About


Hello everybody.

Thanks for taking the time to look through my website. For those who don't know me, this section will tell you a little bit about myself, about where I've come from and about my future plans. For a lot of people who do know me, you'll be finding some things out for the first time.

I was 23 years old when I’d finally saved enough money to go travelling. I’d never left the UK before. My mum raised me and my three siblings from when I was just one year old and we had the same holiday every year in a caravan in Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire.
Escaping the UK was something I’d dreamt of for the last six years. I’d recently finished studying to become a personal trainer at college and it felt like the right time to do it before settling into a career.
My first stop was Thailand. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I didn’t find what I was looking for there. I met a girl from Australia and discussed going there instead. She warned me that I couldn’t escape myself and that if I was unhappy in Thailand, I may be unhappy somewhere else. I booked a flight to Australia the next day!
I spent the first few weeks staying in hostels in and around Perth, having fun with the other backpackers but basically doing exactly what I could have been doing back home. And you know what they say? What’s the point in that?

Browsing through my Lonely Planet travel guide, I read an article about the Bibbulmun Track; a 600 mile trek along the south-west corner of Western Australia’s coastline and through hundreds of miles of forests. ‘Why not?’ I thought. That same day I took a walk down to the Bibbulman Track headquarters in Perth. After gaining a little knowledge on what to carry and what to expect I decided I’d just go for it. About a week later I found myself stood at the southern terminus of the trail in Albany with my great aunty Dorothy waving me off. After just one month of walking an average of 20 miles a day, I was back in Perth to claim my 'End to End' certificate.
Upon returning to the UK, I quickly became restless. I was browsing through the travel books in my local library when I found a book on cycling the length of the UK from Land’s End to John o’Groats. I had only just started back at work but asked if I could book two weeks off for the trip and set about planning it. Within two months, I was on the start line and after eleven days, most of that suffering from excruciating knee pain, I had finished.
The travel bug had bitten me big time. It wasn’t long before I’d found my next adventure. An article about a couple who circumnavigated the world by motorcycle in just 19 days got my attention. I wondered whether it had been done on a bicycle and so sent off my very first application to Guinness World Records.  I knew I'd need to get even fitter so switched jobs to working as a refuse collector so that I could earn money while training; a job I still do 12 years later. Due to a combination of struggling with planning, finances and not having the nerve to just go for it, my dream never did come to fruition. If anybody had told me that it would take me over 7 years before I completed another adventure, I would surely have given up. However, adventure is in my blood and I didn’t give up. In 2011, after seven years and thousands of pounds wasted on numerous aborted attempts, I finally set a new Guinness World Record by cycling between Europe’s southernmost and northernmost geographical points, Tarifa, Spain and North Cape, Norway. The following year I broke one for crossing the USA from north to south and west to east. I have been setting records every year since. 

So, why the fascination with Guinness World Records? To begin with, I think this is just something that has blossomed out of something I loved doing. Over the years, I have registered over two hundred new categories with Guinness World Records so see this as a long lasting career. It's my dream to become one of the worlds most accomplished record breaking adventurers; something I hope to achieve with a few more years of hard work. I've discovered in the past that I haven't enjoyed travelling alone just for the sake of travelling. I have quickly become bored and lonely and wound up sat in coffee shops and watching nearly every movie at the cinema. That's just the way I am. I've found that I thrive most when I combine travel, adventure and a physical challenge. There's also another difference I've discovered with breaking records. They don't allow you to take time out when the going gets tough or to skip long, monotonous sections and jump on a train and it's these differences that have made some of these journeys more interesting for me. 

There are other reasons for attempting records which I won't deny. There's the show off factor of course. They're a way of actually proving that you completed something and a lasting legacy. I've never felt I'm the best storyteller and always knew I'd have to achieve so much more than those who's books I'd read before I would contemplate writing one. Just like a lot of people who take this up full-time, I hope to make a living from it by becoming a public speaker and inspiring others to break away from bad habits and work hard towards setting and achieving goals. One of the biggest obstacles I overcame in life was crippling shyness. I got on fairly well at primary school until the age of 11 and was a fairly confident kid with male and female friends. Being raised as a Catholic, I was the only kid in my year to go to a Catholic school so was seperated from all my friends. I lost all my confidence and never settled very well into secondary school. I don't remember having a single conversation with any girl and just got progressively left behind. By the age of 14, I couldn't stand it any more and barely went into school for the last two years. For anybody who has suffered shyness, they'll relate to being terrified of eating in public as you think people are watching you. I used to lock myself in the only toilet at school where nobody could peer under or over the top of the door to eat my lunch. I wouldn't even go to English and maths lessons in fear of being targeted by the teacher to explain something or work out a sum. I left school straight after my exams and started work full-time in a sports shop and working nights as a glass collector. 

For the next six years, my life spiralled out of control. By the time I was 17, I had started using recreational drugs and at the age of 18 had been convicted of my first crime for theft from my employer and commiting fraud. As a supervisor, I had been in a position of trust and so was given 180 hours community service and a fine. I shrugged it off as bad luck as somebody I knew had reported me. For the next few years, I carried on shoplifting. I hold my hands up and admit these were my own choices and not down to peer pressure or hanging with the wrong crowd. I had a good upbringing and went to a good school. I started taking drugs for no reason other than that I wanted to see what they were like. At some time or other, I had tried almost everything going from smoking weed, taking ecstasy, coke, inhaling gas and even injecting heroin on one occasion. I can go an entire year now without drinking more than a dozen alcoholic drinks but it's hard to believe there was a time in my life when I had bottles of spirits on my bedside cabinet and I would smoke a joint just before sleeping and again when waking up.  I'd started stealing out of boredom and wanting something exciting in my life. It wasn't long before I discovered I was pretty good at it.  Not content with getting away with taking a t-shirt from a sports shop, I progressed to stealing hundreds of pounds worth of designer clothes at a time. In a twisted way, it made me feel like I'd achieved something and it became an addiction. I put the same amount of thought into that as I do planning adventures now. I even had the audacity to walk back into a supermarket after filling a holdall with food, asking the security guard if he could check the cameras as somebody had stolen a wheel off my bicycle. The irony! In the end, I realised that I was stealing for the thrill and not out of necessity. I had a job and was studying at college at the time. In the end, I began to hate my life and hate who I was. I'd decided at 22, after college, that I had to do something fulfilling with my life and so decided I would save up to go travelling. I still had an unspent conviction and so handed myself in to the National Probation Service, to their bemusement, to complete 240 hours community service for ABH.  I read a lot of self help books and also gained a lot of confidence from travelling and meeting other like minded people. 

Travelling and completing tough challenges is what really broke me out of all my previous bad habits and set me on a new path. I guess the addiction of breaking records has replaced my old addictions but this is hopefully a lot more inspiring and feels a hell of a lot better. I'm now in the best position of my life to get out there and achieve something truly great and I'm not going to squander any more of my time. Some records I have planned include crossing each of the worlds continents and circumnavigating the world as well as attempting records on water, mountain and in the air. Here's to great adventures and to hopefully get some people out there to change their lives for the better.


Glen Burmeister.