Gena Laielli: 5,332 Burpees for Omphalocele and a Guinness World Record

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 294 with Gena Laielli.

Gena Laielli: Like I said, I am a nurse. I used to work in Newark, which is, like, crazy, in New Jersey. And we used to do twelve-hour shifts there. I'm like, alright. If I could do twelve hours in Newark on night shift, I could do twelve hours of burpees.

Introduction

Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's podcast. We have the world record burpee holder with us. Gena Laielli just set the world record for 5,332 burpees in twelve hours. And you know what? That's not even the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part is why she did it, and we're gonna learn about that right now. Well, great. Nice to meet you. Thanks for doing this.

Gena Laielli: Nice to meet you too. Thanks for having me.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. I can't remember who it was that told me about you, but it was one of the listeners of the podcast. Do you have some fishermen that work out with you?

Gena Laielli: Not that I know of.

Tom Rowland: Well, you have one, apparently.

Gena Laielli: I know that I have, like, a lot of firefighters, cops, teachers, police officers, and nurses. I have a couple of friends that are fishermen.

Tom Rowland: Okay. Well, somebody that listens to the podcast works out with you, said you're a beast, and I should look you up. So I have done a little research, and I started looking you up quite some time ago when you were just doing the burpee record.

Gena Laielli: Yes.

Opening the Gym and a Family in Uniform

Tom Rowland: So tell me, what do you do? Like, do you own your gym?

Gena Laielli: Yes. So my brother and I, we both own it. We opened it up about two years ago. It was two years in January. And we're like, I come from a very military background and family, very uniform family. So all of the workouts are very military driven. Like, there's nothing easy about it. We don't put up with any excuses. None of that.

Tom Rowland: Were you in the military?

Gena Laielli: Me, in the military? No. My brother, my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, they were all prior service. And my husband and my dad are both firefighters. Well, my dad retired, but my husband currently is. So very uniformed family. I mean, I am a nurse. I wanted to be a nurse in the Navy back in the day, just to do the boot camp. I really wanted to go through the boot camp.

Tom Rowland: What branch were you most interested in?

Gena Laielli: I was gonna join the Navy. Yeah. But then I changed my mind.

Tom Rowland: And did you always think that you would probably own a gym or be a part of it in some way, shape, or form?

Gena Laielli: I've always been into fitness and playing sports and everything. I've always wanted to open up my own gym, but I never thought that I would ever be able to. But then we just took this chance, and we did it, and we did it quick. And it's the happiest — I'm very, very happy with what I do.

Shutting Down for COVID

Tom Rowland: Right on. So what about the COVID situation right now? How soon did you close down your gym? How did you react to the situation?

Gena Laielli: Being that my daughter is very prone to any type of respiratory infection — I mean, she can get a cough and then immediately turn into pneumonia because of her medical background and everything that she's been through. So I closed my gym actually four days prior to when the government said to shut down everything. We had a private fitness page, and I posted a whole thing about two days before that I was gonna close my gym down, allowing members to take home equipment, and that I would be providing workouts on our page daily. But I actually closed it four days prior to everything being shut down.

Tom Rowland: Right. That has been a big thing, you know, among the CrossFit community and other gyms kinda like that — of just letting the members take whatever they want, because there's no use in it just sitting there, I guess. Right? Did you find it interesting what people took?

Gena Laielli: Yeah. So I kept a log book, and I let them take two pieces of equipment, mostly weights because the slam balls and the med balls, like, they can break and pop easily on concrete, and most of the members are working out in driveways. So I let people take home weights and dumbbells. And it's been a month now.

Tom Rowland: And your workouts — you've been doing them all on, like, Zoom calls or Facebook, or what have you been doing?

