A former high school vice principal just held a single exercise position longer than most people spend at the gym in a week — and she's 61 years old.

  • 5 hours — DonnaJean Wilde's new plank world record, set at the World Senior Games
  • 4 hr 30 min 11 sec — her previous Guinness World Record, set in March 2024
  • 12 grandchildren and 5 children in her family
  • 1,575 push-ups she completed in a single 60-minute record attempt

From Wrist Injury to World Record

DonnaJean Wilde, a retired teacher and vice principal from Alberta, Canada, didn't set out to become one of the most durable athletes on the planet. She started planking after a wrist injury sidelined her from running and weightlifting.

"I couldn't run. I could hardly walk down the road with a sling, but I could plank," Wilde told Impact Magazine, as reported by the Times of India. "It was such a pivotal moment for me that day. It just changed my life."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, informal family tests of how long she could hold the position crept up to two hours. That result convinced her the record was within reach.

Building Toward Five Hours

Wilde's training combines planks with push-ups, weightlifting, running, and dead hangs — the last of which she credits with improving her grip despite chronic pain and numbness in her hands and arms. In preparation for her first record, she sometimes practiced planking for up to six hours a day.

On March 21, 2024, she held a plank for 4 hours, 30 minutes and 11 seconds at Magrath High School, her former workplace, beating fellow Canadian Dana Glowacka's previous mark by more than 10 minutes. Guinness World Records) recognized it as the longest time in an abdominal plank position by a woman.

"I actually still can't believe it. It feels like a dream." — DonnaJean Wilde, after her first world-record plank

A Record That Keeps Moving

Two years later, Wilde pushed her own mark even further, holding the position for a full five hours at the World Senior Games — a 30-minute improvement on a record that was already considered extraordinary.

The feat drew cheers from the crowd at the venue and a wave of amazement online, where fitness fans have marveled at an endurance athlete reaching her peak well past the age most competitive strength sports consider retirement.

Wilde isn't slowing down. In 2024 she also set a (since-broken) record of 1,575 push-ups completed within 60 minutes, beating the existing mark of 1,207. Her advice to anyone chasing a goal that feels out of reach is as plain as her training regimen: "Keep trying and keep practicing." At 61, holding a five-hour plank, she's still proving it works.

Why Her Age Is the Real Record

Most of the athletes who chase extreme endurance plank records are decades younger. Guinness World Records' own history of the women's plank title notes that the mark has previously been held by a teenager and a middle-aged mother — but rarely, until Wilde, by someone well into her sixties.

That makes her approach to training as notable as the record itself. Wilde isn't doing a casual core routine; she is following a structured, multi-year strength program more typical of a professional athlete half her age, built around the idea that the body's capacity for extreme endurance doesn't have to shrink with time if it's trained deliberately.

Her own history also undercuts the idea that this kind of achievement requires a lifetime of elite fitness. Wilde came to competitive planking through an injury that initially looked like it would end her training altogether, not through a childhood in gyms. The wrist injury that blocked her from running and lifting weights became, in her own telling, the opening that let her discover an exercise she could push further than almost anyone else alive.

For now, the five-hour mark stands as the benchmark the next challenger will have to beat — and given Wilde's pattern of breaking her own records, it may not be the last one she sets herself.