Would you do it after him? In 2006, Scott Bell earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest barefoot walk ever over hot coals: 80 meters of glowing hot coals, at 650 degrees Celsius. Eight months later he broke that record with another firewalk, this time 100 meters.

Now he runs an events company in Great Britain. guiding other people over hot coals and the occasional bed of broken glass as part of team-building exercises and charity events. But only walking one and a half meters over 2,000 LEGO bricks? Bell usually has someone else on his team do it.

“Of the three that I do regularly, before I step on the LEGO I think, 'Oh, this is going to be a bit uncomfortable, this is going to hurt,'” he says, laughing.

LEGO walking is becoming increasingly popular at charity events, Lego-themed events, team building workshops, on YouTube and even cabaret acts. It's exactly what it sounds like: walking barefoot on a pile or path of LEGO bricks, usually in different sizes. But unlike fire walking or even glass walking, walking over a set of L EGO actually hurts. Why? And an even better question: what do we get out of it?

L EGO , the stackable plastic brick we all know and love, debuted in 1958 and since then, people around small children have experienced the stupidly painful shock of stepping on a stray L EGO with bare feet. By this century it was well known enough that, according to Know Your Meme, the extremely vindictive phrase "I hope you step on an L EGO " became popular in chat groups and comics starting around 2009.

But the first intentional L EGO walks appeared on YouTube about four years ago.

In June 2014, a video store in Portland, Maine, held a promotion: brave the 10-foot-long " L EGO Firewalk" and buy The Lego Movie for half price. The promotion only lasted an hour and several dozen people, including children, attended, but Star Trek's George Takei posted a photo of the Firewalk and a link to the store, Bull Moose, on his Facebook page. Within a few days, the photo had earned more than 186,000 likes and been shared more than 76,600 times (four years later, that figure had risen to 257,000 likes and 150,000 shares).

The Firewalk went viral and within a few weeks other stores and events across the country were hosting similar walks. Sir Troy's Toy Kingdom in North Canton, Ohio, the largest independent toy store in the state and something of a regional mecca for L EGO fans, was one of the first and most sincere adopters. Not long after Bull Moose's event, the store was contacted by a local library who was hosting a showing of The Lego Movie in the park; they wanted to know if Sir Troy's could help them get one for the display. The shop built an 8-foot-long and 21-foot-wide board, piled high with 40 pounds of Lego, mostly bricks, worth about $1,000.

“Now that we have this long walk, where are we going to store it? That's why we decided to explain it in store,” says Heather Marks, head of marketing at Sir Troy's. The Firewalk is now almost as popular as the working L EGO train set also in the store, and is a permanent fixture at in-store birthday parties. Because it is somewhat portable, they can take the walk to events and festivals; at a recent meeting, more than 300 people took on the challenge. Marks also said they installed a huge commercial sink in the back of the store to wash the thousands of L EGOs . People drive from hours away just to walk barefoot on sharp, pointy pieces of plastic – or rather, for their children to walk on them: “The welcome was very warm, because this was the revenge of every parent.”

This year has seen a surge in L EGO walking, largely encouraged by some high-profile bids for world records. In January, Russell Cassevah, a vlogger and Lego fan from Chesapeake, Virginia, who goes by the name Brainy Bricks, ran 110 feet to raise money for a local charity that provides Lego to children in hospitals. Then, just a few months later, in March, hugely popular YouTube bro-tainer Dude Perfect ran nearly 150 feet to earn a Guinness Book of World Records award. But even before the month was over, the hosts of Lego's own YouTube show, Rebrickulous, walked an astonishing 1,264 feet, 6 inches, on a spiral path of Lego pieces, blowing away Dude Perfect's record. What else could Brainy Bricks do other than walk the path of plastic pain again?

On April 21, Cassevah—sweat beading on his brow and teeth clenched—ran an incredible 800 meters on a square circuit of red four-by-two Lego bricks in front of a cheering crowd and a Guinness cinema at Philly Brickfest. World record judge. By the end his feet were violently red, bleeding and swollen. “With each brick there were eight chances for me to hit a corner and that's how it felt,” he told YouTube channel Beyond Bricks. “My feet are on fire right now,” he said as a medic wrapped them in bandages.

