At one time, Paul Budline ’72 held the Muhlenberg school record for the high jump — his jump of 6 feet, 5 inches is still good for eighth on the college’s all-time list. And now, he holds the Guinness World Record for “oldest person to perform a handstand (male).”
“I always thought how much fun [it would be to] be in the Guinness Book of World Records,” says Budline, 74, who studied economics at Muhlenberg and who still works as a freelance video editor. “We would have a hard copy of it and look up goofy things. This one’s not quite so goofy. It’s not like, you know, doing a handstand while smoking marijuana.”
“I always thought how much fun [it would be to] be in the Guinness Book of World Records … We would have a hard copy of it and look up goofy things.”
Decades of training supported this record attempt: When he was younger, Budline was a marathoner, and for the past 20 or 30 years, his daily routine has included a few handstands, 20 minutes of weight training, and riding the stationary bike on the highest resistance for 40 minutes.
“I’ve been a workout fanatic for forever,” says Budline, a familiar face at his hometown gym in Princeton, New Jersey. “I do work out extraordinarily hard. I watch other people, and nobody’s working quite as hard as I am, for better or for worse.”
After contacting Guinness World Records, Budline got a packet containing the specifics of the record attempt: He’d need to hold the handstand steadily for at least 15 seconds, and he would need to supply photographs, video, and the signed testimony of three witnesses as evidence. Fortunately, his gym community was happy to step up, and within a few days of doing his record-breaking handstand (on May 5) and submitting the evidence, he was officially a world record holder.
Budline’s record pursuits are over for now — “unless there’s a record for lowest GPA to graduate from Muhlenberg, I don’t think I would qualify for anything else,” he jokes — but his inversions are not.
“Part of my day is starting with that handstand,” he says, “and as long as I can do it, I’m going to do it.”
The softball field ceremony was held on campus as part of Alumni Weekend, while the ceremony for the baseball field, a renovated Bicentennial Park in south Allentown, was held on October 19.
