Just over 45 people gathered in a small Kanata group fitness studio on a Saturday afternoon, all to witness Morgan McKay set a Guinness World Record.
The challenge was to do as many in-spot lunges as possible in an hour, and McKay blew past the requirement for the Guinness women’s record of 1,800 by ringing up 1,984.
“She makes it look so easy,” said Sonia Sorrini, who came out to support McKay, an in-house coach at bodiesbyphil who she had known for more than a decade.
McKay smiled as she knelt for the 1,475th time, 14 minutes shy of the hour.
“Thank you everybody for being here,” she said. “It makes it easier.”
”How is this even possible?” a voice on the other side said. “She’s still smiling. That’s good,” another said.
Around the 45-minute mark, McKay said, she felt nauseous, but having friends cheering helped keep her going.
To qualify for the record, every lunge had to meet Guinness requirements, according to McKay, which meant both feet had to face forward at the beginning before one leg came down forward at 90 degrees and the trailing leg touched the ground.
The legs would then have to be returned to a straight, locked-out position.
McKay said listened to Viking war music during the lunge challenge.” I thought of playing it for everybody, but it’s really intense because it’s just Vikings, like, yelling and hitting drums and stuff.”
“For some reason it just gets me so fired up,” she said. “Towards the end, it switches to the soundtrack from the movie Tron, and near the end it was like Eye of the Tiger.”
McKay said she made the playlist specifically to help her train for the lunges. “It helped a lot. I felt that I might get distracted by whatever was going on around me, especially because I’m seeing my close friends and I wanna talk to them, but I can’t.”
Why do this?
“I just like to do hard challenges,” McKay said. “If somebody is like ‘Oh that’s crazy,’ or ‘That’s insane,’ I’m like, ‘Actually it’s not,’” she said. “If you break it down into small steps and you work towards it consistently over time, it seems crazy when you look at it as a whole, but the sum of the parts is actually not that crazy.”
McKay said she wasn’t thinking of the record attempt as an hour long, but as smaller components of between 30 and 35 lunges each minute.
“That’s how her brain works,” said Phil Green, the owner of bodiesbyphil. “I guarantee in a couple weeks she’s gonna say, ‘I need to beat that.’”
This was not the first time McKay had set a world record. In 2019, McKay said, she set one for the fastest 10K race while carrying 100 pounds.
“I set that record here in Ottawa at the Tamarack 10k,” she said.
When McKay found out someone else had bettered that record, she decided 2026 would be her redemption year.
“I want to go get that record back,” McKay said. “I wanted to set this record today and I’m gonna have a few others.”
Her determination was somewhat all-consuming, spilling from the bounds of the gym and into day-to-day life. She trained for three months and dedicated two workouts a week to preparing for Saturday’s test.
“Even on vacation, we were doing lunges on the beach,” she said with a laugh. “One day we did 45 minutes straight of just lunges up and down the beach.
It was something “fun” for her and her boyfriend to do together, McKay told the Ottawa Citizen. “We hit the grocery story and get groceries and then we would do our lunges in the grocery story.
“Wednesday nights, my boyfriend and I, we just go to the gym and do weights, so we would do split squats, Romanian deadlifts, step-ups and then lunges, and then Sunday was our high-volume day. We would go to Carleton University — they have a track there — and do walking lunges around the track and we would just get as many as we could in an hour or two.”
Since 2020, McKay has coached Sorrini into completing a marathon.
“Happy I had her by my side, and now I’m here to be by her side,” Sorrini said. “Boy, she’s a force to be reckoned with.
“She’s a ball of energy, a fantastic coach in terms of training you and she’s always in your corner.”
For McKay to set the record, she had to get a minimum of 1,800 on Saturday, Green said. “That’s why everyone was kind of counting down to 1,800, and everyone freaked out when she hit 1,800 because then it’s officially a record.”
Guinness still must confirm the results in what would be a 12-week process, but Green, who counted McKay’s lunges, said she “blew past that bar.”
The current men’s world record for lunges in an hour is 2,700.
Related
Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed.