NEW WORLD RECORD! Walking barefoot on LEGO bricks

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No further attempt has been made since then. Cassevah said he wanted to set the bar so high that no one would try again. But the challenge is offered less widely at events around the world. British event organizer Scott Bell has been offering Lego walking for almost three years, but he says it has become a lot more popular in the past 12 months, especially at charity fundraisers. “The charities like it because it sounds safer than the fire or the glass walks,” he acknowledges. People, he says, instinctively shy away from that because everyone has burned or cut themselves and they know it hurts. “That fear aspect is so ingrained that they've been taught their whole lives that this is going to hurt, even though logically they know it won't hurt,” he says. “I think with Lego, because it's a toy at the end of the day, it's not as scary... because you don't bleed or get blisters with Lego... the risk factor doesn't seem as high.”

And yet, as Bell says, it's the one thing he does regularly that's actually smart. World record holder Cassevah, in response to a question about how he prepared for his second walk, said: “It hurt so much, there is no exercise for that.” Sideshow comedian Bazoo the Kloun, a man who juggles balls of barbed wire and lets people staple dollar bills to his chest, said on Instagram that he keeps telling people that walking on Lego actually hurts more than walking on broken glass, but no one believes him .

So why does walking with Lego hurt, while walking with fire and glass does not? Physics and anatomy offer some clues.

Bell says that for fire walking, he and his team use hardwood logs, which they let burn for about 45 minutes to an hour until they are just embers. Although the coals will indicate a temperature between 930 and 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, that's not the level of heat you'll feel walking over them, provided you don't stop for a selfie. Hot coals, Bell says, are very slow conductors of heat, and the time the foot is in contact with them is too short to cause damage. This does not mean that there is no risk of burns. Bell says he suffered severe blisters when he took his first world record walk, and in 2016 more than 30 people suffered burns on their feet during an event led by a motivational speaker. Tony Robbins. Similar incidents can be attributed to improperly prepared coal, according to Bells.

Glass walking, which seems incredibly painful and perhaps most similar to walking with Legos, can actually be relatively painless. To prepare a glass walk, the pieces are typically broken to a fairly small size, then poured onto the flat surface and tapped together to ensure a more uniform walking surface. Once the walker enters the path, the glass shifts and flattens further, and the walker distributes his or her weight evenly over many potentially sharp points – the 'bed of nails' effect. This means that not enough pressure is applied to any part to break the skin or even cause damage to the many pain-sensitive nerves in the feet.

Lego is – for now at least – made of ABS plastic, an extremely hard and durable terpolymer plastic. They are built to survive intense levels of abuse without shattering: a single two-by-two brick can withstand up to 4,240 Newtons, an incredible amount of pressure. That equates to a mass of about 950 pounds, and it would take 375,000 other rocks stacked 2.75 miles high to exert the same kind of pressure.

So if you step on a single Lego brick, with its sharp corners and pointy bits and no give at all, the force has nowhere to go except back to your very sensitive foot. (And people's feet are very sensitive: despite the fact that we stand on them all the time, feet, along with hands, lips and genitals, are among the most sensitive parts of our body, reacting immediately to painful stimuli and The The bottom of each foot is filled with up to 200,000 individual sensory receptors, which continuously send information back to our brains and allow us to subconsciously adjust our gaits and steps as necessary.)

That's why it hurts to step on just one L EGO . It hurts less to kick on many points at the same time because the pressure is no longer applied to a single point, but rather distributed over several points. It still stings because, unlike glass, which shifts and conforms easily under your feet, even weight distribution across Lego bricks is unlikely; they just don't flatten out.

“Glass moves when you stand on it, whereas with L EGO you get one that stands proudly and refuses to go down,” says Bell. This also explains why children seem to be more resistant to the Lego walking pain, something that parents around the world have clocked, simply because they weigh less and therefore exert less pressure, says Bell.

But there's another question about why L EGO walks are becoming popular: why would anyone want to subject themselves to walking on sharp, pointy pieces of plastic? Why would we do something so painful? One answer is that it makes us better people