In no particular order, here are some of the toughest people around!
8 - Mr A. B.
If you’re into fitness or have friends who are, you’ve probably heard about some of
the extreme diet routines that people actually go through. But back in 1965, a man underwent
the most hard-core diet routine ever. He fasted. Now, fasting isn’t really something that
new. It’s how long he did it that’s amazing. This man, whose identity remains a mystery
to everyone except to himself and the scientific team performing the experiment on him, didn’t
eat any food for guess how long?! OVER a year!! He fasted for 382 days! When the experiment
started, the 27-year-old man suffered from morbid obesity. Mr. A. B., the only name provided
by the team of researchers afterward, willingly subjected himself to total starvation. During
his fast, the doctors only gave him multivitamins and a couple tablespoons of yeast every single
day to prevent critical nutrient deficiencies, but other than that, he didn't consume any
food whatsoever! The researchers check his blood samples every week in order to keep
track of his vitals. Months passed and Mr. A B remained healthy. Of course, the primary
goal of Mr. A B was to reduce weight, and obviously, he achieved that. In the beginning,
he weighed 456 pounds. After 382 days, Mr. A. B. had reduced his body weight to roughly
180 pounds! The most amazing part? He didn’t end up with any skin folds like other obese
people losing a massive amount of weight rapidly, something that researchers attributed to his
fasting.
7 - Chris Gursky Sometimes, luck simply isn’t on our side.
Yet, our survival instinct has a way of kicking in when we most need it. This is exactly what
happened to Chris Gursky when he went on vacation to Switzerland. At one point during his vacation,
Chris decided to go hang gliding through the skies. It’s Switzerland, after all, and
the landscape is supposed to be breathtaking. Little did he know, he was about to work out
his arms to the max. When Chris and the pilot took off, Chris quickly realized that something
wasn’t quite right. It turned out that the hang glider pilot had forgotten to attach
Chris to the glider! Seriously, is there anything more important to do than making sure everyone
is attached?! The only choice they both had was to try and land as soon as possible before
Chris fell to the ground. The closest area they could land was over 1500 meters away.
In the video, anyone can see how long Chris had to hold on with his left arm. Chris himself
joked afterward how his left hand had left an imprint in the metal bar. Chris ended up
holding on for an agonizing 2 minutes and 14 seconds.
When they landed, Chris hit the ground at 45 mph. He amazingly still held on even after
tearing his left bicep tendon! He also had to have surgery on his broken right wrist.
Chris says he wants to go gliding again, as his first time didn’t quite uh…….go
according to plan.
6 - David Goggins David Goggins’s story will certainly make
you believe in the power of mind over matter. In 2005, Goggins attempted to enter the Badwater-135
Ultramarathon for a fundraiser. However, he was told by organizers that he needed to enter
another ultramarathon first, as the Badwater is an invitation only event. So what’d he
do? He entered the San Diego One Day race in order to qualify. Did we mention that Goggins
had NEVER even ran a marathon before? The San Diego One Day was the first ultra-marathon
for this 240-pound Navy SEAL. Runners had to complete a 100-mile circuit to finish the
race. It wasn’t easy, but Goggins was confident he could make it. Except that after running
70 miles, his body apparently decided that no, he couldn’t do it after all. Around
the 70-mile mark, his kidneys failed! And oh yeah, by then, all the small bones in his
feet had broken, and he was suffering dual stress fractures in his lower legs. Pretty
sure 99.9% of the population would have quit wayyyyy before this! The shin splints were
so bad that at one point he wrapped his ankles in compression tape just to try and stave
off the pain. In a later interview, Goggins said that the San Diego race was undoubtedly
the worst pain he’d ever been in and that he thought he was on the brink of breath.
That’s a lot coming from the only person to have completed Navy SEAL training, Army
Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. But Goggins didn’t
give up. He used two mental strategies that helped him during his military training: visualization
and self-talk. Visualization is seeing yourself where you want to be until the mind convinces
itself that the image is real, so it becomes real. Self-talk is reminding yourself that
you can achieve your goals. He completed the final 30 miles nonstop, without calling for
a doctor, or pausing for even a small break!
5 - Tommy Wiseau
We’ve all watched some pretty awful movies. Except there are bad movies and there are
bad-so-bad-please-make-it-stop movies. And The Room is one of the latter. Tommy Wiseau
REALLLY wanted to be in a movie. However, Hollywood agents kept rejecting Wiseau despite
numerous auditions. So he decided to make his own movie, without really knowing how.
Released in 2003, The Room is the end result of a man who decided to take matter into his
own hands.
Tommy Wiseau wrote, produced, directed and starred in the movie, The Room. This movie
is as an ode to Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”, although anyone
would agree that the final cut is anything but. Very long scenes with plots to nowhere
made the movie so bad that it was hilarious, and because it was THAT bad, that made a ton
of people watch it and make it a cult film!
20 years later, this movie is still being screened frequently. The Room has gathered
a fandom that obsesses over the details. Fans go to screenings in full costume, and do quirky
things such as throw spoons whenever spoons appear on screen. The great success of The
Room is spurred by the great mystery surrounding it. Wiseau, a genius for some people, still
claims that this movie is his masterpiece. No one knows where exactly he got the millions
of dollars to produce the movie, or where he even really is from. But hey. You have
to give props to the man that created his own movie when Hollywood wouldn’t let him
in!
