The 48-year-old Italian endurance athlete arrived in the town of Al Qala’ on Wednesday afternoon after five days crossing the desert in extreme conditions.
As a result of his finish, he became the first man in the UAE to the cross the Tropic of Cancer.
“It was the hardest, most incredible, toughest adventure I’ve ever accomplished,” Max told Sport360. “It was a trip to hell.”
“When I started on the Saudi border I realised all my calculations were wrong. The quality of the sand was weak. My feet were going down through the sand for 8-10 centimeters. It was an extreme physical effort.”
In addition to the miscalculations, two of Max’s support cars were caught up in severe conditions which meant he drifted nearly 35 km away from his team on the second day.
“I kept going, moving further and further away from the cars. It was a big mess. Usually I was able to cover 80km-100km in 24 hours through any conditions. During the trip, to cover 1km was one hour,” said Max.
“You have to keep checking the GPS, and the right calculations of your food, drink and energy to be able to understand the distance. Through all this, there is the big question mark – ‘can the team find me when we decided we had to meet?’
“During the night, it was impossible to continue because the quality of sand was too dangerous. In the evening I would take one or two hours rest during the sunset, and then I moved alone.
“It was difficult to find the moonlight as it started to rain, sandstorm or thunder during the night. You can start to hallucinate and have a totally different perspective of what is the truth. You start to see stuff that doesn’t exist because you are tired.”
Managing these different scenarios meant Max had to change his strategy in order to complete his quest, which he did by discovering camel footprints on his final day trekking through the sand dunes.
“I decided that I had to change, and keep walking as much as possible during the night because of weather conditions,” said Max.
“I was getting lost because the quality of the sand dunes was impossible to climb. If you have to climb one sand dune, you have to follow the line. You’re moving following the direction, and it’s bringing you far away from your line. It is here I found the prints and that brought me 10km from Oman.”
It was only a few kilometers later that he finally reached civilization and confirmed his name in the record books as the first to achieve this memorable feat.
