The swimmers
Normally, there’s only one way to get into 4C water: in a hurry. From Southampton to Sydney via St Petersburg, an in-and-out New Year’s Day dunk is a long-established custom; the image of hordes of swimmers charging en masse to meet the wintry waves a familiar one. But go down to the picturesque banks of the river Stour at Dedham in the early morning of 1 January 2018, and you will find an altogether more sedate, low-key gathering, as a small but committed group of swimmers pull on their wetsuits ahead of their annual New Year’s Day swim. “We get together our thickest wetties and hoods and gloves and boots,” says Stuart Hamilton, 53. “Every year when we first get in, everybody complains about the cold, but that’s part of the fun, to suffer a bit. And to overcome the suffering.”
This will be the fifth year running that Hamilton, his wife Cathie, daughters Tiffany and Candy, son-in-law Danny and friend Kevin, brave the ice-cold currents of the Stour as they attempt to swim the 2.3km from Dedham Mill to Flatford Mill. The route, meandering along the Essex-Suffolk border, is one they know well: in the summer, Hamilton organises an annual Mill 2 Mill event on this same stretch of water, drawing up to 350 participants, all eager to enjoy a leisurely dip followed by a riverside picnic. The New Year’s Day swim, by contrast, though advertised to all comers on the Outdoor Swimming Society’s website, seldom draws more than a half-dozen hardy regulars.
“Very rarely does anybody make the full distance, because it’s so cold,” says Hamilton, a barrel-chested gym owner from Colchester. “At the halfway point there’s a footbridge that crosses the water – that’s always a good target. If we can make it as far as there, we’re doing well.” Meanwhile, awaiting them on dry land are Thermos flasks full of warm, milky hot chocolate. “The water can be anything from 12C down to 2C. That is very cold. A normal swimming pool temperature is in the mid-20s. So I make sure I fill up those flasks.”
While Hamilton and his family comprise the core of the group, it was his friend Kevin Sheath, a keen amateur triathlete and wild swimmer, who initiated the tradition. “Being out on the river is absolutely gorgeous,” says Sheath, 56, who swims in the river year-round. “This is Constable country. Our finish point, at Flatford Mill, is where his Hay Wain was. If you go in the summer, it’s like Clacton beach; there’s rowing boats, standup paddleboarders, kayakers, fishermen – the whole world and his uncle. But in the winter, you can have the river to yourself.”
It’s this peace and tranquillity that keeps the swimmers coming back year after year, says Hamilton’s daughter, Tiffany Wood. “Christmas can be a bit indoorsy,” she says. “You can overcook yourself on it all, get cabin fever. As a family, none of us likes to go out partying or drinking; we socialise by going for a bike ride, or a swim. It’s great to get out into a real wild space where you can’t see any buildings or roads, where there are no Christmas lights or music. It wakes you up, makes you feel alive.”
- Find your nearest swim spot at outdoorswimmingsociety.com. Christmas swim caps in main picture are from Speedo.
The fell runners
If hauling yourself out of bed on the morning of 26 December feels like an uphill battle, spare a thought for Geoff Sproson. For the past 39 Boxing Days, bar none, he and brother John have organised the Devil’s Chair Dawdle or Dash, a steep three-mile round trip up and down the muddy tracks and rocky moorland of Shropshire’s Stiperstones national nature reserve. “Our first event in 1978 was purely a local affair,” says Sproson, 70, who took up the sport on his doctor’s advice, to help him recover from a footballing injury. “We had about 60 participants – mostly lads from the football club. We thought it would be a one-off.”
They were wrong. Last year, the Dawdle or Dash drew 460 participants, with another 150 spectators lining the course and cheering on the walkers and runners. Numbers aside, not much has changed over the years. The start-finish line is today, as it has always been, at the Stiperstones Inn – the pub that has been in the Sproson family for half a century; Geoff’s daughter is the current landlady. At the halfway point, some 600ft above, sits the Devil’s Chair, the craggy quartzite outcrop that rises from the heather-strewn hills of the Stiperstones Range. It’s a tough course, and has seen its fair share of casualties. “You have to go up a very steep field, and then on top you pick your way through large stones and boulders for a good half-mile,” Sproson says. The event goes ahead, whatever the weather. “We have raced in sunshine and rain, over frozen ground, deep mud, thick snow, but never cancelled. Several people come back with grazes and cuts. And there was one year early on, when an aunt of mine broke her ankle and had to be carried off the top.”
