If you have to ride the New York City subway every morning, you’ll know that it’s a full-contact sport punctuated by loud public arguments and, occasionally, vomit on the floor. When you finally get off at your stop, you feel like you’ve lived 1,000 lives.
Now, imagine pairing up with a friend and spending 23 nonstop hours riding on the subway, making every single stop—468 in total—in pursuit of a new world record. That’s what friends Chris Solarz and Matt Ferrisi did back in 2009, with an official time of 22:52:36—a record the Guinness folks verified the following year. (Watch a video on their historic run here.)
But it was all for naught. The “Subway Challenge,” as it’s known, has since been re-broken multiple times. The latest world-record holder? Matthew Ahn, who performed the ungodly feat first in 2015 at 21:49:35, only to have the record nullified, because the 7 train was extended. But Ahn didn’t stop there; he followed it up with all 24 lines and 469 stops this past summer with a time of 21:28:14, setting a new world record in the process.
Read about the Subway Challenge’s origins here. Watch a video of Ahn’s record-breaking subway run below.
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