend was like oh you're going to do five hours of pull ups instead of spend time with me. What did you say to her?
Andrew: No one understood. It was such an it was almost a pride thing but they not like against anyone else like against myself kind of like I just want to be my own them like they do the best that I can do and like because I didn't do that the first time. And my mom didn't understand. She said You already did it once. Why do you need to do it again? Same with my girlfriend she said. You did it once. Do you have a world record. You have you had a world record like what to do this? They come study or spend time with me. And I would I would just say like you don't get it to whoever asked me that. I'd try to explain it sometimes. But like it's not something like that sort of drive like some people have it some people don't
John: You keep going bc everyone is yelling at you. The pain is excruciating to push through.
Robbie: Back in the gym, John has slowed to a crawl. 10,000 is no longer an option. His back is locked up, and on fire. Worse, however, is the nausea. Room spinning, bucket-seeking, motivation-killing nausea.
Robbie (Interview) : I think I just saw you swear under your breath.
John: Yeah. I’m running out. I’m getting over this number, but that might be the end of my day. Once I get over 7600, it’ll just be a personal best at that point. It’ll be the one way I can get out of this without letting anyone down. I’m miserable, everything, back is really bad pain, I can calm my stomach down. It’s survival mode.
Robbie: At 6800 pull-ups, John drops off the bar, and limps out of the room. He tries to throw up, but can’t. He lies down on a climbing matt, and while his friends massage him and offer some encouragement, he passes out cold.
I’ll admit, I was fairly convinced at this point that the event was over, that John had pushed himself past his breaking point, and wouldn’t be getting off that mat for a long time. But then something pretty amazing happened. After about 30 minutes, he struggled to his feet, and hobbled to the shower.
John: and I remember leaving the locker room still feeling sick still feeling like I didn't know what I was going to do and at that point my back was still if you remember just locked it. Everything hurt. But when I walked out of the locker room you can clearly see the party going on my pull up bar just kind of in the middle of the whole event and the place was loud and I in that one hundred feet from the locker room to the entry way to the you know to the gym. I remember thinking, No we got this. This is this is time and then everything in those few minutes just shifted and I remember walking from that doorway to my pullup bar in a direct line. And I grabbed my gloves I put them on and I just started cranking them out again because something from the locker room to that to the bar said no it's time to get the job done. And that's when things pick back up. I thought that was the best the greatest moment of the night.
Robbie: John plowed through his final 800 pull-ups like it was the first hour of his attempt. 5 every 28. No breaks. Until he broke his own record. 7,601.
John: It’s Fucking awesome!
Robbie: And that was it. After that record breaking pullup, John was done. Over the next few hours he managed 69 more, often just one or two at a time.
John: And at that point it wasn't even mental anymore my body shut down. Yeah. People really wanted me to get one more so it would have been an even number and it took me three attempts to make that final pull.
Robbie: So John collapsed, and then, like the hero in a sports film, got back up and broke his own record. Once he did, he was completely done. So, what happened? Why could John just decide to keep going? Well, remember those signals cruising between brain and body, and how at a certain point, our muscles will start throwing static on the line? Well, your brain has to shout over the static. and the more motivated you are, the louder the signal from your brain. So pushing the limits of endurance becomes a kind of negotiation between mind and muscle. The muscles are trying to block out the brain, but if the brain has a very good reason to keep going they will. So hitting a number, or reaching a goal, becomes a kind of bargaining chip. if you get me just a little bit farther, the brain says, we'll stop.
Alex: If you're doing something like going for a pushup record then in some sense it's it's an open ended challenge. You're trying to go as long as you can and that's psychologically even tougher because it's not like I'm going to go for twenty six point two miles and then I'm there stop. It's I'm gonna go at this pace or at this effort until I can't. And so there's no finish line to be looking towards. And so you start to create artificial finish lines you know whether it's you know the 5000 mark or a round number or previous record. But it's not the same as having a finish line. So that creates an additional psychological challenge in that you know that if you succeed in doing the next rep that means you have to try the rep after that and if you succeed in that one you have to try again. You never get to the point where say oh God I did it I think this was the finish line.
Robbie (Interview): That was the crazy thing with John that I saw. Once he came back he was like OK. You know it I don't care I'm beating my old record even if it's just by one pull up and he just flew like that the last whatever thousand or something that it was. It was like it was his first set. But then this the pull up after his record breaking pullup like it was just a very literal wall.
