Man Earns Guinness Record for Being Buried in Snow

It's not completely clear why anyone would want to subject themselves to bodily discomfort just to earn a world record, but ... sometimes records are just waiting to be broken. That's what spurred Elias Meyer, a Swiss competitive powerlifter, to "put his cold endurance to the test," as UPI puts it, and try for the Guinness record for the longest time spent in direct full body contact with snow. Per a release issued Monday confirming the record, Meyer discovered that the longest anyone had lasted during such a feat was in 2022, when Poland's Valerjan Romanovski stuck it out for 1 hour, 45 minutes, and 2 seconds.

That's why Meyer set out into the ice and snow of Switzerland's Andermatt on April 2 of last year. Wearing only a pair of swim trunks, he allowed himself to be buried by shovelfuls of snow until all that could be seen of him was "his face and a peek of his mustache," in the service of proving that the "body is capable of incredible things," per the release. As he tried to break the record, Meyer had an emergency medical team monitoring him to look out for hypothermia or other serious issues.

And break the record Meyer did, managing 2 hours and 7 seconds submerged in the iciness before he was yanked out (see a sped-up time-lapse video here). The cold itself was challenging, but Meyer says that even worse was the weight of the snow. "The heavy snow pressed me down, causing my shoulders and elbows to ache," he wrote on Instagram shortly after completing his chilly task. "Perhaps you also feel a sharp ice cube against your back." He said he would've stayed even longer in the snow, but he had to get home that day. (More Guinness World Records stories.)