I finally watched the Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher. If you haven’t already seen it, stop reading this and watch it now. The film follows filmmaker Craig Foster as he extricates himself from a debilitating depression by learning to free dive in the icy waters off the shores of the Western Cape of South Africa. He vows to swim every day for a year, no matter the swells, the storms, or his mood. His consistency and fortitude earn him the trust and the affection of a female octopus. Foster shares with us his awe and admiration for the creativity she employs in outwitting her predator, a pajama shark. She escapes its jaws by riding on its back and by folding herself into an outfit of discarded shells. While the film focuses on the relationship between human and mollusk, I was most drawn to Foster’s commitment to cold water swimming.
There is great pleasure in comfort but, as My Octopus Teacher reminds us, there are delights of the unknown that become available to us when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Pleasure and pain exist on a continuum and cold water immersion is a practice that can help us develop a tolerance for the uncomfortable. Foster said that after a year of swimming, he not only acclimated to the cold, he began to crave it.
I aspire to crave the cold, too. Joe and I lived in Cape Town for several years and I know the wild waters of the Western Cape, the ocean in which Foster still free dives every day. There, the sun burns hot and bright and the sea promises relief from the heat. But, the first time I dove in, expecting to swim out to a buoy, I panicked. It was so cold that I felt a giant fist gripping me, making it impossible to inhale. I retreated to the shore as fast as I could. I feared that ocean. Even on the hottest of days, I kept to the shallows where the waves were so cold they gave my ankles gave a headache.
I wasn’t always afraid of the cold. As a kid, I remember playing in the water until my teeth chattered. I thought nothing of running around without a jacket during harsh Minnesota winters. One January, I managed to lose my coat, a feat my mother never understood. If someone had told me I could cut a hole in the ice and swim, I think I might have tried that. But slowly, this changed. Adults warned me that I would get sick if I stayed outside too long. “Aren’t you cold?” was my mother’s refrain. I began to pay attention to the numbness in my fingers, worrying about frostbite more than the snowball fight. It makes sense that we humans fear the cold, especially cold water, which saps our body heat 32 times faster than cold air. Our extremities go numb in freezing water, we become disoriented and helpless. The danger is real. As I got older, I became more cautious until my fear of the cold presided over my love of swimming.
When my girls were little, they too wanted to splash in the cold water. They asked me to launch them off my shoulders to see who could get the most air, but I couldn’t stop focusing on my blue lips and goosebump skin. I sent Joe in to play with them while I sat on the shore baking in whatever sunlight was available. After a few summers, they stopped asking me to play. I began to notice how often I turned down experiences because I feared the cold: I stood on the dock while my friends took moonlight swims, I turned down camping trips, I urged my kids to leave the playground when it started to snow, I took a cab instead of walking on brisk winter evenings. I was beginning to feel like I didn’t have agency over my body; my fear was ruling out a lot of life experiences.
Ten years ago, I made a vow to expand my range. While I am nowhere near Foster’s commitment to swimming every day, I have jumped into the Atlantic in February and swam through November in our favorite Cape Cod pond. One of my most cherished awards is a ribbon from a swim in the Provincetown Harbor that ended with both a mild case of hypothermia and a sense of euphoria that was one of the best highs I have ever experienced.
For Craig Foster, showing up in the cold water every day gave him access to an otherwise hidden world. For me, expanding my comfort zone has opened up the world within me that is as full of mystery and delight as an underwater kelp forest. I know what it is for my skin to tighten, my neurons to fire with shock and the sublime euphoria of the release that follows. I am learning what I am capable of, which is so much more than I ever knew.
I am a work in progress when it comes to my tolerance for the cold. Here are a few things that have helped me along the way:
First, expand your notion of what is possible.
We are constrained by our beliefs of what we can do, so I look to others who have defied expectations and often, science. To spark your imagination, I offer the following:
Lynne Cox, 30, swam across the Bering Strait in a bathing suit for two hours and six minutes in 40-degree F water.
British swimmer Lewis Pugh swam for 30 minutes in the Artic peninsula
Siberian mothers teach their kids to resist the cold by bringing them to swim in holes cut into frozen lakes.
In Ukraine, school children go snow bathing.
I am haunted by the magician David Blaine’s 63-hour encasement in a block of ice.
Second, Stick With It. The women in Chicago who have been cutting a hole in Lake Michigan to swim every day during the pandemic said that it was important to never miss a day. Consistency helps with adaptation. Wim Hof, “The Ice Man”, has a solution for this: the 90-second cold shower. Try it. It’s invigorating, so good for your skin and it keeps us agile in our ability to withstand. I am not yet at the point where I crave my cold shower but I know if I keep going, it will happen.
Breathe: Deep breathing changes the chemistry of our body. It offers us control of our adrenal and immune system, which regulates our emotions, or, as Hof calls it, our life force. When we breathe slowly and calmly, we communicate with our animal body, telling it that it is okay. Wim Hof uses breathing techniques to keep himself warm in sub-zero temperatures, displaying the full power of human breath. Which brings us to….
Surrender: When entering a cold body of water, there is an involuntary reaction to name the sensations as pain and discomfort. I am most successful cold-swimming when I can experience the sensations as nothing more than raw data. I try to witness my physical responses as though I am a foreigner in my own body. Despite the alarm bells going off in my brain, I tell myself that everything is okay. It’s not unlike soothing a baby. Slowly, slowly, my body relaxes. Wim Hof says this is the moment we get to know who we are. There is clarity —and sometimes euphoria— in the inability to think of anything else but that which is. Freediver Martina Amati, describes it this way: “You need to let go of everything that you know and everything that makes you feel good or bad. It’s a very liberating process. But equally, you need to stay completely aware of your body and where you are, entirely in the moment.”
Are you a cold water swimmer? Tell us about your experiences. Thank you for reading. I am loving your feedback. If you have a topic or question you want us to cover, send it along!
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Institute of Pleasure Studies
I am a big fan of Wim Hof, the Ice Man, who teaches us the mystical dimensions of being human through his breathing techniques. “The cold is merciless, but righteous” Hof says. “It is a way to experiment with the biochemistry of our bodies. It is a way of connecting with ourselves, the way nature meant it to be.” On his website, he is offering his work at a reduced rate during the pandemic. The Super Human World of Wim Hof is a film that follows him as he trains two journalists to climb a mountain in their shorts but really, he takes them on “a psychedelic journey across Europe that circled the chasm between science, spirituality, and mystery.”
The Subversive Joy of Cold Water Swimming (New Yorker, January 2020) by Rebecca Mead
Breaking the Waves An accounting of Diana Nyad’s near-fatal swims (New Yorker, Ariel Levy, Feb 2014)