Incredible Feats of Ironing Prowess

No, seriously.

If you associate ironing with words like boring, routine, or housework, you haven't been keeping up on world news. Ironing, the most domestic of all chores, has become part of the extreme sports craze. And if deep-sea or mountain top ironing sounds too challenging, maybe you can develop the endurance to beat the world record for continuous ironing.

Extreme ironing

An amateur rock climber from Leicester, UK, invented extreme ironing in the summer of 1997. The challenge is to take an iron and ironing board and do your ironing under the most difficult physical conditions. The sport is ruled over by the Extreme Ironing Bureau, and an Extreme Ironing World Championship was held in Munich in 2002.

Extreme ironing has yet to hit the mainstream, but regular updates of extreme ironing world records can be found at www.extremeironing.com. Extreme ironing records tend to focus on ironing locations. For example, the underwater ironing record was set in August of 2006 by Louise Trewavas, who performed her ironing at a depth of 452 feet at a Red Sea resort in Dahab.

Ironing endurance record

Ironing, as we all know, is difficult enough on land, but no one has displayed the ironing endurance of Guinness World Record ironist Suresh Joachim. Joachim is a Canadian who has broken over 30 world records as a means to raise money for underprivileged children.

Joachim's records focus on endurance, such as the consecutive 69 hours and seven minutes he spent watching television, or the 75 hours he spent in a rocking chair. Joachim set his ironing world record at The Bay Court shopping mall in Mississauga, Ontario, in September of 2005, ironing from 8AM Thursday morning to 3:05PM Saturday, a total of 55 hours and five minutes. Joachim's ironing marathon beat the previous ironing endurance record by over 15 hours.