Gena Laielli: So I usually post a workout every single night. And if it's, like, a new move or something confusing, I'll post a demo of the moves. I did a couple of live videos, but with the kids, it was more like, "one second, guys. Stop fighting. Okay. We're back." So that was just whatever. And then I started doing Zoom videos a couple weeks ago, but I only do them a couple times a week. And it's mostly in the afternoon because after all the homeschooling and everything, I usually do a Zoom workout a couple times a week, and I'll just sit there and yell at them, "Stop. Let's go. Not you." But I miss the whistle, because I usually have a whistle. And they're like, "I miss the Genaisms," because I'll say the most random things during the classes, and it makes everyone laugh. I don't know where I come up with these things, but they miss all that. I miss everyone too, but we're making it work.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. It's quite tough with the social distancing. I mean, people don't realize it at first — you know, it's kinda nice to have a little time by yourself, and then the next thing you know, it's been a couple of weeks, and there's this craving for contact and just being around other people. So I hope it goes back to normal pretty soon, and you can open your gym back up.

Gena Laielli: Me too. I miss it. Like, I just miss everyone. And then when you see them on Zoom, you're just like, "I wanna hug you guys," virtually for now.

Becoming a Guinness World Record Holder

Tom Rowland: So just recently, in the last day or so, I was following your social media — your record became official. So tell us what the record is that you have.

Gena Laielli: So I am a Guinness World Record holder for the most chest-to-ground push-up burpees in twelve hours, and I did 5,332.

Tom Rowland: Wow. 5,332. That's a lot of burpees. I love burpees. They're my favorite. Not a lot of people say that burpees are their favorite exercise, but I consider the burpee to be the cornerstone, the foundation of my fitness. I mean, you just put that into so many different things. You can do it anywhere. I love that exercise. How did you — first of all, I wanna know the story behind why you decided to set a world record, because I know that's a big part of what this whole thing was for you.

Why She Did It: Emma and Omphalocele Awareness

Gena Laielli: Yes. So this is gonna sound crazy. Every single January — so my daughter was born with a condition called omphalocele. It's an abdominal wall defect, and it only happens in one in ten thousand births. And they have Omphalocele Awareness Day, which happens January 31. And every January, I try to do something just to raise awareness for Emma and all of the other omphalocele babies in the world, since it's such a rare condition. Even in nursing school, we learned about this for, like, a day, and that was it, because it's so rare.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Gena Laielli: So I usually do, like, a workout or a brunch, and the colors are black and white, and everyone has to wear black and white something. So this year, I was like, "Oh, let's just do a burpee marathon." And then a couple of my friends at the gym, they lost their mom to pancreatic cancer. I wasn't able to do this race with them back in November because Emma, my daughter, was sick. So we raised awareness for pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer. And we got all these local businesses to donate baskets and everything, and we were gonna do raffles every hour. In the meantime, while all that was going on, someone on Facebook tagged me in this post on Guinness's page about a guy who beat the record, and they said, "Gena, you should do this." So I'm like, alright. I love competing. I love competition. I love anything that's crazy. And I actually applied to Guinness a month prior to the event, because our event was January 11. And when I applied, it did say Guinness will probably not get back to you — it's like a twelve-week process for the applications to even get through. So I'm like, alright, this isn't even gonna happen. But they got back to me two weeks before the event saying, "You have an attempt on January 11. You need this, this, this, this, and this to get it done." So my application got accepted, and I had, like, two weeks to get everything together.

The Guinness Requirements and Two Weeks to Prepare

Gena Laielli: I had to find six independent witnesses. I had to find professional cameras.

Tom Rowland: How many cameras do you need?

Gena Laielli: We had three. We had one in the front, one on the side, and one on the back. And the burpees had to be Guinness style. So they had to measure my body, and then take half — I can't really remember exactly, verbatim, but it was two pieces of tape, and my hips had to touch a certain way, and then my feet, when I jumped back up, they had to come right to that front piece of tape. So it's not like your typical burpee. I don't do burpees like that every single day. That was really hard on my body, but it was worth it. I really only had, like, two weeks to prepare. And even though I've always been active and working out and doing these crazy military workouts — like weighted-vest runs, running with ropes, running with balls around town — my gym is known for, "Oh, you're that gym that runs around the block with weights and ropes." We do, like, a rope run. We call it "the unknown." All crazy stuff. But I didn't really train like someone who trained for a marathon. The only thing that I really trained was the form. I trained for the form.

