Breaking World Records
Many people in the world have a desire to break world records. They want to improve on something another human being has done before them. They try to do all sorts of things humanly possible and then enjoy it thoroughly when they achieve them. Why do people have this innate desire to do something better or faster than someone else. It seems that people will keep setting and then breaking each others' world records for the foreseeable future.
There has to be a limit to how good we can get, to how fast a human being can actually be and to how strong we can become. At some point in the future, we are going to reach a limit that cannot be crossed and the world records will stop. At the moment though, there seems to be no end in sight to how many records we humans can break. Just look at any Olympic Games and the last one is a good example. More than 40 world records were broken in the last Olympic Games alone. We as a race seem to be getting better at everything we do.
If we look at pure sports in the Olympics, an interesting thing comes to light. More world records are broken in certain sports than in others. Take for example swimming, so many records were broken that it started to become meaningless to break a swimming record. It seems everyone who entered an Olympic pool to compete ended up breaking a record of some kind. On the opposite side of this scale is track and field where so few world records are broken that when someone like Usain Bolt comes along, it is seen as a miracle.
People who are not athletes also try their level best to break world records and the stranger the record that they are out to break, the better. There have been world records broken for a guy who had the most cockroaches poured into a glass container with him, longest French kiss, most head spins, highest vocal note by a man and a guy who rolled an orange around by his nose for the longest distance. Why are people willing to do these kinds of things and is there something that is a part of us that compels us to try and break records.
Most people aim to break records because they want to be recognised for it or for satisfying themselves. At the same time though there are those people who want to do something because deep down they feel inadequate and so try to make up for the fact by trying to break a world record. Another reason that people try to break world records could be because there is a spirit of competition inside us all. We all have this competitive streak a very long time ago when we had to survive and beat our fellow cavemen for food. That has probably survived in us and it comes out when we try to do things like breaking records and trying to outdo each other. This could also be a reason why so many people enjoy watching and playing sports; that’s the spirit of competition that we all feel inside of us.
When it comes to breaking records, those athletes that have the desire and motivation to achieve their dreams seem to be the ones that come out on top every time. They go to great lengths to be the best at what they do and it shows when they can claim their place on the podium having beaten a world record.
Maybe we will reach a point when there are just some world records we cannot beat physically. As species, maybe one day we will find that no matter how hard we train or how much we try, no more world records will fall. When that time comes we will probably invent some other way to show our competitive nature and find ways to try and better one another. Until then though; the world records will keep on falling and being broken.
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