Can you do a situp? Quest Fitness Center and Neartown Murray, a nonprofit that supports
addiction recovery efforts, are partnering up to try to break the Guinness World Record for the most people doing situps simultaneously at the same spot.
Quest Fitness Center owner Tung Dinh, a martial arts master and a 13-year veteran of the Kentucky Army National Guard, said that the effort is inspired by his admiration of veterans, like the late Sen. John McCain.
“Starting [in] the year 2000 I saw a clip from when Senator McCain visited Hanoi in Vietnam and to celebrate his 25 anniversary of his service in Vietnam when he was shot down and imprisoned,” said Dinh, a native of Vietnam. “So then I said, maybe I need to do something to acknowledge that.”
It’s not the first time Dinh’s paid tribute through feats of athleticism. In 2000, Dinh decided to run 25 hours to honor the 25 years since the fall of Saigon. To do so, he said he ran four miles an hour over the course of a little more than a day for a total of 100 miles – striding from Roy Stewart Stadium in Murray to Benton and back.
Dinh made the switch from feats of miles on foot to situps after health issues and weather impeded his progress – and, he said, put his life at risk.
“I started running from 8 o’clock in the morning until 9 o’clock the next [evening] … [when] I finished, I thought I might die,” said Dinh. “So I said, ‘No, I'm not gonna do that anymore.’ So I would do situps because you can't control the weather and the highways.”
In 2005, he did 30 hours of situps. In 2010, he did them for 35 hours in front of the U.S. Capitol building.
Dinh’s aspirational fitness event is set for Saturday, May 3, at Roy Stewart Stadium in Murray. Saturday also marks National Fitness Day in the U.S.
Dinh said that 2,500 people doing one minute of situps would total around 33,500, which he hopes to add to his own situp total from the week before the event – an anticipated 25,000 – to match the number of names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington D.C.: 58,500.
Originally, though, Dinh was going to take on the task by himself.
“I was planning to do all 58,500 situps to break the record to represent every name on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall. But then my community that we put together were concerned I might die,” Dinh said. “They said, ‘so, why don't you just do about 25,000 and let us come in and share the freedom and struggle to help capture this world record.”
Dinh said the current record, set in 2016 in Australia, is 2,005 people doing situps at one setting.
Neartown Murray executive director Jereme Rose said the event is a call to action, but also an opportunity to connect as a community.
“There's division and all these things that go on around us, but we can all come together and know that no matter what we think freedom is to us, no matter which side we're on, any of that … freedom's freedom to us,” Rose said. “The world record is actually for the number of people doing situps together at one time. It doesn't have anything to do with the number of situps that we do. It's just strictly the number of people that are doing situps at one time.”
The event is expected to run from 9 to 11 a.m. on Saturday at Roy Stewart Stadium. Free registration is available through EventBrite, though there is an added cost for a commemorative shirt. More information is available through the Quest Fitness Center facebook page.
