A group of fourteen trekked up the hill from the harbour, shivering in fleece jackets and wool beanies on a sunny Spring morning. Some hunched under backpacks, others hauled ice coolers as the troop filed silently into town. It was late March in Mallorca – holidaymakers had begun to trickle back onto the island, although it was still too chilly for basking on the beach. Retirees and sun-seeking couples lounged on al fresco terraces. As the strange procession passed, chatter paused and sunglasses were lowered to get a better look. An older lady in a pink jogging suit put down her wine glass and stopped a few stragglers of the group.
“What is this?” She fluttered her hands in the direction of the wintry ensemble.
“We just went swimming!”
12.3 degrees Celsius, 54 degrees Fahrenheit. No wetsuits. The group had just completed a two-hour swim in the harbor of Porto Petro, and most of the us would go on to complete a six-hour swim the next day. This was a training camp for swimmers planning to make a solo crossing of the English Channel – in fact, half of the group had already booked their slots for either this year or the year after. (The prime windows for making the crossing, along with most renowned captains for navigating the support boat, can be booked up three years in advance. Ocean conditions, after all, dictate a large part of a swim’s success.)
Other than sumo wrestling, there is no other sport I can think of where its most avid practitioners look so little like athletes. Pillowy paunches, muffin tops, occasional rolls of back fat. I had arrived in Mallorca straight out of an appetite-suppressing breakup, but I’d really spent my entire life to date securely within the “overweight” section of the BMI map. When I discovered cold water swimming, I finally found my tribe. I mean, have you ever seen a skinny dolphin? A scrawny whale? No. Ariel the Little Mermaid would have perished from hypothermia frolicking under the sea.
I had been a regional-level (pool) swimmer when I was much younger, but struggled to get into any finals after moving to Australia for high school. It was a huge hit to my confidence and led me to quit swimming altogether. (The U.S. might scoop up most of the Olympics swimming events, but Australia might produce the highest rate swimming champions per capita – in the 2016 Summer Olympics, the Olympic Selection Time for women’s 100m freestyle stood at 56.01 seconds. In my last high school swim meet, every single teenage girl in the 100m freestyle final made the same race in under one minute.) It wasn’t until the Spring of 2016 that I got into the water again – prompted by an unlikely Netflix series.
Secrets of Great British Castles season one, episode one featured Dover Castle. Dover, a lynchpin in English defence, marked one end of the shortest route between England and continental Europe – a distance traversed not only by boats, but also by a select group of swimmers brave or foolhardy enough to undertake the (on average) 13-hour journey. After a panorama of the ocean, the camera cut swiftly to the presenter sitting with a pint at Dover’s White Horse Pub. The walls of the pub were covered with names and messages from every swimmer who had completed the English Channel, and as I laid on my bed eating Chinese takeout, I decided that I also, one day, would swim the English Channel.
To be clear: I have not yet. And probably won’t for another few years. Notwithstanding the long process of booking swim slots, boat captains and so on, my training schedule is non-existent. The English Channel is 21 miles long as the crow flies, but currents make for a much lengthier swim. For comparison, a marathon by swimming standards is 10km – a little more than 6 miles, and about two hours long for Olympics podium athletes, just like a runner’s marathon. Other than the standard fatigue that sets in, chafing from the salt crystals in the sea water set a new standard for pain – particularly when the skin in your mouth and throat is gradually ripped off with each unexpected gulp of rogue wave.
On top of the distance, salt, jellyfish, and waves, the swimmer needs to endure extended exposure to the low water temperatures (15C – 18C/low 60s F). Crew on the support boats are told to look out for the signs of hypothermia, and are instructed to check on the mental facilities of their swimmer ever few feeds (basic maths questions do the trick). Although nobody wants to terminate a swim after months or years of preparation, swimmers sometimes have to be pulled out against their will if they are deemed to have moderate to severe hypothermia. Even exiting the water doesn’t mark the end of the danger – the sudden change can cause a severe “after-drop” in core temperature, with the swimmer shivering violently and losing all motor function for the next ten minutes. (This happened several times in Mallorca. The coaches had to help me put on clothing.)