Alex: I mean I think in that moment you have the ultimate encapsulation of what it means to be limited not by your brain or by your muscles but by yourself by your brain and muscles together. That's that. That's the nature of limits is that it's those two things coming together. And it wasn't just his brain or just his muscles that that that put up that wall. It's you know his his human self. The the the whole package and what he'd been through over the previous whatever how many hours it had been.
Robbie: John’s final number was 7670. A personal record. A moral victory. But 2,350 short of the number Andrew Shapiro hit a month before.
Peter: But then when I talked to him, I asked Andrew if he’d heard anything from Guinness.
Peter: So where do things stand right now with your ten thousand record.
Andrew: So this is something I actually have not told anyone except for really like my family and so try to help me out. But Guinness declined my record this time for the 10000. They said my technique was not 100 percent what they wanted.
Peter: For the record, Andrew says his technique never changed, and that he compared his pull ups to John Orth’s and they’re the exact same. But there’s nothing he can do. Guinness’s decisions are final.
Andrew: And so basically like they said I wasn't going down far enough every time with my pull ups and I tried to argue it for a solid week or so send emails back and forth and I'd say I was probably going down to one 75 degrees because they said like the rules for pull ups from Guinness are go down to like the natural straining in your arms. But there's a natural bend in my arms like when I'm walking my arms aren't completely straight you want a 180 degrees and I don't think they took that into account and like my technique from the first time to the second time. Exact same but it's just they're not I don't think they're completely reliable reliable company like their company. They're not experts on fitness. They hire other people to be experts on fitness. And those people can change have different opinions. And like I compared some my pull ups like some pulps John or did like we went down to the exact same point is 7600 pullup attempt and they counted those correctly but they discounted mine. So as of now the 10000 record is it's nothing.
Peter: Both John and Andrew started working on the pull up record at basically the same time, hit the same numbers, and now, they both say they’re done with the record.
Robbie (interview): Do you think you'll do this again?
John: I'm not sure at this point. I'm feeling like I probably won't staging a 24 hour event training for a 24 hour event is gruelling. It takes up a big chunk of your life. You know you're training 20 or 30 hours a week and it's hard on your family it's hard on your friends when they're pulling for you the whole time. So right now it's not in the cards. I want to train for a few other things. I've also thought about putting the word out seeing if anyone else wants to train for this and I'll help them yeah you know this is this is a game of how far can we push the line and if somebody wants to train for it I have the experience. Now I know what to do I know how to get somebody else across this line and I think it would be great to see if somebody would take me up on it. Yeah right now no takers but it'll be interesting to see if we can find one.
Robbie: In the end, the real limit on the 24 hour pull up record might simply be time.
John: We've now not pushed it to the human limit. We know that what we know is that we've moved it out of the realm of you know casual anyone who wants this now has to dedicate a portion of their life to it to do it. Anyone who could walk into this and break 7000 pull ups on a on a whim you know within with three to five months of training is Superman. This is gonna be the type of thing now that someone has to dedicate 20 to 30 hours a week for the better part of a year to even have a shot at.
Peter: So, if this pull up record stands, it’ll probably stand because people with the kind of time, strength, and let’s be honest, money, to break it, aren’t willing to sacrifice the rest of their lives. The real limit of the pull-up record, and human endurance itself, may simply be our desire to do other things. Be fully human.
Peter (interview) How many pull ups do you think it's possible for a person to do it like a human being in a day?
Andrew: It's always going to keep expanding. I think if you never stopped training and you didn't actually attempt to record and destroy your body you could potentially get there. I think you probably take like a decade or something of literally training everyday which I don't think anyone will ever do. Just for pullups. So if someone is crazy slash stupid enough to do that. And for whatever reason they want to I think it is possible. But Yeah, that's up to them.
Credits:
Peter: Since we first published this story in 2018 there have been many, many attempts at the pull-ups record. And it has been broken and rebroken a handful of times Australian Jaxon Italiano did 8,008, Kenta Adachi of Japan did 8,940. The record is currently held by Doug “Censor” Martin. A Twitch streamer and Call of Duty World Champion who did 9,250 pull ups in 24 hours last September.
This episode was written and produced by me, Peter Frick-Wright, and Robbie Carver, with music and sound design by Robbie.
Special thanks to Sweat Science columnist Alex Hutchinson. His book is Endure: The Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. And he has a new book coming this spring.
Thanks to Laura Krantz, Matt Fidler, and Paul Karolyi for recording help.
The Outside Podcast is made possible by our Outside+ members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at Outsideonline.com/podplus.
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