Tom Rowland: Right. Did you watch some other videos of how people were doing it and what the acceptable form was?

Gena Laielli: So I couldn't really find — can you hear me okay? They're playing Mario Kart. I'm sorry.

Tom Rowland: That's okay. No, you can speak up, though.

Gena Laielli: Alright. Sure. I'm sorry.

Tom Rowland: Well, this is what everyone's house looks like and sounds like right now, so it's no surprise.

Gena Laielli: It's quarantine reality. So I did find a couple of videos of the male version of the burpees. I know that with the men, they had to come chest to the ground, and then they had to put their arms out to the side and then back in. The only female video that I found was the half burpees. But I did not find one of, like, a twelve-hour female record. I did find the male one. And then I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, do I have to put my arms out to the side and then in?" And we had a pasta party the night before, and we had every single person that came read all of the rules — just to have more eyes on it, just to make sure that I didn't have to go out, in, up. Like, I just had to bring my arms down, push-up position, and then up. So the only videos that I saw were the men's, really.

What Omphalocele Is — and Emma's Journey

Tom Rowland: So let's talk about this condition that your daughter has. It's called what?

Gena Laielli: It's called a giant omphalocele.

Tom Rowland: Omphalocele. Okay. And can you describe that for us — what that is?

Gena Laielli: So it's when the baby in utero has all of the organs formed on the outside of the body, and they're usually contained in a thin membrane. With Emma, they told us that her membrane ruptured and all of her organs were just floating in my amniotic fluid. And when I was pregnant, they gave her a very small chance of surviving. They gave her a three percent chance of surviving. And we went to the best hospital, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and they saved her life. And with this condition, it also has other side effects. Small lungs — they're also called hypoplastic lungs — which usually means your child may need a trach and a ventilator, which Emma had both of up until she was about three. They were also gonna have feeding issues, maybe heart issues. Emma had both feeding and heart issues. She actually started eating by mouth a little over a year ago. She was tube fed. And she also had a defect within the defect, which is extremely rare. They performed a one-time surgery on her when she was seven months old, and they weren't sure if it was gonna work or not.

Gena Laielli: They called her the trailblazer of that surgery because they'd never performed it before on a child with an omphalocele. She had multiple bowel obstructions. And we were told that you either have bowel obstructions or you have an omphalocele — you never ever have both together. And Emma, unfortunately, had both. So they performed it on her, and they weren't sure if it was gonna work. And luckily, it did. But she still had feeding issues, so she was tube fed until about a year and a half ago. And she's eating by mouth now.

Tom Rowland: She sounds like she's doing okay.

Gena Laielli: Yeah. That's Mario Kart — they're playing. Sorry.

Tom Rowland: Oh, it's no problem. So how many surgeries did she have to go through before this January, I guess?

Gena Laielli: She's had about six or seven surgeries. And looking at her, you would never even know everything that she went through. She just has scars. She had a trach put in. She had the lysis of adhesions surgery. She had plastic surgery, because we tried all of these different methods of compressing her organs back in. We had a shell. We bandaged her. We did everything, but nothing was really working. So then we had plastics come in, and they inserted two saline balloons on the sides of her body. And then for six months, my husband and I had to give her weekly injections to stretch out her skin, so that eventually they would be able to tuck in her organs and then wrap everything up and make her an abdominal wall.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Gena Laielli: It's very amazing what the hospitals do now.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Seriously. That is incredible. So the survival rate — has that survival rate for that condition improved over the last, maybe, ten or fifteen years?

Gena Laielli: I would say yes. But every single omphalocele case, not one is ever the same. Because there's also a small omphalocele, and usually with small omphaloceles, there's a chromosomal defect. With giant omphaloceles, they're all different. We've met several of the omphalocele families, and not one has been the same. It's crazy. I actually met four other moms. I grew up in North Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and they were all in a five-mile radius. For something that's so rare, I've met four other moms that had babies with omphaloceles.

Tom Rowland: Really? Wow. That's crazy.

