Today I joined nearly three thousand people in a field above Peel to attempt a world record, and I can now say, with a straight face, that I am a world record holder in Pilates. Sort of.
The setting was the point of it all. Knockaloe Farm in Patrick was home to the largest civilian internment camp in the world during the First World War, and among the thousands of men held there was one Joseph Pilates. It was at Knockaloe, watching the Island’s cats stretch and studying the mechanics of movement, that he began shaping the exercise system that now carries his name and is practised by millions around the world. A century on, the Pilates community came home.
The headline attempt was to stage the largest Pilates class ever held, with the record standing at 3,486 participants, set in Turkey in 2013. In the end 2,804 of us took to our mats, a remarkable turnout for a small Island but agonisingly short of the mark. The consolation, and it is a genuine one, is that before the main class began, the same crowd smashed the record for the most people performing a standing roll down simultaneously for one minute, sweeping past the previous best of 250 by more than two and a half thousand. The Guinness adjudicators were on hand to make it official.
The class itself, led by instructor Hannah Storey, included some of the original exercises Joseph Pilates first developed on that very ground over a hundred years ago, which lent the whole thing a satisfying circularity. The turnout was suitably eclectic, ranging from the Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Minister to John Rhys-Davies, several thousand enthusiasts of every age and ability, and one accountant in a light blue tracksuit whose warm-up attire drew more comment than his technique deserved.
Credit is due to Ramsey Crookall and 34Moves, who organised the day in aid of Island charities alongside a wellness festival and charity village. Beyond the records, the event told a story the Isle of Man should tell more often, of how a place of hardship produced an idea that went on to improve lives across the globe. Knockaloe has always deserved to be better known. On Sunday, briefly and gloriously, it was the centre of the Pilates world.
Charlton Krentz 