Come on in, the water’s f-f-freezing!
Endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh is preparing for his most gruelling challenge ever... in Antarctica. Is he mad, or simply superhuman? HARRY MOUNT took the (icy) plunge with him to find out
As I plunged into the wind-whipped sea off the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides yesterday morning, the temperature had dropped to 5c (41f). The water was 8c (46f). so at least it was warmer in than out.
That wasn’t much consolation. When I put my head under the waves, I felt an almighty shock — a combination of brain-freeze and hyperventilation, when you breathe abnormally fast.
This is known to kill people who fall into freezing water — the sudden intake of breath underwater can cause them to drown.
Yet the agonising conditions were nothing to the man swimming next door to me. The endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh, dubbed ‘the sir Edmund Hillary of swimming’, has splashed through the most extreme climates on Earth.
Pugh was the first person to swim across the North Pole, in 2007, and has swum in a glacial lake on Mount Everest. Last year, he swam a 348-mile length of the English Channel and he has also swum the full length of the Thames.
Later this month he will embrace a new challenge: swimming in a lake on top of the ice shelf of the Antarctic, in water barely one degree above freezing. And all this wearing only speedos, a swimming hat and goggles. No wetsuits for him: he always goes ‘skins’.
‘It’s not bravado but world leaders need to be courageous, and so do I,’ he says.
Not me. I manage only five minutes and one second in ‘skins’ in the agonising Hebridean waters.
That extra second is important. The day before, TV presenter Ben Fogle swam with Pugh while the broadcaster celebrated 20 years since he appeared in the documentary Castaway on the neighbouring island of Taransay.
Fogle managed five minutes with Pugh. I may have swum for longer (just), but my style wasn’t very impressive. The pain of dipping my head underwater was so great that I had to resort to breaststroke rather than the front crawl Pugh favours.
EVEN then, the cold was so extreme that my body sent blood rushing to my inner core to protect my vital organs. That left my extremities — toes and fingers — even more dangerously cold.
My fingers felt like icicles as they dragged through the grey-green water, my feet like frozen flippers.
My two-kilometre warm-up run through the surf had clearly achieved little. I watched as Pugh and his pacemaker, Max Holloway, 31, who swims ahead of him to keep his speed up, and three fellow swimmers headed off.
They were pursued by a friendly seal, who kept diving beneath them and popping his labradorlike face up just in front of them.
That was enough for me. I looked ahead — north towards the Arctic — and lost hope.
I raced back to Coll beach (two miles from Tong, where Donald Trump’s mother was born and raised), my towel and, later, the loveliest bath in history in my stornoway hotel. Even two hours later, after that heavenly bath, sitting under an electric blanket with a cup of tea, I still felt the cold gnawing at my innards.
Pugh’s fellow swimmers had responded to an advert he placed in a newspaper, looking for potential training partners from the end of December until this week. Recruits, he wrote, would have to swim and run hard.
He added: ‘There will be two training sessions a day, one at sunrise, one at dusk . . . there will be no tea breaks and no Hogmanay — not even if you’re scottish!’
‘I was amazed by the response,’ Pugh, 50, tells me. ‘sixty-six people applied. My fellow swimmers include a janitor from a local school, a former soldier from the scots Guards and a doctor.’
One of our fellow swimmers, a London banker, heard about the event on Friday and jumped on a plane that day to join in.
To ensure the lowest possible training temperatures, Pugh will also swim in an icy Hebridean reservoir that’s fed by mountain rivers and, unlike the sea, is untroubled by the Gulf stream.
To create insulation, he has to build up his muscles and body fat. He will weigh 16st 7lb when he begins his Antarctic swim, after his south African wife Antoinette has duly fed him huge plates of pasta, curries and bangers and mash to bulk him up.
Decades of training and swimming have turned him into a man mountain.
The shape of his body, made out of solid muscle, has changed over the years. His shoulders, chest and stomach have developed into a mighty V-shape. His biceps are like tree branches, his hands like vast paddles.
Pugh chose the Hebrides because there are no islands in the southern hemisphere suitable for training for an Antarctic swim. ‘I wish I’d trained here before,’ he tells me. ‘They’re perfect — rugged and wild. And the local swimmers are astonishing. They really help me build up to the final swim.’
One of the volunteer swimmers was Alexander Pohl, 43, from London, who has bathed in 2c (36f) water in sweden.
‘I felt extremely privileged to swim with Lewis,’ he said. ‘It was surreal and empowering. I felt a sense of community — as if I was part of something bigger.’
He adds: ‘Lewis is human. He’s real. I thought it was refreshing and fun. You feel part of the water — natural!’
Pugh’s forthcoming Antarctic swimming pool is a ‘supraglacial’ lake: one of many basins of melted water that have gathered in depressions on the surfaces of glaciers and ice sheets.
Thanks to global warming, more than 65,000 of these lakes have developed on the Antarctic ice sheet in the past three years. It will be his most painful swim to date.
The fresh water will be just above freezing point but the air directly above it will be a heart-stopping minus 37c (minus 35f).
‘That’s not great for swimming,’ chuckles Pugh, who was born in Britain before moving to south Africa as a boy. ‘You raise your arm and it gets so cold that you want to put it back in the water. For a good stroke, you would want to raise your arm high.’
HIs swim will last between 18 and 21 minutes: enough to kill most human beings. ‘The natural reaction to those temperatures is to panic and gulp,’ says Pugh, who adds that he is bound to get hypothermia in his swim. ‘Lots of people would drown.’
As with all his daring swims, this one has a purpose: to help create a network of protected marine sanctuaries in east Antarctica.
Pugh is helping to co-ordinate the efforts of 25 countries in securing protection for the region. Twenty-three have already signed up: only Russia and China are stubbornly holding out.
He will be accompanied by a British doctor and will have a support swimmer in a dry suit next to him.
But still he can’t guard against all eventualities, not least the sudden appearance of a crack in the iceberg, through which the water suddenly leaks away deep into the ice sheet. These cracks can be wide enough for humans to fall through.
‘I don’t want to be swimming in the lake when it leaks,’ he says, grinning.
still, in other ways, the swim will be safer than his previous efforts in the polar waters. Because he is in a lake on top of an ice shelf, the killer whales and leopard seals that threatened him in the sea will present no danger.
‘Leopard seals can be friendly one minute and grab you the next,’ he says. ‘All the animals in the Arctic and Antarctic have to have plenty of fat — penguins, whales . . . ’ he says.
And, for one brief moment later this month, those magnificent creatures will be joined in their native environment by a splendid companion — the one human best adapted to the coldest water on Earth. And this time, he can count me out.