4 - Charles Joughin
Charles Joughin was a survivor of perhaps the most famous maritime disaster of all time:
the sinking of the Titanic. So how did he survive? No, he didn’t make it on a lifeboat!
Joughin was a trained from an early age to be a ship’s cook. After he got a job stocking
the Titanic for her maiden voyage, Joughin was eventually offered a post as the head
baker. The pay was good, and the ship was supposedly the safest ever, right? What could
possibly go wrong? Spoiler alert: icebergs!
We have a hunch that we don’t need to retell the story here. As the iceberg began to sink
the ship, Joughin quickly made it to the main deck and helped people get into the lifeboats.
He even ran back to the ship in order to find more passengers. When it was his turn to get
into a lifeboat, he gave up his seat to another passenger. After the last lifeboat was lowered,
Joughin headed below deck and did what anyone who’s resigned to a water fate would do:
he got hammered!
One thing the Titanic had going for it is that it was very well stocked: official records
state that the ship left port with fifteen hundred bottles of wine, fifteen thousand
bottles of champagne, 20,000 bottles of beer, and hundreds of cases of liquor! So Joughin
drank, drank, drank, and then drank some more for good measure. According to his own testimony,
he kept paddling and treading water for about two hours. He also admitted to hardly feeling
the cold, most likely thanks to the alcohol he had imbibed. However, interestingly enough,
large quantities of alcohol generally INCREASES the risk of hypothermia! Somehow someway,
he was one of the very very few people who survived in the water. Was it because of alcohol
or his will to survive? Let us know in the comments!
3 - Troy Hurtubise
Troy Hurtubise was a man who was obsessed with creating the ultimate body armor, even
if no one wanted it. He’ll be remembered as the man who built a grizzly-proof suit.
He got the idea in his mind that he needed to build a grizzly-proof suit after he had
a rather violent encounter with a grizzly when he was just a teenager. Now, he came
out alive, but many people don’t. So Hurtubise decided that he would be ready if he ever
encountered another grizzly.
Being the son of an anthropologist, Hurtubise was used to being outdoors exploring the world.
So when he decided to build the suit, he went looking everywhere for materials. Built from
various metals, plastics, airbags, and even a material of his own creation, the suit was
named “Ursus Mark VI”. It’s starting to sound eerily like the plot of Iron Man,
right?
Hurtubise tested the suit several times in different environments. For example, Hurtubise
had three-ton trucks drive into him at 50 kilometers an hour 18 times in a row, and
he also got a bunch of bikers to hit him with baseball bats, all to prove the suit’s strength
and resilience. Ultimately, Hurtubise never tested his suit in front of a real.
2 - Jordan Grahm
Jordan Grahm is one of many Americans who suffered from morbid obesity. When he was
a child, he was always on the chubby side of the spectrum, but nothing that would worry
a doctor. Yet when his mother died, Jordan fell down an emotional and physical spiral
which resulted in a weight gain he’d never experienced before.
In late 2007, Jordan weighed nearly 400 lbs and wore size XXXL shirts and size 48 pants.
You get the picture. Obviously, doctors told him he wouldn’t make it much longer if he
didn’t change his lifestyle, but Jordan paid them no mind. That was until he was in
a car crash. When he was taken to the hospital and had to get an MRI, he could barely fit
in the machine. Doctors suggested that he go to other facilities more suited to his
physical condition, and that was Jordan’s turning point. He decided he wanted to change
his body, and to do that, he had to change his life.
With a severe shoulder injury caused by the car accident, many movements hurt his upper
body. Still, Jordan soldiered on. He started walking a mile per day with his dog. It may
not sound like much, but he slowly and surely increased the length and speed of his walks
until he was running around the neighborhood. After losing his first 100 pound by walking
and running alone, he joined a gym. Jordan ultimately lost 160 pounds, and maintains
a healthy 220 pounds! Jordan says that the mind is so much more powerful than many people
give it credit for. That’s something we’re not going to disagree with!
1 - Cha Sa Soon
There’s a fine line between determination and obsession, and we’ll let you guys decide
on this one here. Cha Sa Soon was a lady on a mission. She became an unlikely national
Korean celebrity by passing her driver’s test. And no, it’s not because she’s especially
old for a license. But it’s because this Korean grandma took the test NINE HUNDRED
AND FORTY NINE times before she was finally able to pass!
After passing her exam, she became an inspiration to all Koreans, as Koreans highly value perseverance
and determination. In April 2005, she started taking the test once a day, five days a week.
Although after failing daily during the week for three years and her pace slowed a bit,
she never stopped trying. She still took the test twice a week until she finally passed.
The instructors at the driving school she had attended were all cheering for her, and
they gave her a gigantic bouquet of flowers when she FINALLY got her license.
Ms. Cha wasn’t having trouble with the actual driving skill test, thank goodness, but she
was having trouble with the written part. The instructors said that it was a very difficult
test for Ms. Cha because she struggled with the terminology. She could read and write
phonetically, but still, the technical words escaped her grasp. She says she studied every
day for over an hour in order to reach her goal, just as she studied hard when she wanted
to get her hairdresser license.
After she got her license, Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group started an online campaign asking people
to congratulate Ms. Cha, and soon after, asked her to make an appearance on a commercial.
Here’s what’s next!