Unusual Human Capabilities There was a television series on a few years ago when Stan Lee, the creator of several different famous super hero characters, was searching for people with super powers, and those they found were able to do incredible things. I remember one person who could lift a car, and another who would let deadly amounts of electricity surge through his body. It just goes to show how some of us are different from the crowd. Some would call these people aliens, because of their capabilities, but the truth is they are just ordinary people capable of extraordinary things. Perhaps we all have unusual capabilities, but most of us just don’t know how to access them. As we examine human capabilities we find people who did things we thought were impossible. Jack LaLanne was a true fitness apostle. He used to appear on television, and tell us not to put all those poison foods into our bodies, and he would often be seen blending some sort of health drink or another. Even when he became old he still had a great physique. In his lifetime he performed several feats of strength. In one test of strength he was shackled and handcuffed, and hooked up to 70 rowboats. The rowboats were not empty, but contained people. He towed them from Queen’s Way Bridge to the ship, the Queen Mary and did it against the current with winds blowing. When he performed this act he was 70 years old. I remember watching a documentary which featured a man free diving to a distance which would kill most of us. He dove to a depth of 125 meters or 411 feet, and back to the surface. Thinking about someone doing this without a breathing apparatus and a diving suit is a very scary thought. This was accomplished by William Trubridge, but he never got official credit for it since he didn’t remove his goggles. This is the case of a stupid rule destroying an incredible feat. We see stories about how ancient soldiers, like the roman army, were able to cut tunnels through mountains, and even start at both ends of a mountain and meet, and only be an inch or less off and we have to wonder how humans without modern tools could do this. Can you imagine cutting through a mountain with a shovel or hammer? There is a man who lives in India in a small village who had a very sad thing happen to him. His wife died because he couldn’t get her medical help in time, because the doctor was on the other side of the mountain, and the trip around the mountain was 42 miles. After she died he decided to remedy the situation, and he began to dig through the mountain. He dug for 22 years, because he didn’t want what happened to his wife to happen to anyone else and cut a wide path through the mountain, and now the trip to the doctor is less than 3/5ths of a mile. It is amazing what the human body is capable of doing and resisting. We know in times of stress some of us have been known to lift cars off of people, and sometimes large stones and metal. A mountain climber was climbing up the side of a mountain when the unthinkable happened. A piece of the side of the mountain he was holding came loose and pinned him while he was sliding down the mountain toward a cliff. The stone weighed about 1,200 pounds. As his slide approached the cliff edge, the climber was able to actually lift the stone off of himself and flip it over the cliff stopping his slide before he went over. This sudden burst of strength saved his life. It seems some of us have this hidden increased strength capability. While a man watched in horror he saw a car dragging a cyclist under it. He jumped out of his car and ran to the car where the cyclist was pinned, and with a huge burst of strength he lifted the car off of the bicycle and its rider. When one reaches old age they just don’t feel the way they did when they were younger, and many of the things they did fall out of the realm of possibility. This didn’t stop Johanna Quhaas a German gymnast. Old age was not a bar to her performing. As a matter of fact, she resumed her gymnast career at 57 and still trained at 86 years old. She became the oldest gymnast in the world. Some marathon runners prepare all year to run one marathon and sometimes they don’t even finish. Not so for Dean Karnazes. Mr. Karnazes likes to run marathons, and he is the holder of an incredible feat. He ran fifty marathons in fifty days. When he was in kindergarten he would always run home from school. As he ran he stretched out his runs so he would cover more ground. When he was 11 years old, to test his stamina he climbed Mount Whitney and hiked across the Grand Canyon rim to rim. Did you ever feel you didn’t get enough sleep? I remember when I worked for the U.S. Postal Service for awhile, and it was near Christmas. I was a substitute clerk and was not supposed to work more than 16 hours in a row. My boss got around this by punching me off of a time card every 16 hours and onto a new one. This went on for 3 days until I fell asleep on the floor and they sent me home. I couldn’t believe I managed to stay awake that long ,but it would be nothing to Randy Gardner who managed to stay awake for 11 days and 24 minutes. He set the world record for staying awake at the time. Some people do incredible things and get into the record books, but you have to wonder why they do what they did. Take the case of Lasha Pataraia. He pulled a large helicopter weighing over 17,000 pounds for a distance of almost 29 yards. Some would say that was pretty good and an accomplishment. I would say it was an accomplishment which most of us couldn’t do. By the way I have to tell you he did it by attaching a rope or strap to his left ear. I don’t know how many times I have heard of people jumping off of bridges to commit suicide. You always seem to hear there is no way anyone can survive diving from this height. Even Myth Busters showed there is a limit to the height someone can dive from, and that limit was a lot less than Lazaro Schaller dives from. He has cliff dived from heights up to almost 193 feet. I don’t remember the exact height Myth Busters determined would kill a diver but it was something like 48 feet.
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