• Posted April 3, 2025

How Cory Booker Prepped His Body To Break 25-Hour Senate Speech Record

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker stood on the Senate floor and spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes this week, breaking the modern record for the longest Senate speech ever.

Senate rules allow a member who is recognized by the presiding officer to speak for as long as they wish, as long as they don't stop or sit down. The 55-year-old New Jersey Democrat started his speech Monday at 7 p.m. ET and didn’t stop until Tuesday night.

Booker did not take a single break to eat, drink or even use the bathroom.

“I think that had good and bad benefits. I definitely started cramping up from lack of water,” Booker told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday. “In the end, I was just trying to do something to stop my muscles from cramping.”

He beat the record set by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957, CNN reported.

Booker, who kept a Bible verse in his pocket, warned his fellow Senators about the harms he sees the Trump administration inflicting on the nation. His intent, he explained, was to disrupt normal Senate business for as long as he could, because "these are not normal times in our nation. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate."

Booker said he fasted and limited water for days before the speech to avoid needing a bathroom break.

Dr. Saju Mathew, a primary care physician and public health specialist at Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, would have advised him to do the opposite.

“You need enough nutrition and enough sleep,” Mathew told CNN. “And a week before, you need to start replenishing electrolytes, because you’re going to almost be in a comatose state when you deprive your body from fluids and nutrition for that long.”

Dr. James Gladstone, a sports medicine expert at Mount Sinai in New York, said he was surprised Booker didn't have cramps sooner.

“In some ways, what he did was an endurance race,” he said.

“But his preparation was definitely unorthodox,” Gladstone said. “Most athletes, for an endurance running race, would carb-load leading up to it, certainly hours before the race, and will hydrate to the max and hydrate during the course of the event.”

Other doctors warned about the risks of dehydration. 

“When you don’t have enough electrolytes to support your muscles and your blood volume, you get symptoms like that, and if it goes on too long – thankfully, he stopped at 25 hours – but really significant dehydration can affect your kidneys. It could affect urinary issues, and it can even cause you to faint,” Dr. Mishal Reja, a gastroenterologist and internal medicine physician at Extension Health in New York city, told CNN.

Reja also explained that athough Booker purposely avoided drinking a lot of fluids so he wouldn’t have to pee, physically resisting urges to go to the bathroom could also take a toll on the body.

“I don’t think it was exactly clear if he really needed to pee, but if he did and he held it, then that’s something where they call it ‘post-void obstruction,’ where you use all your muscles to hold in that urinary stream,” Reja said.

“If it gets over a certain level, it could be really dangerous, and you can have some severe bladder issues,” he added.

Now that the speech is over, Booker is recovering. Doctors recommended that he rehydrate slowly and eat easy-to-digest foods.

“An ideal diet would look something like a little bit of bone broth or a little bit of rice or vegetables, something that’s easily digestible, or bananas,” Reja said. “And then you replete the electrolytes and you replete the calories, because your energy stores and your glycogen stores in your body have essentially been depleted after 25 hours.”

Mathew said he hopes Booker gets some R&R.

“I hope for his sake that he has taken the next three days off and he is getting enough sleep and then getting his electrolytes back,” Mathew said.

Despite feeling tired, Booker told CNN, “my spirit is soaring. My body is definitely weary."

Asked if the speech was a preview of a presidential run in 2028, Booker told CNN, “I need to get re-elected. That’s my focus.”

More information

The U.S. Senate has more about filibusters.

SOURCE: CNN, April 2, 2025