The rewards for braving the uneven terrain are much the same as they have ever been. “A gallant group of local ladies still provide sandwiches and soup to every runner and walker,” Sproson says. “And an intrepid band of supporters from the Shropshire Mining Club still encourage weary souls with a drop of the hard stuff at the summit. They’re getting on a bit, but they still take a couple of cases of whisky up.”
There’s a core contingent of regulars who take part. “There are people who started doing the event as young boys or girls who are not only still doing it, but whose children are doing it, too,” Sproson says.
One regular is Stiperstones-born Viv Jones, 73, who used to play football with Sproson, and now lives 25 minutes up the road, on the outskirts of Shrewsbury. “In 39 years, the only one I missed was last year,” Jones says. “I had a bit of a problem with my knee. I’ve got to have a new one some time, but at the moment it isn’t bothering me, so I’ll do it again this year, under the hour if I possibly can. I had two minutes to spare last time.” Jones is spurred on, in part, by fraternal rivalry. “My brother Neil hasn’t missed a year. He’s 63, so 10 years younger than me, and he always gets over the line first.”
- For local races, events and advice, go to fellrunner.org.uk
The parkour crew
This Christmas, up to 100 parkour enthusiasts will celebrate the festive season by running, vaulting, clambering and crawling their way around a purpose-built gym in Milton Keynes.
“We wanted to celebrate not just parkour, but movement itself,” says Ruel DaCosta, 32, co-founder of Paramount Parkour Academy and host of the Christmas Jam, now a regular fixture in the calendars of parkour practitioners, or traceurs, nationwide. “We invited dancers, gymnasts, kickboxers, people from all walks of life who had one thing in common: making art with their bodies.” Thirty people showed up to their first Christmas Jam in 2013; this year they’re expecting more than three times that number.
“Parkour is like dance, but over obstacles,” DaCosta says. “It’s an expression of movement, but over urban landscapes, turning a town into a playground.” He opened his gym, the UK’s first dedicated parkour training facility, to create an environment for traceurs of all levels to hone their skills in a safe environment.
On jam night, the doors stay open to all comers until 3am, with high-energy music blaring out through a specially set-up sound system. While the gathered crowd play around on the gym’s elaborate scaffold rigs, ramps and foam pits, the DJs (DaCosta’s brother and nephew) will play a soundtrack of dancehall, drum’n’bass, bashment and reggae – though there won’t be any overtly Christmassy music. “There are people of different religions who come along, so we don’t force Christmas on them,” DaCosta says. “But the Christmas spirit is there, in the sense of meeting up with friends who you don’t see often.”
The showstopper moment is always the “back-tuck circle”, DaCosta says. “It’s what Paramount’s jams are known for. Anyone who can do backflips joins in and we all do them in a Mexican wave style. At the last one, we must have had 70 people doing back tucks in two concentric circles.”
It’s a highlight for Charlie Higgs, 23, an ambulance dispatcher who travels 25 miles from her home in Bicester to attend the jam. “When I go to training I’m like, ‘Right, I’ve got to get my back tuck so I can join in the circle at the next jam’,” Higgs says. As a keen gymnast and cheerleader, picking up new skills is part of the appeal. “The atmosphere is so friendly. I’ve had issues with my confidence in the past, but they’re all so good at pumping you up. Even the tiniest skill that you get, everyone is so proud of you.”
- Find a parkour community near you at parkour.uk. Thanks to River Island for the T-rex Christmas jumper.
The paddleboarders
Like Santa Claus himself, the all-red, felt-and-flannel get-up worn by this group of standup paddleboard (Sup) enthusiasts comes out just once a year. On the other 364 days, the floating Clauses are better known as Easyriders, a Sup club based on the Sandbanks side of Poole Harbour. They’ve been donning their festive finery every year since 2013, when a roving, paddleboarding Santa called Jay Manning first introduced them to the idea of the Santa Sup, a tradition now honoured by paddleboarding communities across the UK.