The Awareness Mission: Giving Other Families Hope

Tom Rowland: So the idea with the record is to bring attention to this because, obviously, it's a very rare condition. So the more attention you can bring to it, I guess that solves some issues of just awareness, and then doctors study it more. What else comes from the awareness that you're bringing to this?

Gena Laielli: Well, we gave a lot of hope to other mothers. I remember when I was pregnant, I couldn't really talk to anyone, because all my friends were pregnant with healthy babies, and it was just awkward. And I kinda wish that I had someone to talk to with a positive story. So I feel like I've gotten in touch with other mothers and other families, not only with just the omphalocele part, but with the whole trach and ventilator part too. Because that's a big step and commitment when you're trach-ing your child. That's the trach — the breathing machine. And it was, like, the only way that we could actually be parents in the NICU. When Emma was intubated, we would have to ask permission to hold her, and then we would have to get pinned and sit there for, like, six hours or however long with your child pinned to you. But with a trach and a ventilator, you get taught on how to be a parent without asking permission to take your child out. You could be more involved in the care. And other parents, when their child was a candidate to get trach-ed, they were scared and hesitant like any parent would be. But they saw Emma, and they saw us — she was in the NICU for nine and a half months — they saw us being so active and hands-on with her. That gave them hope. And I've touched base with other mothers in, like, Poland, Canada, where they're pregnant currently with omphalocele babies, and then seeing Emma gave them hope. And that's the awareness that we wanted. It's just hope.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And you've obviously done that, and setting the world record brings even more attention to it. I mean, you were on Good Morning America and all kinds of other outlets when I started googling around — a lot of people picked up your story. So did that help with the awareness worldwide? Or do you have, like, a Facebook page that you're communicating with a lot of people on?

Gena Laielli: It definitely helped with awareness. I have a private Facebook page, and that's mostly for my friends and family, and we post pictures of Emma. And a couple of the mothers that I've met through the internet, they follow us on Instagram. They follow us on Facebook now. Last January, every single day, I posted Emma's story. So every single day was, like, our NICU journey until now. My private Facebook page is private, but my Instagram is more public, so I feel like I have more people that are not part of my family following me on Instagram. And media, sometimes.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, of course.

Strategy, Rhythm, and Finding a Beat

Tom Rowland: So let's talk about your record real quick. The previous record was from 1975. Is that correct?

Gena Laielli: Yeah, '75.

Tom Rowland: So that sounds pretty good. How did you determine your strategy? When I heard that, I immediately broke it down to how many I would have to do a minute for twelve hours. How did you look at this big number and decide a strategy that you were going to try to implement in your two-week preparation?

Gena Laielli: The strategy was, I wanted to go hard for the first hour or two and then break it down. And I had to have the judges count out where I was, like, every 10 or every 20. I had to have them count, because if I was to count, I would just go crazy. I really didn't have any strategy. To be honest, I just wanted to go hard for the first or second hour. And then the whole counting part that the judges did for me, that helped me. And then one of the judges said — and I can never play this mix ever again — it's called "Hip Hop Barbecue" on Fit Radio. The Hip Hop Barbecue played seven or eight times throughout my twelve-hour period, and he said that my flow with the burpees went perfect. I had great rhythm. I wasn't getting frustrated. I wasn't getting tired. And it was all old-school hip hop. So I would say maybe following a beat was a strategy. And really my plan was just to beat the record. Because if I failed it, I would've tried it again.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Gena Laielli: I had to just beat it.

Tom Rowland: Well, at first, when you're looking at twelve hours, that's a lot different pace than maybe you would go for twelve minutes. So when you're thinking about going hard for the first couple of hours — did you have any number at all in your mind of what that meant for you?

