Speaking at Length

Earlier this year, United States Senator Cory Booker set an unusual record: He spoke on the Senate floor for 25 hours and five minutes straight. That’s right—one continual stream of speechifying, a marathon meant to highlight opposition to the policies of U.S. President Donald Trump. Booker eclipsed the previous Senate record for speaking longevity by nearly an hour.

Whether or not you agree with the New Jersey senator’s politics, you have to appreciate his oratorical endurance, from a physical standpoint if nothing else. During that entire span, Booker never once left the Senate floor, not even for a bathroom break.

His headline-making display got me wondering: Have any Toastmasters been involved with prodigious feats of speaking stamina?

The answer to that is a resounding yes. In fact, Toastmasters have carved out their own distinct spot in the Guinness World Records, holding two different marks. In 2019, Toastmasters from New Zealand established the record for longest speech marathon by a team. One by one, 171 members stepped up to give 381 consecutive speeches (some gave multiple speeches), always in front of an audience, for 127 hours, 31 minutes, and 43 seconds.

Imagine: speeches around the clock for more than five full days.

“Finding people who were willing (and able) to be there between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. was very difficult,” says Alun Chisholm, DTM, a 31-year Toastmaster from Auckland.

In 2023, Patrick O’Mara, a Toastmaster in Hoover, Alabama, set the Guinness record for most speeches by an individual during a 24-hour period. He gave 33 of them (although officially only credited for 32), all at least 10 minutes long. The previous record was 30.

A member of Go Pro Speakers, a hybrid club in Canada, O’Mara presented to audiences at 33 different locations including a fitness center, a hotel, and a baseball stadium.

He started at 5 a.m., ending around 9:30 p.m.

“It was a day, let me tell you,” he says.

I don’t know about you, but when I finish one 5-minute speech, I’m ready for a nap. I felt exhausted just learning about the lengths to which these Toastmasters went in their record-breaking odysseys.

While O’Mara’s marathon was a long day’s journey into night, the New Zealand event was nearly a week’s worth of collective persistence. As members from 72 different clubs spoke at the Waipuna Hotel in Auckland, at least 10 people were required to be in the audience at all times, an especially daunting task in the beyond-midnight hours.

“When someone needed to go to the restroom at 4 a.m., you had to count twice and make sure there would be enough people left in the room,” notes Chisholm, who lives close to the hotel and volunteered to take on middle-of-the-night shifts.

All of the New Zealanders had to speak for at least 5 minutes. Some spoke for the minimum amount; others went more than an hour. Chisholm, a Past District Governor, gave four speeches during the week, including a 35-minute one on the history of Hong Kong and a 15-minute speech about traveling to his first Toastmasters International Convention, in Phoenix, Arizona.

The team was part of New Zealand’s recently formed District 112. Rob Wightman, DTM, the then-Public Relations Manager, says the new District was looking to do something big to announce its arrival. What better than attempting a Guinness World Record?

The District promoted the audacious quest at various events, aiming to recruit participants. Wightman says a comment by one member, Nico Lumanglas, was typical of the reaction: “This is insane—count me in!!”

A member of three New Zealand clubs, Wightman says District 112 leaders lent a great deal of help before and during the event.

 

 

Back to O’Mara, the solo record breaker.

O’Mara was inspired by reading about a fellow Hoover, Alabama, resident who was part of a four-member team that set a Guinness mark for corn shucking. (They shucked 38 ears of corn in one minute, if you’re wondering.)

O'Mara decided to improvise his 30-plus speeches, crediting his Table Topics training. To mix things up, he had an idea: fortune cookies! He would give spontaneous speeches by expounding on the fortune he pulled out of each cookie.

To train for the endeavor, O’Mara went to a Chinese restaurant and purchased big boxes of cookies. For months, he practiced two or three times a day, until he could reel off about 20 fortune-fueled improvisational talks.

The logistical challenges were stressful. O’Mara had to line up 30-plus speaking venues, and at least 10 different audience members had to be at each when he spoke.

There was lots of last-minute scrambling. When there weren’t enough audience members, his support team—which included local students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham—went into on-the-spot recruitment mode. “At the YMCA, they’d go into the gym area: ‘Hey, you want to take a break with us for this special 10-minute speech?’ We’re at a hotel, they’re going into the breakfast area: ‘Can you bring your breakfast into this room?’”

Guinness is rigorous about its requirements. These speech marathons had to have witnesses, rule keepers, timekeepers, and videographers who had to shoot hours of footage. It took months to submit the necessary items to Guinness and then hear back for confirmation of the world records.

O’Mara remembers his reaction when he read the email saying he had indeed set the new mark in his category.

“It was like, Okay, it’s real. I can finally celebrate!”

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