The summer and autumn of 2019 and winter of 2019/2020 have been unusual at the Guillamene cove. Not for the weather or for the sea but because we had a higher number of safety incidents than previously. There were a number of serious incidents that I am aware of that required intervention of inshore rescue…
For some years, my New Year’s post for those taking up swimming for exercise or weight management has been one of the site’s most popular and has gone viral on a number of occasions. But like with my Christmas Swim post, I wanted to change it up this year. Like so much of what I’ve written,…
We claim victory. Or survival. We swim out into Bone Cold water, and we claim it. Metaphorically speaking, we mark the nadir of winter at the end of February out in the water, bleeding our skin colour into the icy greyblackgreen, exchanging heat for some ludicrous sense of playing a game with the ocean, that…
Swimming was important to me, at an age when maybe some of us are past learning these things, in discovering how much we are all capable of, if we just commit ourselves. Ultimately, everything else I’ve learned and try to share is mechanics, or more easily comprehensible knowledge. There are no secrets in swimming, no secret to…
This post begins a new series here on Loneswimmer.com. There are certain patterns that I’ve seen repeated over the years. There are certain experiences that recur, certain thoughts that reappear, coming anew each year. Though previously experienced, all feel fresh each time, only deepened by the growing realisation that what were once first-time or rare…
The Simple Rule of Rough Water Exits I’m going to continue by reiterating the most important point from Part One. The first, easiest and more common way of dealing with rough water exits is to not get into the water unless the water is calm. It’s an option many novices fail to consider and they often…
The local pool and gym is taking part in Operation Transformation in January. So there will be six weeks of hell in the pool, as most will not succeed. and will have given up by mid February. This is the same as almost every pool and gym in the world, it will just be exacerbated…
If open water swimming was as simple or simplistic as is sometimes portrayed I’d long have ceased writing. Olympic or professional open water swimmers who distil the skills associated with open water swimming to a mere “learn to sight, swim straight” have over-looked all the other skills they may have learned along the way. Similarly, amateur marathon…
Go back to Part 4 of Extreme Cold Adaptation in Humans. All right , let’s finally wind this down with an obligatory reminder from Tiina Makinen; “several individual factors effect the rates at which people respond to the same stimuli . The time course of adaptation is dependent on the threshold of the stimulus, a…
Part 3 of Extreme Cold Adaptation in Humans. So we’ve covered a lot of the features of cold adaptation. One major factor of habituation is left, and it’s key. Let me quote directly from Makinen. All subsequent italicized sections are direct quotations: “Young [] postulates that the type of cold adaptation response is dependent on the…
Tiina Makinen‘s “Different types of cold adaptation in humans” works as a meta-analysis of various scientific studies of cold adaptation and is a fantastic read and is available at the Finnish Arctic Institute of Health. It ranges over types of cold adaptation, (physiological, genetic, behavioural), acclimation and acclimatization in specific groups (occupational, indigenous, high latitudes)…
Part 1 of Extreme Cold Adaptation in Humans. Let’s back up a bit. Way back in fact, to some of my first posts, where I talked about Habituation and Acclimatization. By the way, if I was writing those posts now, since my experience had changed again, I would have different figures. It’s good that I…
It’s spring. We’re in the sea more or want to be, stretching out swimming times or wanting to. It’s probably more appropriate to talk about cold now than during the winter, because we are coming into the most difficult time of year for distance swimmers. In the winter many stop sea swimming or switch to…
LoneSwimmer 