How it all began…

To be honest, this whole thing started off as a joke.

I was helping the school in a trivia hunt last spring when a student needed help finding the answer for a question asking about the record for running up the Empire State Building. I told him to look at the Guinness Book of World Records. He comes back with the book and points out the picture of the record holder. Right next to the picture of that record was a picture of a guy holding a basketball and it said, “World Record holder for running a marathon while dribbling a basketball: 4 hours 30 minutes 29 seconds.” Another teacher saw it too and jokingly asked, “Can you beat that?” I replied, with, “Easily. Being a running point guard, ambidextrous when it comes to dribbling, and being a distance runner, I can break it.” We left it at that. Later that evening, the teacher came over to have dinner with my roommate and myself. At dinner, she brought up the record and we all joked around about me breaking the record. They dared me to sign up, so I got my laptop and signed up on the website in the middle of dinner. I then printed out the application forms and signed them and mailed them that night. We all thought it was still a joke because we figured they had thousands of record attempt requests, and would not get back to me.

Then, in the middle of summer, as I was traveling in Peru, I checked my email and there was a message from Guinness telling me that I was approved to attempt to break the record. I laughed and kept on with my trip. It was not until my second leg of my travels, while I was in South Africa with a friend that we got to talking about the approval. It was here that it hit me and I made the decision to actually go through with it. Through our talks, I decided that if I was going to put my body through so much pain, I might as well do it for a good cause.

When I arrived home from my vacation, I immediately called my good friend Chris Gaines, who is a personal trainer and strength and conditioning coach for Stanford Rugby, and explained my challenge. I wanted a few tips to help me in my training. When he heard I wanted to do it to raise money for a good cause, he was all in. We worked together and developed a precise and intense workout plan for this record attempt, looking at different components of training. After realizing I could do it, I contacted Christine Solari (director of Stanford College Prep) with an idea to raise money. After making sure I was not joking, we set up a meeting and talked about it further. Little by little, the training and campaign started developing. We picked up more team members for the campaign to help out, and now, we have officially developed “Upward Bounce.”

After we had already established Upward Bounce, I received word that the record was lowered to 3 hours 48 minutes 23 seconds. While making this more of a challenge, I still believe I can break it and we have continued to train hard to prepare even more for this attempt.