Gena Laielli: No. I just wanted to get it done. Every thousand was a goal for me, I guess. At the thousand mark, I was like, "Alright. We got this. We got ten hours left." And I was like, "This is like a nursing shift." Because like I said, I am a nurse. I used to work in Newark, which is, like, crazy, in New Jersey. And we used to do twelve-hour shifts there. I'm like, "Alright. If I could do twelve hours in Newark on night shift, I could do twelve hours of burpees." Every thousand was a goal. And then my brother made a whole burpee board, and he broke down the burpees for me. I slowed up, I'd say, around hour four, hour five, because no one was really in the gym at that time. There were people in the morning and people at the end, but that middle period, I was like, "Oh my god. I'm, like, halfway to halfway. What the heck?" I had my husband there. I had pictures of my kids. My kids were there. They were drawing me paper plate pictures. Hitting every thousand was the goal. And the one judge who found my rhythm with that Hip Hop Barbecue on Fit Radio, that helped my flow big time. But I had to beat it. It was just no question. If I didn't beat it, I would've probably done it again the following week.

Tom Rowland: Right. So do you remember what your first hour was? Like, how many you got in your first hour?

Gena Laielli: I think I might have gotten around 700, I think.

Tom Rowland: Wow. Because I checked the other records, and it looked like the one-hour record for men was 891 or something like that, which I thought was pretty good. But it sounds like you were in shooting range of that in your first hour of a twelve-hour deal, which is pretty impressive.

Gena Laielli: Yeah. Thanks.

Fuel, Hydration, and Meeting Emma

Tom Rowland: So what about nutrition and eating and stuff like that? Water. What did you do for that?

Gena Laielli: So I had tons of water there. I had Gatorade, peanut butter sandwiches, and bananas. And then one of my members, who's also a friend of mine, she's a nutritionist, and she told me to make this syrup. It was water mixed with maple syrup and salt.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's like a prairie Gatorade.

Gena Laielli: Yeah. I had that. So I was drinking that. There was a picture of me somewhere where I'm holding it and just pouring it into the water. And it was probably the nastiest thing that I've ever drank. And I literally couldn't eat peanut butter sandwiches or bananas for almost two weeks.

Tom Rowland: Who is that?

Gena Laielli: Emma.

Tom Rowland: That's Emma? Hey, Emma.

Gena Laielli: Say hi. You know what? We're gonna go on our school week. We're gonna get you sooner than that today.

Tom Rowland: Alright. That sounds cool. I've seen more people riding bicycles, walking outside, kids playing outside than I've seen probably in the last fifteen years during the quarantine. It's crazy. Everybody's kinda spending a lot of time together. Seeing a kid ride a bicycle was almost strange today, but now it's happening more and more. So that's cool.

Gena Laielli: I love it. Emma learned how to ride training-wheel free.

Tom Rowland: Really? Just recently?

Gena Laielli: Yeah. Last week.

Tom Rowland: Okay. That's great.

Gena Laielli: So she thinks that she's all cool.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, that may be what she remembers out of the quarantine. Like, "I learned how to ride a bicycle."

Gena Laielli: Yeah. That's super cool. And baking.

Tom Rowland: Baking. And what about her diet? Does she have to be careful about anything that she eats?

Gena Laielli: So right now, the doctors are a little bit concerned with her weight, because she's eating so much food but she's not gaining and growing compared to what she eats. And she's not eating salads. She's eating, like, pizza and kid food. I mean, we give her fruit. She likes honeydew melon. She likes mangoes. She'll have a blueberry once in a while. And she loves yogurt. She eats so much food. And we even ordered these weight gainers, and we have to put it in her strawberry milk. She loves strawberry milk. She has about seven cups a day. But she's having an issue gaining weight and growth. Her brother, my son Owen, who's four, weighs more than her. She's only, like, thirty-six pounds. So she's tiny. Even putting heavy cream in her eggs, making her grilled cheese sandwiches, putting mayonnaise on the bread and a ton of butter — just little things like that. Before all this, I'm not really eating any takeout food now just because I'm paranoid about everything. But we used to go to McDonald's and just let her get whatever she wanted once a week, just because gaining weight is such an issue for her. Pasta — we throw butter and heavy cream on everything for her, but she's still not really growing accordingly with what she's eating.

Tom Rowland: Mhmm. That sounds like a fun diet. I would like to have to go on that diet. That would be awesome. Those are all the things I have to be careful of — those are all the things I wanna eat, but I have to be temperate.

Gena Laielli: I'll smell it. I'll be like, "Oh my god. That smells so good."