“It’s usually the last Sunday before Christmas, and I look forward to it every year,” says full-time music teacher and part-time Santa Elaine Williams. “I remember the first time I saw it, it was such an amazing sight. You just wouldn’t expect a whole load of Santas to be paddleboarding off the Dorset coast.”
Meeting at the club’s trailer in the harbour, the Santas paddle out to sea for up to two hours, weather dependent. With no set plan or destination, they might pootle along parallel to the shore, or venture out into the deep waters of the shipping channels. But either way, they have the harbour largely to themselves. “You don’t get other people out on the water; a lot of the yachts are taken in for the winter,” Williams says. “From the position you’re in, standing up on the board, you see so much more than you would from a kayak, or from walking along the shore. These views, and the peacefulness that you experience when paddleboarding, are the main attractions for me. With the right conditions, there’s no other sport like it.”
While the Sups are fairly stable, and most of the Santas are experienced paddleboarders, with sea temperatures hovering around 10C, they all wear thick winter wetsuits under their fancy dress, in case of an untimely tumble. “The atmosphere is quite playful,” says Jeff Pangbourne, 67, who has been paddleboarding for eight years, and taken part in the Santa Sup for the past three. “I haven’t fallen in, but you can get pushed. A couple of years ago some people decided to push each other off, and then everyone else joined in. It got quite wet. But regardless, it always makes for a bit of a spectacle. We tend to do it quite close to the shore at Sandbanks, so if people are having a leisurely walk, they can see us all on the water. People will stop and get out of their cars to take photos. We wave at them and shout ‘Happy Christmas!’ There’s a lovely atmosphere.”
- Find local courses, clubs and events at bsupa.org.uk
The ramblers
On Boxing Day 1963, Jean Todd and her husband Don wrapped up in their winter coats and headed out for a long walk around Virginia Water Lake in Windsor Great Park. “We had a son of two and decided to walk around the lake with him in the pushchair,” Jean says. “My son’s 56 now. Since then, we’ve increased the size of the family, but we haven’t changed our Boxing Day walk.”
They often shared their traditional circumnavigation of Virginia Water with an assortment of friends and visiting relatives. So when the call came out from a member of the East Berkshire Ramblers – a walking group which Jean and Don had recently joined – to organise a Boxing Day walk, the Todds offered up their ready-made route. “It was about 12 years ago. Our kids had more or less given up on the walks. They’ve grown up and married and they do their own thing now, though we do still spend Christmas together,” Jean says. “I said, ‘Look, we’re doing this family walk every Boxing Day, let’s turn it into a Ramblers walk.’”
Since then, Jean and Don have been joined by around 30 people each year. This year will be the sixth that Frank Bush and his wife Mavis have accompanied the Todds on their four-and-a-half-mile ramble. “It’s the perfect way to blow the cobwebs away. And we get a chance to talk about what we’ve done over the last few days – not so much about presents at our age,” laughs Bush, 75, a retired police officer who is in awe of some of his fellow walkers’ energy and enthusiasm. “Some of the 80-year-pluses go up hills like they’re mountain goats. They’re amazingly fit.”
Part of what makes the Boxing Day walk so accessible for all ages and abilities, however, is that the route is fairly flat, and provides ample opportunity to stop and take in the scenery. “It really is a lovely park,” Jean says. “When you think of a park, you think of flowerbeds and short grass, but the Great Park is just open land, a lot of it wild. It has everything: ponds, streams, woods. Near the end, we come to a waterfall. It’s very fast-flowing and beautiful.”
“There’s a lovely atmosphere,” Jean says. “All the children have their new bikes and scooters. You bump into people and say hello, and then most of us go to the local pub. We thoroughly enjoy it. I’m just hoping the time doesn’t come when I can’t do it. We’ll keep going for a few more years yet.”
• Find somewhere to walk this winter at ramblers.org.uk.
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