When people talk of endurance sports, distance running typically comes to mind. With all due respect, distance swimming is a whole new level of masochism. You’re hungry? Here, here’s half a banana studded with painkillers to get you through this shipping channel. By the way, you need to sprint the next mile. We’re in the path of a cargo ship. Although longer swim races – marathons and beyond – typically feature a support kayak or boat, the swimmer is disqualified if he touches the vessel at any given point. In the middle of an event, the exhausted swimmer cannot simply take a “walk break”, let alone a roadside pit stop. Food and water are dropped to the water in a bucket at the end of a rope or plastic rod, and the swimmer treads water while taking each feed. But even treading water takes energy, and the swimmer at rest is especially vulnerable to heat loss and currents pulling him away from the designated course. (In order to keep Channel crossings as short and attainable as possible, swimmers are encouraged to keep feeding breaks to a maximum of 30 seconds.)
In the book What Doesn’t Kill Us, investigative journalist Scott Carney traces human evolution to a time before the rise of technology. (The subtitle itself is pretty explanatory: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning will Renew our Lost Evolutionary Strength.) The argument is that humans have been softened by technology – cold exposure acts as a necessary shock to the system, reminding the physiology of “the way life used to be”. The Channel swim is, in a way, this philosophy applied to the extreme, with an extra dash of dogged ambition. There is actually nothing special about the physiology of a cold water swimmer other than the thicker layer of fat. Barring cardiovascular issues – which may cause extreme susceptibility to sudden changes in temperature – cold adaptation is equally attainable for anyone. At the end of Carney’s own Wim Hof training, master and apprentice promptly completed a 28-hour hike to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. The kit: nothing more than a pair of sneakers and running shorts.
The cold brings perspective. It fixes you in the present as you gasp for air, like a stunned butterfly pinned onto a mounting board. The ocean in winter is impersonal – even worse, indifferent. Your problems are shamed into silence by the endless water stretching into the horizon.
Few amongst us would scale Mount Kilimanjaro even with the best of equipment and warmest of gear. But a cold shower, or a dip in the cold sea, is a good place to start. The barrier to entry is largely mental. Most of the time, the ordeal of cold water swimming starts the second you emerge from the changing room. Or from the car. Or from your front door, for that matter. The air temperature and wind chill tear down rather than steel your ambitions, especially when you know that the water is going to be even worse.
As you step into cold water for the first time, the shock triggers a fight-or-flight response. You stop dead in your tracks. If the cold is intense enough, it might not even feel cold – it burns like acid on your skin. Your muscles clench up. You might pee. The blood vessels in your extremities constrict to conserve heat, quickly increasing blood pressure – the body compensates for this increase in pressure by relieving itself of liquid elsewhere.
When you wade further into the water, the water reaching your genitals and belly, you get a second wave of cold shock. The heart rate goes up, the breathing becomes ragged. A few more steps in, and the water is up to your armpits. You try to stabilise your breathing, reminding yourself that you probably, most likely, will not die just from this little swim. At this point, the best thing to do is to dunk your head in the water. You might already know to splash water on your face when you’re stressed – this is the same concept, all part of the mammalian dive response. When your face is cooled, breathing rate and heart rate are both lowered, a millenia-old underwater primal instinct shared by all air-breathing vertebrates.
Now that your face is in the water, move. Start swimming. Frantically at first, maybe desperately, but with one stroke after another your arms fall into rhythm. You have to keep moving before your core temperature drops too low. You can feel the heat escaping your body, sucked away by the icy currents, and you make a mental note to keep the arms floppy so the muscles don’t cramp in the cold.
The cold doesn’t stop. In the twelve, fourteen, twenty hours of a Channel swim, the cold never stops. You learn to make a tacit pact with it. There are other hurdles to clear – the darkness of night, the waves that toss you around like a bottle cork – but at least the cold is an old friend. With every other breath you catch sight of your crew on the fishing boat, the only sign of civilisation as far as the eye can see. It’s warm up there, but your job now is to swim. You envision the shore of Cap Gris Nez, the promised ending of your Channel crossing, and the triumphant stumble onto land at last. You vehemently believe that at the end of all this, you’ll scrawl your name on the White Horse Pub too. You swim, and you pray that Poseidon is smiling down on you.
(I don’t own this image - this is from Outdoor Swimmer.)