Crushing the Record — Not Just Beating It

Tom Rowland: Okay. So you do this record, and you beat the record at 4,700, and then you continue on to 5,332. Why did you keep going so much past the record?

Gena Laielli: Well, if I was gonna beat the record, I didn't wanna just beat it by one. I wanted to crush it. And also, I beat the record — I think I had about an hour and a half or an hour left to spare. We couldn't just stop. We had to keep going, otherwise it wouldn't count.

Tom Rowland: Oh, really? You have to go for twelve hours?

Gena Laielli: I had to go for twelve hours. People are like, "Why didn't you just do one and then stand around for, like, ten seconds and then do another one?" And I'm just like, because I didn't wanna just beat it by one. And then what if some of the other burpees didn't count? That's why it's important to make it count — because it's twelve hours of burpees. If I didn't do this, I would've been like, "Oh my god." It wasn't just an hour or ten minutes of burpees or a minute of burpees. It was, like, half a day.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. And so did they tell you that some of the ones didn't count, or were you pretty consistently all the way across the board that they counted?

Gena Laielli: Every single one he counted. And the form — I was shocked. I'm very happy.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, I mean, you'd never done them exactly like that before. It's not the way that you normally do them.

Gena Laielli: I've always had a jump. I've always felt like my arms went up. But the way that they had it measured out, your feet had to come behind the line and then right back up to the starting line. You had to touch it. And then the jumps — as long as both feet came off the ground, they didn't really care if you did a power jump or whatever. They just wanted both feet off of the ground. And some of my husband's firefighter friends, they were like, "Oh, buffalo them." And I'm just like, "Let's see you do it." But yeah, every single burpee counted, and I'm so happy. That was a lot of work.

Lessons From 5,332 Burpees

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So what can doing 5,332 burpees — what can you take back into your regular life, and how can that help the people that are listening to this? What lessons did you learn in doing that? There had to be some dark moments there where it didn't look like you wanted to continue, or it looked like, like you said, "I'm only a quarter of the way there, and there's no one around." What kind of lessons did you learn in doing this?

Gena Laielli: So, if you put your mind to anything, you can do it. That is a very old-fashioned statement that is used all the time, and it's so true. And I did it for my daughter. Everyone is like, "Well, why are you doing burpees? What does that mean? How is that gonna help your daughter?" — sorry, Emma and Owen, stop — but her watching me do this, I mean, she did the last ten minutes with me. That's the video that went viral. For her to be able to do ten minutes of burpees with me — someone that has hypoplastic lungs, someone that has artificial mesh acting as muscle in her stomach, because she wasn't born with any muscle — her taking part of that meant a lot to me. That just overtook the whole twelve hours, that last ten minutes. What else? You can do anything. The dark moments that I had, it was, "Why am I doing this?" And I would stare at my daughter and her picture. She's strong. Her strength came onto me throughout that whole period, because she fought for her life. And for her fighting for her life, I can do burpees — which is the most horrible exercise, even though I love them. It's the most stressful exercise that everyone hates. And now, when I work out, I'll post my workouts, and burpees are usually in almost every single workout that I post. And if people are complaining about doing 25, thirty, fifty reps, I'm just like, "Listen. I did 5,332. You guys can do at least 50."

Tom Rowland: Is that the end of the complaining when you say that, or do you even have to say that anymore?

Gena Laielli: I say it all the time. People are like, "A hundred burpees, you can't." And I'm just like, "Really?" And I'll just point to the picture. But honestly, out of the whole twelve hours, the last ten minutes of my daughter doing burpees with me just meant the world. Because for her to be able to — that's a full-body movement, like you said earlier, that uses every single muscle — for her to do the last ten minutes, just meant everything. It made the whole thing worth it.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That's so cool. That's really cool. It's also cool that you did this kind of just on the spur of the moment with very little preparation. I mean, the drink that you drank — I've always gone by, ever since I ran my first marathon, one thing that I learned from a Hal Higdon book, he's super old school. And he's like, "You never do anything on race day that you haven't done in training." And so I've taken that into everything, into fishing tournaments and everything that I do. It's like, if I haven't done this in practice, I'm not gonna do it on game day. So I would have practiced that drink and made sure it didn't make me sick. I would have had everything prepared and ready, and I would have tried it out. I would have worn the clothes that I was wearing two or three times before at least. I would have done all this preparation. It sounds like you did virtually no preparation. You just found out that you're getting ready to do this thing, and you ask somebody, "What should I drink?" That's amazing to me.

