#Bungee jumper Mike Heard sets world record in Auckland for 941 leaps in one day

“From time to time, you get sort of like a sea sickness or motion sickness feeling, but I just sort of pushed through that and got on with it,” he said. 

“So it didn’t slow us down or affect us at all,” he said, adding that he felt “on top of the world” to have broken the record.

It was fitting that Mr Heard broke the record in New Zealand, regarded as the home of the extreme sport.

“This is the birthplace of bungee jumping,” he said. 

“It was commercialised in New Zealand. We like to own this sport, so the record should be here. This is one of the biggest records in bungee jumping and I wanted it home. So we did it.”

In the run-up to his record attempt, Mr Heard held what he called “bungee boogies” with friends, jumping for a few hours at a time to establish how to tighten his harness in the best way and stop himself spinning.

He also prepared himself mentally for the prospect of taking jump after jump off the bridge, which spans Waitematā Harbour.

Mental battle

“I identified it was a real mental battle. I needed to work on my mindset, my mental health and I spent the last few years doing that,” he said.

“Also in the past 15 months, the record was taken from us and it just goes to show, the body will do what the mind allows it.”

Mr Heard kept himself going with supplies of chocolate, nuts, energy drinks, water and bananas – though at one stage he ate a slice of pizza which, as he put it, “didn’t go down well”.

He is now celebrating with his wife and children while he waits for “the certificate to arrive in the mail”.

“It certainly wasn’t easy and, going into it, I knew it would be a massive challenge,” said Mr Heard. 

“The number of jumps we had to hit added a whole new level of nerves to this attempt for me. But the record needed to be here because bungee is a part of our DNA.”