Eugene Kim doesn't need a chair.
Chairs are for the soft-minded, limp-legged weaklings who did not spend last summer in boot camp for the Marines. Chairs may be comfortable but are unnecessary for the senior tri-captain of the men's crew team, who wakes up at sunrise to go to work molding his legs into stout rowing machines.
Yes, a chair is nice. But all Kim needs is a clean space of wall and he'll be just fine.
Last Wednesday, this superior sitter shattered the Tufts athletics wall-sit record, which was previously held at 14 minutes by a member of the men's lacrosse team. The new bar-setting time? Let Kim sit himself against a wall at a 90-degree angle and go watch an episode of your favorite sitcom or start a load of laundry.
If you come back 25 minutes and two seconds later, he'll still be there.
"The week before, I had done a wall-sit for five or six minutes, and I figured, ‘Why not try breaking the record?'" Kim said. "So I did five and then thought I could do another five, and then another and another and another. By the end, my legs still didn't even hurt; I was more bored than anything else."
Kim's record-breaking sit came at the end of a long morning workout that included over 45 minutes of sprints and a leg-intensive weight routine of squats and deadlifts. Athletic trainer Marten Vandervelde then challenged the team, as he had done last spring with the men's lacrosse team that went on to win the national title, to a team-wide wall-sit-off.
All the other participants bowed out in less than five minutes, but Kim just kept going, leaving his teammates dumbfounded and Vandervelde glancing at his stopwatch in disbelief.
"He's in training to be a Marine, so we all already knew that he was a badass," sophomore Matt Parsons, one of Kim's teammates, said. "But even I didn't expect that he would last that long. I mean, I could barely stand before the competition even began! He's ridiculous."
Vandervelde, who has worked at Tufts for two years, cannot remember exactly which lacrosse player set the previous record, but odds are that it was stocky senior T.C. Neuhs, who the Tufts trainer described as a "bulldog."
"Legend has it that it was T.C., but I can't say for sure," Vandervelde said. "T.C is a very, very strong guy. I can guarantee, though, that no one [at Tufts] ever sat for 14 minutes straight before that; what would be their motivation?"
Kim says that he is open to all challengers to his wall-sitting throne, and that he is confident that he can increase the record to 40 or even 45 minutes.
"Oh, I could have went way longer," Kim said. "My back really hurt more than my legs by the end. I figured that I was already ahead of the record by 11 minutes, so I'd give [the previous record holder] something that he could strive for. Plus, I was holding all of my teammates up for breakfast."
Neuhs could not be reached for comment before press time, but Vandervelde has no doubt that the lacrosse team will mount a challenge to Kim in the coming weeks.
"The lacrosse team prides itself as being the strongest athletes at Tufts," he said. "I think Eugene should flaunt this for as long as he can, because I'm pretty sure it will be broken within two weeks."
Kim, who this weekend will compete for the first time this year with his team at the Quinsigamond Snake Regatta, is prepared for all comers. "I'm waiting and ready," he said. "Any wall, any place, any time."
