Sticking Around for the Record : Fund-raiser: Gary Stewart boarded his pogo stick Friday, hoping to break his world record of 130,077 jumps. Twenty hours later, he had 177,737.

Gary Stewart of Cincinnati had a lot of ups and downs Friday and Saturday--more than 170,000 of them.

Stewart, the world pogo-stick jumping champion, climbed aboard his custom-made stick outside of a Beach Boulevard Burger King at 2:37 p.m. Friday, determined to break his world record of 130,077 consecutive jumps. A little more than 20 hours later--shortly before 11 a.m. Saturday--he jumped into the Guinness Book of World Records again with 177,737 repetitions.

“My ankles are extremely sore,” Stewart said from his hotel room Saturday night. “I have trouble walking--steps kill me. But I’m happy about it.”

Stewart, a medical student at the University of Cincinnati, set the record during a promotional fund-raiser to introduce actor Paul Newman’s salad dressing to Burger King restaurants. Burger King pledged 10 cents for each of Stewart’s jumps to Cities in Schools Inc., a nationwide dropout-prevention program. The pledge was matched by Newman and his company, Newman’s Own Inc.

Stewart attributed his pogo-stick jumping success to his custom-made pogo stick, which he said was firmer than an ordinary stick and, because it didn’t propel him too high into the air, allowed for more repetitions per minute.

While Stewart was happy to break the record, he said he would have quit soon after reaching the 150,000-jump plateau--his goal for Saturday’s event--had it not been for the restaurant promotion.

“It was just a huge production,” Stewart said. “It was orchestrated, and Burger King had something planned for 10:30 (a.m.), so I had to go until 10:30. I was dead by then. I was dying.”

Besides the charitable aspect of the event, Stewart said he had another motivation for attempting to break his record.

“The first time I did it in 1985, they put down my name (in the book) as Guy Stewart instead of Gary,” he said. “When I went to the ceremony in New York, I talked to (Guinness Book of World Records author) Mr. (Ross) McWhirter, and he said they’d correct it, but they never did. That was a major reason I did it again. Being in the Guinness Book of World Records was my childhood dream.”

Stewart said he was uncertain whether he would attempt to break the pogo-stick jumping record again, but added that he might try for a Guinness record in another category.

“The record height for having a grape dropped into your mouth is 380 feet,” he said. “Maybe I can do that.”