If you hadn't heard, January 31st each year has been designated as "Backwards Day", an occasion to celebrate an inverse perspective. This could be anything from walking and talking backwards, to wearing clothes inside out, or even eating your meals starting with dessert!
Here are a selection of weird and wonderful world record achievements that have been set by doing things the wrong way round:
There's a whole community of retrograde runners, men and women who're constantly looking over their shoulders for what's ahead of them.
Fastest of them all is Ferdie Ato Adoboe, who ran a backwards 100m in just 13.6 seconds - not a lot slower than Usain Bolt!
Over greater distances other reversed runners excel, with D. Joseph James managing one mile in 6 minutes 2.35 seconds, and Xu Zhenjun earning a title over the marathon distance (26.2 miles), with a time of 3 hours 43 minutes 39 seconds:
Moses Lanham walks backwards in an entirely different way to these athletes - no turning of the head is necessary, as he holds the record for the largest external foot rotation! Moses is able to move each of his feet round to an angle of 120 degrees, and also holds a record for the fastest time to walk 20 metres with the feet facing backwards - 19.59 seconds.
Looking for something a little faster? Dave Coates reached a speed of 244.1 km/h (151.7 mph) on a motorcycle sitting with his back to the handlebars, while fellow petrolhead Darren Manning drove a Caterham 7 Fireblade kit car at 165.08 km/h (102.58 mph) in reverse. Of course, the car will then need to be parked - so call upon Ronny Wechselberger, who managed the tightest parallel parking in reverse, squeezing into a space just 35 cm longer than the car:
There's no need for an engine to set a speed record, though - the very appropriately-named Anders Backe took to the slopes, clocking a speed of 128.7 kmh (79.97 mph) while skiing backwards down the Vikersund Skiflying slope in Norway:
From the icy slopes, we move on to the world of words: The fastest time to spell 50 of them backwards is 1 minute 22.53 seconds by Shishir Hathwar of India, while Michele Santelia in Italy has typed out over 71 entire books completely in reverse - a total of 771,911 words, or 21,255,432 characters.
To finish on, we have just one word for you all: saippuakivikauppias. At 19 letters long and reading the same backwards as forwards, this Finnish word for a dealer of lye (caustic soda) is the world's longest palindromic word.
!yad sdrawkcab yojnE
