The Nepali Soldier Who Descends 100 Stairs Faster Walking on His Hands Than Most People Can on Their Feet

Hari Chandra Giri can get down a flight of 100 stairs in well under a minute, without using his feet. The Nepal Army athlete descends stairs walking on his hands, and as of June 2026 he holds the Guinness World Record for doing it faster than anyone alive.

Between those records, Giri picked up two more: the fastest 10 metres walking on hands with a football gripped between the legs (4.49 seconds) and the fastest 50 metres doing the same (25.58 seconds), both set in May 2022. Four separate Guinness titles, all variations on the same skill, built on nearly two decades of unglamorous, repetitive practice that started as a childhood party trick. Nepal's Army sports centres have quietly produced a run of the country's stranger endurance records in recent years, and Giri's speciality is one of the narrowest: pure hand-locomotion, refined until stairs that would wind an average adult became his signature stage.

The 2023 record is the one with the best backstory for anyone who's visited Kathmandu Valley. Jamchen Vijaya Stupa sits atop Budhanilkantha hill, about 14 kilometres north of central Kathmandu, a newly built Buddhist monument reached by a genuinely strenuous hour-to-90-minute uphill walk, rewarded with a panoramic view over the entire valley. It's a serious hike even right-side up. Giri did it upside down, on his hands, faster than most visitors manage the same 75 steps the conventional way.

What's notable isn't just the raw speed, it's how evenly it scales. Each extra 25 steps adds roughly the time you'd expect from a hand-walker holding a steady pace, which is itself the remarkable part: most people's forearms and shoulders give out long before their legs would on a normal staircase. Guinness World Records has called his 100-stair descent his most dangerous stunt yet, given the risk of a fall gathering serious speed on a hand-walked descent rather than a controlled climb.

What this means for trekkers

If a Kathmandu stopover is part of your plan, our Kathmandu Valley cultural tour covers Budhanilkantha and the temples around it. For more of Nepal's stranger records and superlatives, we've also written about the country's living goddess and the world's highest bakery on the Everest trail.

Source: Guinness World Records, with additional reporting from myRepublica and Gulf Today.

Cover photo: Manoj K Shrestha via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).