Riva Police Officer to Swim 50km Lake Cross: Training for Epic Challenge
For some time now, he has been gaining weight visibly, but between today and tomorrow he believes he will lose seven or eight kilos in a single stroke. Dietary miracles from a relentless gourmand? No way: it’s a matter of sport. Specifically, swimming. Between today and tomorrow, a police officer from Riva del Garda, Christian Sartori, will attempt to swim across the lake between the Trentino town and the Sirmione peninsula: about 50 kilometers of water. To store enough energy, he has followed a high-calorie diet: consuming between 5,000 and 7,000 calories daily. The goal is to increase body fat mass, which on the day of the crossing needs to fuel muscles and brain. He will burn so much energy that he will end up losing seven or eight kilos. All according to the instructions of the Polish-born dietitian-nutritionist Alina Suder. All that remains is to wish him good luck, especially because if he were forced to withdraw, what would he do with the kilos gained? How does he get rid of them?
The swimmer and the training
The swimmer attempting the marathon swim is a thirty-two-year-old police officer assigned to the Riva police station. He also plays basketball: competing in C2, with Giesse Riva. He has the stature of a basketball player: 1 meter 92 centimeters tall, a giant. For the past month and a half, he has been training hard: three days of swimming (fifteen kilometers at a time) and one day on mountain bike.
He will enter the water tonight, around 7 p.m., aiming to reach the Catullus caves in Sirmione. He will wear a wetsuit and fins, the same used by the marines of the San Marco battalion. The wetsuit is absolutely necessary if staying in the water for so long. Moreover, during the night, water temperature drops sharply.
He will swim freestyle: a pace of 56 strokes per minute is what he should be able to maintain for an hour straight, before taking a short rest and resuming another hour of swimming, and so on, for about twenty hours. During this long swim, he will be accompanied by three canoes and a motorboat. He will be assisted by volunteers from the Trentino rescue association and the Virtus rowing club. On the boat, a device connected to the satellite network will be in operation to give directional coordinates. «I do not intend to set any records», Sartori said, «but I aim to complete the crossing in a time between sixteen and twenty-two hours».
Historical records and risks
In August 1961, Vicentine Walter Destavola took the same route in 27 hours. Before him, the Padovan Amoretti took 23 hours and 52 minutes. Enormous times compared to the 21 hours and 58 minutes recorded in June 1997 by Marco Battaggia, a croupier at the Venice casino by profession and an extreme swimmer by passion, to cross the 60 kilometers of lake between Riva and Desenzano, also battling a storm.
In October 1999, Martin Streel, world record holder in extreme-distance swimming, took «only» 21 hours and 25 minutes to swim between Riva and Desenzano. He zigzagged forward, carried by currents: it was estimated that he covered over seventy kilometers. Currents and exhaustion are unpredictable: in 1987, a Bari lawyer ended up in Lazise, on the Veronese shore, instead of Desenzano — he lost his bearings.
