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…
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…
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…
You know how one can reliably tell that summer is certainly over? I start writing about cold water. Let’s kick the winter swimming season off, shall we? Okay, I know the water is still warm, but it’s often this time of the year that people stop or get close to stopping open water swimming…
Part 1 Part 2 Ten minutes after briefing and the swimmers were lined up on Lough Dan’s so-called beach for the group photo seen in the previous part. Sometimes writing about the minutiae of swimming is really boring. Sometimes such reportage can mask some other truth. Sometimes I think that the more I try to…
This post was a companion to HABITUATION, both of which I wrote in early 2010. Since I revisited and largely rewrote that as Cold Water Habituation, my plan was to do the same in this post also. Acclimatization (acclimatisation for those of us who forego the use of the z) is a different factor to habituation. While…
HABITUATION was one of my very first posts, and the first post I wrote about cold and cold water swimming, over four years ago, little realising it would become my favourite subject. Although it is linked in the Cold Water Articles Index, I decided to air it out and rewrite it. (And change those capitals).…
Over a year ago I wrote a popular post called The First Three Minutes, which investigated just the first few minutes of a cold water swim. (A real cold water swim, not your balmy 10 degree Celsius getting a tan (50F) water for softies). We know, us cold water swimmers, that passers-by focus on the water…
Look away, look away. My head whirls, sentences and clauses. Words and incantations. I need to hold the intent, remember the state. I need to write. I have swum, and now more than anything, I need to write. More than I need people or food, more even than I need heat, I need to vomit out…
This post is an index with a very brief explanation of each of the specifically cold swimming related articles I’ve written, so one can scan the entire list for what is most relevant for their question or area of specific interest. I was a bit surprised to see just how many I’ve written. Articles sometimes…
When all fails and I am at a loss for something to write about, I can write about cold, my favourite subject. Especially in the context of Cork Distance Week coming in two weeks, when we had a few people pulled from the water with hypothermia last year. For anyone involved in open water swimming…
This is a one subject site, open water swimming. Everything on the site relates to open water swimming. But since open water swimming is part of my life, sometimes other parts of my life or some of my interests get pulled in. They may look tangential but it’s because I’m trying to contextualize my swimming…
I get asked various questions related to cold because I like to write about it. Those questions often inspire further writing ideas. One thing I realised was there was no good agreement on cold water. A poll of open water swimmers by DNOWS gave the following results. Under 5ºC (41ºF) – 0% Under 10ºC (50ºF) – 7%…
This article is, once again, a variation of the most popular question here: “What temperature of water is too cold to swim in”?, which I’ve written about before. The temperature at the Guillamene last Sunday week (October 16th, 2011) was about 13° Celsius (55° F). That’s far warmer than what most people will imagine, not…
I mentioned T.I. in an email to a well-known record-setting swimmer and we thought I might write a post on it. When someone who has set a new record thinks it’s a good subject, you write! Many of you will be aware that Total Immersion, (T.I.) is a method of teaching swimming developed by Terry Laughlin, which…
You know, in all the swimming I did last year, I never really wrote about ordinary swims that much. Every swim was part of a structure, a plan, the wet road toward Dover and the Strait. I tended to think more about big swims and tough swims, or swims which marked some milestone. I often…
You could think of this post as something missing from the five-part series Extreme Cold Adaptation in Humans that I wrote. Yes, even with all that I wrote I still missed a major component. When you enter cold water you feel a few different sensations. I talked about habituation and gasp reflex, peripheral vaso-constriction and…
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…
Edit: The original title of this post may have been the worst title I ever wrote. And that’s saying something. I’m really bad at titles. Dante wrote that the Ninth Circle of the Inferno was ice. He didn’t seem to consider freezing water, so I guess it might have been the lobby entrance to the…
When we were in Dover two years ago for our two-way relay swim, one day we were getting ready to go swimming in the harbour. Three guys came over to us and we got talking, as is common in Dover. They had come from New York for a one-way relay. They wanted to know why…
I’m right in the middle of a painful learning experience, and that is the cumulative effects of daily swimming “into” cold or very cold. I’m tired this week as a consequence partly of last Friday’s nine and a half hour swim. But last Sunday I also started to sea swim daily. I’ve swum through the…
LoneSwimmer 