The balloons were no match for my feet… other than it took two tries to break this record. Setup is time -consuming so it’s good that the major mishap that required me to restart the attempt happened early in the first attempt and we only had to replace the first dozen balloons or so.

The record was for the fastest time to pop 100 balloons with the feet. The balloons were required to be in a single straight line and only the bare feet could be used to pop them. The balloons were also required to have a minimum 20 cm diameter (~8 inches).

Before the attempt, I spoke to the youth group about the power of having a growth mindset and some of the failures and setbacks I’ve faced in life and how I overcame some of them.

I thankfully had plenty of help blowing up balloons and taping them to the floor since it takes a lot of time. Unfortunately, I did most of the taping and didn’t do a very good job (ok, so the tape was pretty weak). That led to the first big mishap on the first official attempt. About 10 balloons in one didn’t pop and bounced out of the line. I tried to step on it while it was in the air and that just bounced it off the ground and even higher into the air. I did it again with an even worse result. I had the frame of mind to stop there, setup the line again replacing only the first dozen balloons, and have another layer of tape added to all 100 balloons. It almost worked. On the second try I made it 80% of the way through before a balloon bounced off the line. I let it settle on the ground before trying to step on it, poped it that time, and raced back to the line to complete the attempt.

I wasn’t sure if I’d done it. The first time I tried to break the record for the fastest time to burst 200 balloons with a nail, I had balloons coming off the wall and wasted too much time trying to pop them and came up a few seconds slow. Fortunately, this time I broke the record of 29.7 seconds with a run of 23.69 seconds.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the attempt!