Come On In, the Water’s COLD
Meet the extreme athletes at this subzero winter swim fest.
'Idon’t want to scare you, but if you don’t have a little anxiety about being out there, don’t go out,” says Greg O’Connor to the 93 swimmers who have committed to launching themselves into a lap pool that has been carved into thick ice. “It means you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
It’s a Saturday morning in late February 2020 at the Memphremagog Winter Swim Festival, held over two days at Lake Memphremagog in Newport, Vermont.
O’Connor, 51, the safety director for the annual festival, is holding a briefing inside a tavern that doubles as a marshalling area. The popularity of ice swimming has spiked in recent years, so about half the field of swimmers is new.
As the only sub-zero meet in North America, the Winter Swim Fest makes its own rules. The frigid ‘pool’ is limited to two lanes and 25 metres. Races range from 25 to 200 metres and include various strokes and relays. While parka-clad volunteers clock times, competitors’ race attire must be chillingly confined to a cap, goggles, and a standard swimsuit.
This set- up means no tumble turns. “If you turn wrong, you end up under the ice,” O’Connor says. No holding the ladder or the wall too long at the end. “Your hand can freeze to it.” And no matter what, stay in touch with how you’re feeling. “You can go downhill really fast.”
It started as a joke in the winter of 2014. Race director Phil White, then in his mid-60s, posted a photo of himself on Facebook standing on the ice of Lake Memphremagog with a onemetre circular saw and the phrase “Anybody want to go swimming?”
Marathon swimmer and race organiser Darren Miller saw the post and called to ask, “Are you serious?” One year later, 40 hardy swimmers turned up for the first event, and over the next half decade participation doubled with little obvious reward at stake. Bragging rights and pool records aside, the top finishers receive little more than Vermont maple syrup and homemade beef jerky.
After the briefing, several swimmers around me chatter nervously about how maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I can empathise. A warm-water marathon swimmer, I’ve signed up for the 25-metre breaststroke. In less than five hours, I will be forcing myself into the frigid water.
Cold-water swimming is considered ‘ice swimming’ when the water temperature is 5° C or less. It’s not easy to be in water that cold for very long. While it takes about 30 minutes for hypothermia to set in, you can feel sluggish and winded far faster.
The Winter Swim Festival – where the water temperature is -1°C – sets the time limit for its longest events at
four minutes. But that hasn’t stopped people from going longer elsewhere. Last year’s Winter Swimming World Championships, in Bled, Slovenia, hosted more than 1000 swimmers from 36 countries and included a one-kilometre race that took people between 18 and 34 minutes to complete. Extremists push things even further by completing ice miles – about 50 per cent longer.
At Lake Memphremagog, the lineup contains some ice milers – notably Elaine K. Howley, who has also earned the triple crown of swimming (crossing Catalina Channel, the English Channel and circumnavigating Manhattan). Competitors range in age from 12 to 77 and run the gamut from ultra-runners to guys who’ve had cancer and heart attacks, and
even some who aren’t all that nuts about going in water over their heads.
Plenty of high-profile cold-water advocates, like Wim Hof (the Dutch extreme athlete known for his abilities to withstand freezing temperatures) and Ross Edgley (the British ultra-marathon sea swimmer) espouse the health benefits of exposing yourself to extremely cold water. But the diverse groups of people who have turned up in Vermont seem driven by something more communal. They have cheeky team names like the Buckeye Bluetits and Boston’s L-Street Brownies, who sport T-shirts with the slogan ‘When L freezes over’.
After a few hours of competition, some of the shorter events give way to the 200-metre freestyle. About 30 swimmers line up inside the tavern,
including Louise Hyder-Darlington, who stares out the door into snow. “It’s focus time,” she says under her breath, unsmiling.
The shock of the cold can hit hard, make your heart beat faster, and literally take your breath away. Rick Born, 57, a returning Winter Swim Festival contender, admits that getting in “feels like someone took a large steel band and clenched it around your chest”. That can make you involuntarily gasp for air and suck in water.
The more often you get into cold water, the more you can temper that response, says Michael Tipton, a professor at the Extreme Environments Laboratory at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Even five to ten three-minute immersions within a short period of time can cut down the involuntary reaction.
In longer events, the next challenge that hits you, Tipton explains, is “the cooling of the superficial nerves and muscles, part icularly in the arms.”
Swimmer Thomas Young-Bayer, 40, says, “Your muscles get really cold and stop doing what you ask them to. It’s like swimming through jelly.”
Even for ice milers and openwater champions, the 200 metres in this -1°C water is no joke. Two of the fastest competitors all day, Christopher Graefe, 45, and Steve Rouch, 35, speed through the first 100, but by the last 25, even they start slowing down. (Rouch wins in a swift 2:38.36.)
Ice swimming reveals your vulnerabilities quickly. If you haven’t had good sleep or good food, you feel fatigued faster. The edge of your physical and mental capacity seems closer. “I think it’s more mental than physical,” says Howley. You need to focus on what you’re doing and how you’re feeling.
