Mauro Giaconia, 37, won a place in Guinness World Records for the longest swim in a lagoon after he covered 101km in a marathon endurance test in the vast sea-water swimming pool of a South American hotel.
The swimmer described yesterday how his tongue grew numb after hours of pushing through salt water. He expects to lose his sense of taste for up to two months – "but that usually happens with sea water," he said.
Mr Giaconia struggled to keep swimming on course in the pool, which is itself a record holder – it is the world's largest at 1,013m (3,324ft) long. It covers an area of 20 acres and reaches as deep as 35m.
Lifeguards switched on the lights at night, but he eventually opted to swim in the dark. "I kept going with a lot of enthusiasm to do the task," he said.
He describes himself on his website as a sportsman who "likes extreme and challenging sports, even if they mean hours of solitude". He was recently voted sportsman of the year in Palermo, Sicily.
He was only 14 years old when he began long-distance swimming in Palermo. After briefly "flirting" with kite surfing, boxing and cycling, he returned to his real passion of swimming and has spent the past eight years setting endurance records.
He has swum marathons over 12 and 24 hours in both swimming pools and the open sea, from the gulf of Palermo to the Strait of Gibraltar.
He warmed up for the record in San Alfonso del Mar, on the west coast of Chile, 80km from the capital, Santiago, by swimming three 24-hour races in Austria, Italy and the United States.
In 2005, a group of 20 Finnish swimmers broke a world record for 24-hour swimming that had stood for 23 years. In a relay, they logged 184,994 metres during a 24-hour period, breaking the former record of 182,807m by a group from New Zealand.
The team swimmers were not quite up to Mr Giaconia's feat of endurance. They swum on average 9,250m per swimmer, but there was no exact information on how much water each individual swimmer covered.
BACKGROUND
MARATHON swimming is an endurance sport defined by the International Swimming Federation to be a swim of least 10km in length, and swimmers cannot use wet suits.
While a 10km open water race was added to the Olympic medal stakes in the 2008 Beijing games, record-breaking swimmers pursue longer records in tougher conditions.
On 25 August, 1875, Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim the English Channel without the use of artificial aids. He swam from Dover to Calais in less than 22 hours, smeared in porpoise oil, covering a zig-zag course across the Channel measured at over 39 miles (64 km) long. Modern swimmers have cut the crossing distance to about 21 miles (32km).
In 1987 the American swimmer Lynne Cox famously swam across the Bering Strait between the US and the USSR, approximately 50 miles.
