In its 76-year history, the International Jugglers Association had only given out 16 lifetime memberships honoring a lifetime of service to juggling. In 2023 it gave out its 17th. Arthur Lewbel started the MIT Juggling Club in 1975. In 2004 it didn’t have official MIT recognition so he encouraged me to start the MIT Student Juggling Club again. That changed action changed my life. I’m not the only life he changed which is one of the reasons he was given the award.
In 2018 we broke the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive side-by-side juggling catches by a team of 2 with 532. He would say it’s a silly record easily broken by any serious juggler. He’s not wrong, except Josh Horton and I (both accomplished 7-ball jugglers) spent over an hour in early 2023 in multiple sessions trying to take back the record of 532 catches that Arthur and I broke in 2018 (It had been broken by a run of 901). We failed before I had to rush off to the airport to catch a flight. I came to Boston for a wedding in July of 2023 and stopped by the MIT Juggling Club to take it back with Arthur. It surely would be easy… but it was not. It took nearly the entire 2 hours of club time with multiple patient witnesses and timers to validate the attempt.
We were close to breaking it once but reviewed it on video and were clearly short. We were close again and agonized in despair until we reviewed the video evidence and realized I was miscounting. We had broken the record with 914 catches and were the record holders again.
The evidence will be submitted to Guinness for review.