Ring in the Cold
We’re about to ring in the cold. First with ocean water, and then with a blast of winter.
New Year’s Day brings a traditional swim, a polar plunge, a shock to the system that some say cures all ills, especially when repeated with religious fervor like the growing legion of people who wade into forty-degree water with impunity. Mary one of them, and for two or three years a while back she swam year-round. She will again lead the charge in this pandemic year, water and air temperature both likely to hover just above forty, well below anything I’ve experienced.
“Water temp of forty-one is considered an official ice swim,” she says. “There’s a whole open water community that pays close attention to this.”
Each new year, we attract a small cadre of people to join us. A group of friends willing to brave freezing temperatures to kick off the year in a rush of pure adrenaline. Our group not the official L Street Brownies who gather at their bath house in Southie for a traditional swim that’s been going on over a hundred years. No, ours a quick dip in Pleasure Bay near Castle Island. We’ve tried a few other locations and settled on this protected beach after one of our swimmers cut her leg on a hidden piling. We like to say to others interested in joining that if the cold doesn’t kill you, then being speared by a wooden piling surely will.
“The people who swim the English Channel tend to have natural layers on them,” Mary explains.
“You’d have to,” I think. To swim eleven miles with nothing but a speedo and bathing cap in fifty-degree water. Not to mention tide, and current, and inclement weather that all add to the distance. I recently read about a deep-water fisherman who survived six hours in mid-forty degree water, his crew and partner succumbing after just a few minutes. This unusual Icelander able to swim, fully clothed, for hours in water that should have killed him, his core somehow naturally protected from the cold. He suffered only mild hypothermia upon reaching shore, still able to walk another three miles to safety. A big man, but not fat, his body perfectly suited for the ordeal. He now dismissively enjoys hero status in a small community where he leads the local charge to teach every child to swim.
Heck, our up-and-coming swim may not even constitute swimming at all for the dozen or so of us who participate.
“How long do you swim?” People ask Mary.
“Not long, a few minutes,” her response. “Sometimes not even that.”
Some just dip. I like to swim out and back, ten strokes, enough to make me feel like I’m actually swimming, in January, on the first day of the year, to kick the whole thing off with a rush you can’t find anywhere else. Wim Hof swears by it, the man who made ice baths famous, which is a whole other thing we’ve not yet tried, but whose followers swear by the medicinal benefit.
“It resets my whole mental well-being,” our friend James says of Hof. So much so that he starts every day with an ice cold shower. “The rush is unbeatable.”
We all need something like that. Especially this year. Something to reset not only our calendars but our mental health. Maybe I’ll swim twenty strokes, or thirty, so much so that I might even start to acclimate, like we have a bit to this virus. All of us trying to acclimate to a new harsh environment. Swimmers who do this with regularity talk about bodies adapting to the cold, our biology shutting down extremities, instinctively heating the core enough so to survive the madness. Maybe a bit of that is happening to us now as we protect our spirit by ignoring the extraneous things around us and focus on the core of our being.
“Your hands and feet get numb, then your face hurts as you lose all feeling. But you can swim,” Mary reports of the physiology. “The big danger comes later, with the eventual drop in body temperature that occurs after you get out.” She explains a phenomenon when cold blood from your extremities makes its way back into your core and the whole system gets upended under falling body temperatures. I’ve not suffered this exactly as I don’t stay in long enough.
“You need easy-on clothing to slip into,” she says. “The shivering alone enough to make buttons and laces impossible.” I wonder what our days will be like when the blood of our lives rushes back in. Will we shiver out of sorts at the surge back to normal activity, not remembering what it was like?
A number of the past years have seen unseasonably warm days, though we can’t count on that this year. And why should we? This day the start of months of pandemic winter that some say promises unforeseen hardship as a second wave washes over us the like a flooding tide. This year, we are applying cold-water therapy to prepare us for the certain to be long pre-vaccination months ahead — a first line of defense, a way to convince the body and the mind that anything is possible, that we will endure.
My cousin Elizabeth shared some advice she recently received from a fellow cold water swimmer. “Ready yourself and go in with open heart.”
I plan to take this advice as I don a light neoprene to protect my otherwise reedy frame. Strong and brave, Mary need nothing more than her Wonder Woman suit — she and her friend Jane seemingly supernatural in these conditions.
There’s a reason that everyone’s smiling in all the pictures you see of open water swimmers. Something magical happens in these waters, something trans-formative. If you haven’t seen My Octopus Teacher, stream it. It’s a wonderful movie about a man using cold water swimming to help him crawl out of mid-life blues.
Everyone’s telling us that this winter’s going to be rough. If you’re worried, join us this Friday at about eleven for a few strokes in Pleasure Bay. Or jump in wherever you are and experience a completely natural way to reset your clock and calendar at the same time.
