When University of Alaska-Anchorage student Andy Liebner decided to try making the Guinness Book of World Records, he didn't go for something a little more standard, like the most freethrows in a minute, or Alaska-oriented, like scaling Mt. McKinley without oxygen. To get him in the listings, they'll have to make a brand-new category: Liebner designed and built what should soon be known as the world's largest human hamster wheel, which measures 15 feet standing upright.
"I thought it would be a healthy and nature-friendly treadmill," Liebner, a physical education major, said. "I made all the dimensions and things from a math class, so I figured I might as well try to make use of it somehow. I just wanted to make a treadmill to see if I could do it, and then I got looking in the Guinness Book of Records to see what the largest one was, and there wasn't one on record. So I just tried to build it as big as I could."
"Anybody who's really heard about it, they didn't think that we were actually going to follow through with building it, they didn't believe that it was gonna work, that the stand would hold, that it would even stand evenly," he said. "But I just kept a really high level of optimism and a positive attitude toward everything, and just bounced off their negativity and proved everyone wrong."
Watch video of the wheel in action here.