Even getting in the water is mental – working through the challenge is part of the reward. Another reward is in the post-race rush. “There’s a feeling of being alive that’s hard to put into words that the cold amplifies,” says Born.
Suddenly cooling your skin cues your body to release a flood of mood- and energy-boosting chemicals, explains Tipton. “You become active and alert, and that can last for some time after you leave the water.”
That may help swimmers tough out unpleasant sensations. “The first five minutes can be so painful and you think, I don’t want to do this,” says Talbott Crowell, 52, who has competed here for the past five years. “But
GETTING IN “FEELS LIKE SOMEONE TOOK A LARGE STEEL BAND AND CLENCHED IT AROUND YOUR CHEST”
when you’re [ice] swimming training, within ten minutes your body goes numb and there’s this adrenaline and a thrill. I don’t understand it, but it’s incredible.”
After lunch, volunteers with skimmers harvest the thin layer of ice that has crusted over the pool. Next is the 50-metre freestyle. More than 50 people are participating.
Shivering swimmers are escorted into the recovery area, a small, warm building with sofas, blankets and buckets of room-temperature water to gently thaw your hands and feet. You can’t warm up too fast, or the cold blood in your extremities will return to your core too quickly, lowering your body temperature and blood pressure, which may cause fainting and heart palpitations. Recovery is
an individual thing, depending on the day, your body, and how long you swam. It might take ten minutes, maybe 20, maybe 60.
By about 2.30pm, the energy in the warming room shifts as fatigue sets in. “Normally when we ice-swim, you do it once and you have that rush,” says Graefe. “But here, we’re doing it again and again. It just becomes exhausting,” he says.
People start to drop out of their races. Ice swimming is tiring, yet nobody would really call this conventional exercise. What passes for ‘rigorous training’ might consist of a ten-minute dip and maybe a sledgehammer or an axe to create the training spot if your local pond freezes over. And maybe that’s part of the appeal. “It’s a fairly portable, or quasi-accessible,
means of doing something really outrageous that looks really hard,” says Howley.
I grew more anxious as we approached go time, worried about how fast I could get my breath under control once the cold shock hit.
Finally the time comes. My heart beats faster than usual as volunteers escort me onto the slippery ice deck. They help me kick off my shoes and peel off my DryRobe swim parka and thermal tights.
My lane mate, ultra-swimmer and ultra-runner Derek Tucker, 49, and I descend wooden steps on either side of the pool and stand on a submerged platform that runs between them. We fist-bump, then grab the ice-crusted rail behind us in a set position. Someone shouts “Go” and we’re off. Within a few strokes I’m able to duck my head
under the water. My 25-metre race takes all of 25.97 seconds – and even though Tucker beats me to the wall, I finish tingling and ecstatic. I can’t stop grinning.
The hallmark of this festival, as much as it is the ice pool itself, is the wrap – the move a volunteer does with a towel or giant robe to bundle the swimmer back up when they emerge from the water. Now it’s my turn to feel it, as the volunteers make sure my frozen feet get into my shoes and my robe is zipped.
Earlier, I spoke with one of the young up-and-comers in the sport, the Dutch athlete Fergil Hesterman, 28, who described the ice-swimming community as “one big family that helps each other out”. It’s easy to feel what he means.
My time placed me tenth out of 21
women – and yet I spent the rest of the day feeling victorious. I’d tapped into the mind-over-matter part of the sport, which is incredibly satisfying.
Towards the end of the day, more names get crossed out. By dinnertime, it’s like Christmas night, people strolling around in their pyjamas (wear your PJs and you get a free shot of vodka) and feeling the effects of adrenaline fatigue, of pride, and of being with people who totally get you.
The next day, the temperature remains low. That’s lucky, because warmer weather caused the water at the recent British Ice Swimming Championships to hit a balmy 6°C – too warm to be considered an ice swim. At least one extremist, Lewis Pugh, a Brit ish- South African endurance swimmer and activist, is embracing that sad fact by doing swims in places like the North Pole to bring attention to global warming.
The final event is a set of spirited relays. There’s a flurry of activity as swimmers and volunteers race around to coordinate who’s about to go into the water, and to make sure everyone exiting the pool is wrapped and cared for. Choruses of “Sorry! Sorry!” and “Go! Go!” mingle in the air while volunteers shuff le dry, warm clothes around on deck.
Cheers erupt everywhere – for your team, the other team, the volunteers. I’m cheering too. It’s all, as Tucker once warned me, so silly and unnecessary, and yet energising and fun and empowering to watch.
“I think the sport is growing because it connects us to a real feeling of being alive,” says Margaret Gadzic, 41, a soft-spoken swimmer and organiser on the Buckeye Bluetits. “This is something you can do to feel your breath catch, your heart race, and your blood pump in your veins.”
Once the commotion stopped, the ice returned, and barely 24 hours later the pool sealed over. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s always someone willing to crack another spot open.