Sioux Falls woman sets pickleball world record

By Mick Garry, for Pigeon605

When you’re talking to someone who was part of a group of four who set a world record playing pickleball, it’s a little like talking to someone who has been to the moon. When you ask what it was like to play for 36 consecutive hours, you know this person is one of only a handful on earth who can answer the question.

Geneva Olson of Sioux Falls was one of the The Pickle Breakers, who played pickleball from the morning on April 12 until night on April 13 in Carrollton, Texas, to raise awareness for mental health issues and raise money for Taylor’s Gift Foundation, a nonprofit organization providing organ-donor families with grief support after the loss of a loved one.

The target was exceeding the existing record of 34 hours and 5 minutes, set in the United Kingdom.

“A friend of mine tells me ‘You know, it’s a world record for a reason,’” Olson said. “I knew it was going to be difficult, so I wasn’t naive in that sense, but it was still a lot harder than any of us anticipated.”

Her playing partner was Jaret Petras, a former soccer player who is a national champion pickleball player in Czechoslovakia. Their opponents were Laura Maala, an Estonian who now lives in North Dakota, and Chong Kim, who recently had played pickleball in all 50 states in a span of 45 days and spearheaded this world-record attempt.

Olson and her husband, Mark, met Kim by chance at a pickleball court in Missouri while Kim was on his 50-state tour raising awareness for mental health issues. Olson, who lost a brother to suicide, later sent Kim some words of encouragement and eventually heard back, with the organizer wondering if she would be interested in going for a world record.

Olson, the director of pickleball at Remedy Pickleball Pub, decided she was up for it.

She never regretted that decision, though she can tell you 36 hours is a long time, and the five-minute breaks, even if you save them up for a couple of hours to make them 10-minute breaks, go by very quickly.

“We thought the mental challenge of staying engaged and staying awake was going to be a bigger challenge,” she said. “But it was the physical pain that set in much earlier than we expected.”

The total money raised was more than $23,000 at last count. It was the most important but not the only impressive number Olson and her three accomplices were able to accumulate.

They played 143 games in 36 hours. Someone told them how they were doing win-loss wise when they reached 50 games, but they didn’t want to know after that. On the way to going where no man or woman had gone before, they discovered that humans who are competitive by nature stay that way, even when faced with a full 24-hour day of pickleball and 12 hours of the next day.

“It was all being filmed, and we had an audience watching us a lot of the time and referees for the games, and it created this weird dynamic where we were playing harder than we should have been,” she said. “We all went through different stages where we were thinking ‘OK, we really need to win this game,’ and the rest of us would be thinking ‘What are you doing? Calm down. We got a long way to go here.’”

At the midway point in the middle of the night, there was no crowd, the music was not playing and a lot of the lights in the facility were off. They were still looking at 18 hours of pickleball. This was the worst of it. They were all tired, and there was still a long way to go.

“Then, a few more hours passed, and people started filtering back in, and somebody opened one of the doors, and we could see some sunlight. That helped a whole bunch,” Olson said. “The exhaustion was still there, but it helped a ton having supporters around us. I don’t think we could have done it without them.”

The conditions set by the Guinness people included a five-minute break every hour. They could put those breaks in a bank of sorts and save them if they wished. At first, it didn’t seem like a big deal, and then as they advanced, those breaks became more and more precious.

They eventually settled into taking 10 minutes every two hours, though it never seemed to be enough.

“You’re thinking 10 minutes is a long time, but that’s not how it seems at all,” she said. “We all had to use the bathroom, maybe get something to eat and drink and change your socks or something like that, and that time would just fly by.”

As they drew closer to the end, all that stood in their way was hoping their bodies would not introduce some kind of injury that would make continuing on impossible. No blacking out and falling down, no terrible leg cramps, no broken bones.

“There was never a question for any of us that we were going to finish it,” Olson said. “We were going to push to the end no matter what; we just had to stay upright.”

Their last break coincided with breaking the record, but they were still almost two hours from their own goal. They had a short conversation about continuing at that point and decided to go on – they had targeted 36 hours when they started.

“We told the world that’s what we were going to do,” Olson said. “So we were going to do it.”

Two hours later, they were hugging each other and crying. There was confetti and the sound of cannons going off, and Olson’s husband and four daughters were there cheering her on.

She took off her shoes and socks and counted “11 or 12 blisters – my socks were bloody,” but she hung in there at a party – complete with cans of Guinness, of course –  and took pictures with supporters. They met the founder of Taylor’s Gift, and in all Olson stayed up for 44 consecutive hours.

The next morning at breakfast, they talked about how even though they were physically exhausted, it was still difficult getting their brains to settle down.

Another discovery: They were all better pickleball players by the end of it.

“I guess it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise, but we all saw improvement over those 36 hours,” she said. “So I can promise you, if you play pickleball for that long, you’re going to get better at it.”