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…
Some concepts or acts can be so fundamental to a communal activity that the members of that community can forget that they once may not have known of the concept, let alone the meaning as the activity becomes second nature. These acts, which we might call unconscious assumptions, are not ignored, but accepted, language grows…
“Loneswimmer is a brand now“, my buddy and two-way English Channel and Double Round Manhattan swimmer Lisa (Cummins) said to me one day and not as much alcohol or hypothermia as you would guess was involved. Now let’s get this out the way. Having Lisa as friend is a bit of trial. You go through…
Though I had been pool swimming, I hadn’t swam in the sea in four weeks, and if I didn’t get in at the weekend I would go a month without an open water swim for possibly the first time in a decade. On Saturday the bay was lousy and blown out in howling onshores, breakers…
For the past few years I’ve covered Christmas swims from the practical side, aiming to give some simple advice for the irregular swimmer so they can more fully ans safely enjoy it, by prepare for and dealing with the cold during and after the swim. You can always go back and read the previous one…
“How long are you typically here (in Ireland) for?“, I asked as I chatted with the US customs agent at US Border Control in Dublin Airport in late April. I stared up at the official photo of the current US President on the wall. While the agent gave me the usual interrogation about my reason for traveling,…
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…
“O reader, do not ask of me how I grew faint and frozen then – I cannot write it: all words would fall far short of what it was. I did not die, and I was not alive; think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived of life and death.” – The…
“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the Deep”. It’s occasionally struck me that in the second verse or chapter (or whatever these biblical couplets are called) Nothingness, the Void and the Deep are all co-equal. The Deep cannot exist without the Not-Deep, without its face, (nonsensical theological…
At Christmas time, many people who would never consider getting in cold water will be thinking of a Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or New Year’s Day dip. If you are wondering WHY you might or should do it, apart from; taking part in a local tradition in many places; having a hot punch at the…
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…
I stand and I watch and I look. The sky is blue. The sky is grey. There are clouds, there are no clouds. There is wind. There is always Father Wind, always Mother Ocean. Wind blows onshore, a santoku knife chops up the water surface, spray and solid lumps of water scatter. Wind blows offshore…
It gets better from Down Here. Down Here it’s the coldest and the shortest swims. Down Here is where we separate ourselves from the newbies, the dippers, the triathletes, the fakes, the Christmas Day and mystic swimmers. Down Here is where we differentiate ourselves, even from ourselves. Down Here is the bottom of the bathtub…
“Hey, I watched a great film last night. It was called Sing, by the guy that made Once“. “I hate musicals”. “No, this was good, I really recommend it”. “I hate musicals”. “No, yeah. I agree. I do too. But this one was good”. “I hate musicals”. “But you’ll like this one. It’s 80s music…
The car park, being a winter mid-day, was empty. I was later to arrive than the “two-minute-dip polar bears”, who’d been and gone. I’ve often thought and written about these days, the empty days of open water swimming, no souls but mine and the ocean’s, grey days when getting in the water takes all my…
Is it too cold to swim? and when is it too cold to swim? are perennial questions that have prompted a number of articles and to which I will likely return in the future. If I was to list the variations of ways people inquire if the water is sufficiently warm or too cold to swim, well, the list…
Two years ago I finished my very long series about Ice Mile Swimming. In that series I set out to describe a journey of personal attempts to complete an Ice Mile, my reason for so doing, which was at odds with the rest of people who achieve an Ice Mile, and subsequently my investigation of…
I went for a swim one evening recently, my first time in the sea in about three weeks. The air was warmer, the day nicer, the sun setting later than it had in mid- February. But the water felt bitter. My skin thermometer told me it was about seven degrees (and feeling colder due to…
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…
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