It was a stiff competition.

A former US Marine broke the male world record for holding an abdominal plank — keeping the painful position for a staggering 8 hours, 15 minutes and 15 seconds, Guinness officials announced.

George Hood, 62, of Naperville, Illinois — who is also a retired Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory special agent — achieved the astounding fitness record in Chicago on Feb. 15, according to Guinness.

Hood set the same record once before, in 2011, when he held a plank for an hour and 20 minutes, according to CNN.

But when he tried to claim the title a second time in 2016, Mao Weidong from China beat him — remaining in the position for 8 hours, 1 minute and 1 second.

A determined Hood prepared for his next attempt by undergoing several training camps and intense fitness routines.

“It’s 4-5 hours a day in the plank pose,” he told CNN. “Then I do 700 push-ups a day, 2,000 sit-ups a day in sets of a hundred, 500 leg squats a day. For upper body and the arms, I do approximately 300 arm curls a day.”

In total, he did around 2,100 hours of planks to prepare for this month’s attempt — including one 2018 practice run in which he held the position for a whopping 10 hours and 10 minutes.

Hood said he won’t compete in another planking challenge — but now he wants to beat the Guinness record for the most push-ups completed in an hour. The existing record is 2,806.

“Anybody can do what I do,” he told the network.

“Everybody has to start somewhere. Every tree that’s planted has roots. Once that tree is planted and those roots start to grow, whether it be 30 seconds or a minute or 5 minutes or an hour [of holding a plank], you start repeating the process and taking care of your tree, it will grow and you will improve and you will actually get better.”