The Guinness Book and the Specific Embarrassment of Not Being in It

Since I was a kid I’ve believed, on some level, that I would end up in the Guinness Book of Records. Not for anything noble. Maybe the longest continuous gaming session ever documented. Maybe the most hours logged in a single open-world game before abandoning it. Maybe the most rewatches of some specific film that no one else cared enough about to compete on. The book always made it seem achievable—like if you just committed hard enough to something ridiculous, a category existed somewhere with your name on it.

Duracell got in. A remote-controlled Lightning McQueen—the one from Cars, manufactured by Dickie Toys—ran on a circuit in Budapest for twenty-four hours straight, covering 186 kilometers over 3,200 laps, powered by six of their batteries. The previous record was 106 kilometers. They broke it at thirteen hours and twenty minutes and kept going. Four sets of batteries for the entire run. A Guinness adjudicator stood there and watched the whole thing. That person had career choices to make and this is where they led.

The battery marketing writes itself and I’m not going to help it along further. What I actually find funny is the category itself: greatest distance covered by a remote-controlled toy in twenty-four hours. Someone decided this was a record worth enshrining. Someone drove to Hungary with a Lightning McQueen. An official measured the laps. That chain of decisions is its own kind of dedication.

The bunny and a cartoon race car are in the book. I’m still not. Which means either I haven’t committed hard enough to my ridiculous thing, or my ridiculous things are too ordinary to constitute a superlative. Probably both. The bar, it turns out, is higher than it looks from childhood.