Borderline insanity': Sumo champ completes Bear Lake swim
By Lis Stewart | Posted: Monday, August 25, 2014 9:00 pm Herald Journal, Logan, Utah
Reprinted with Permission.
BEAR LAKE — Wind, rain and choppy water Monday didn’t stop a U.S. sumo champion from becoming the fourth person to officially swim the width of Bear Lake twice.
However, 44-year-old Kelly Gneiting said afterward that swimming 14 miles in open water was an endeavor he would not again undertake so lightly.
“Overwhelming,” he said when asked how it felt. “This was borderline insanity.”
With a storm front hanging over the area most of the day, Gneiting started his trip at 12:45 a.m., ending just after 5 p.m. With the short rest break he was allowed midway through on the east shore before going back to Cisco Beach on the west side, the entire trip took 16 hours, 13 minutes.
Gneiting set the Guinness World Record for the heaviest person to complete a marathon in the 2011 Los Angeles Marathon, weighing 400 pounds at the time. The Idaho native said while the world often views being big as a negative thing, he is out to prove that you can still be big and do what others do.
“To me, even though I’m 430 pounds, the fact of no one believing or even attempting to believe I can do something like this is really a motivation for me to prove it,” Gneiting said in a phone call from his Arizona home last week.
Sitting in the back seat of a pickup truck an hour after the swim was complete, still in his swim trunks and looking exhausted, Gneiting repeated the reason behind his endeavors like a mantra.
“This is not just about glorifying, for me,” he said. “This is about showing everybody that their weakness, or perceived weakness, doesn’t have to stop them from reaching their goals or doing what they’re supposed to do on planet Earth.”
A five -time U.S. sumo champion and native of Rigby, Idaho, who has competed in the World Sumo Championships 10 times, Gneiting is retired professionally. He says he competes about once a year and will coach his 16-year-old daughter and 14 other wrestlers at the World Sumo Championships in Taiwan this weekend.
He got into swimming two years ago with encouragement from a friend and spent time training for the Bear Lake swim by swimming laps across Bowl Lake in New Mexico, which is about 0.5 mile across.
He also says he spent plenty of time talking with Gordon Gridley, president of the Bear Lake Swimming Association, which offered support during the trip.
Gridley is the only Utahn so far to complete the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming, meaning he swam three famous marathon swims: the English Channel, Catalina Channel in Southern California and around Manhattan Island in New York.
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