Gena Laielli: Yeah. It sounds pretty crazy. I'm like, "Oh my god. I didn't even try the drink. What if it made me sick?"

Tom Rowland: Yeah. You didn't try the drink. I would have known exactly how many I had to do per minute and had a minute clock there, or I don't know. I was just kinda thinking about what I would need to do to prepare for this. And almost everything that I thought of, you didn't do. And you crushed the record. So you can take everything that I was thinking and throw it out the window, because you're the one that actually crushed the record. You're the burpee queen.

Gena Laielli: Thank you. That's crazy hearing that, though, because I'm like, "Wow. I didn't even do it." We had a pasta party before, like back in high school, happy days. We had cake. I'm just like, "Oh my gosh." I only had three hours of sleep too, because I couldn't sleep the night before.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That's amazing. So what about — a lot of times people say, if you have a big enough why, you can overcome any how. And you touched on that a little bit, just about your daughter and how important this was to you. But do you think that's how you could just do this without — I'm not gonna say without any preparation, you're obviously a very well-conditioned athlete to be able to just step in and do 5,332 burpees without a lot of, let's say, preparation — but your why, do you think that's what took you across the finish line?

Gena Laielli: Totally. My daughter. My daughter definitely, and my son. Both my kids. Just watching them watch me do the burpees. I don't wanna say that I'm favoring one child or the other, but Emma went through a lot. And just to hear her say, "Go, mommy. You can do this." That pushed me more than anything. And now my kids are watching me work out at home, and they're getting involved in exercise. And that makes me so happy. I'm not a spring chicken. I'm gonna be 38 this summer. I wanna be able to run around with my kids when I'm 60, 70 years old. Maybe 80, 90, who knows. I wanna be able to keep up with them. I wanna coach their sports. I wanna be very active, because they're only four and six. I have a lot of years left, and they are 100% my why. 100%.

How to Follow and Support

Tom Rowland: Well, congratulations on the record. It's really cool. It's really cool to hear the story, and I really hope that this brings the awareness to this condition that you're hoping for. Is there any way that the people that are listening to this could help or support you in any way?

Gena Laielli: Well, if they ever wanted to donate to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, they would send a check to CHOP. I actually have all that information. And every January 31, just go black and white, because that's Omphalocele Awareness Day. I know next January, I'm gonna probably do something for Omphalocele Awareness Day, like I do every single year. It might not be a burpee marathon.

Tom Rowland: What's the significance of black and white?

Gena Laielli: It's the colors of it. There's a whole group called the mothers of omphaloceles and the fathers of omphaloceles, and they call each other "moo," like a cow. So, black and white.

Tom Rowland: Okay. Got it. And if people wanna go to your Instagram, or check out your burpee record or any of your workouts, is there a way that anybody can do that?

Gena Laielli: Yeah. We have a page, Gen Fitness Eats and More. Sometimes I post little clips on my Instagram story. You can also type in Gena Laielli — G-E-N-A Laielli, L-A-I-E-L-L-I — on Google, and you'll see all my Guinness things on there. Also, if you go to the Guinness World Records website, there's a little sports card thing there — me with this crazy face. Even my kids are like, "Mommy, why does your face look crazy?" It's just because I was in the moment of doing the burpee, and I looked shocked. But that was the picture that's on my Guinness certificate.

Tom Rowland: Right on. Alright. Well, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed hearing the story, and congratulations. And I'm so happy to hear that Emma's doing well now.

Gena Laielli: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Tom Rowland: Alright. You bet.

Gena Laielli: Stay safe and healthy, and hopefully this will all be done soon.

Tom Rowland: I know. Okay. Thanks so much.

Gena Laielli: Have a nice day. Thank you. Bye.