Last week I was preparing to give a speech. One of my colleagues and swimming buddies, Julia, was perplexed when I told her about being nervous of speaking in public. “But you are fearless,” she frowned, bemusedly. I told her that the opposite was the case; I was scared of lots of things, but I did them even though they were frightening – sometimes because they were.
In early September last year, I sent an email inviting anyone who was interested to join me in a winter swimming club. I planned to swim once a week during my lunch hour at the nearby Kings Cross Pond Club – an unheated, natural–but-manmade pond in central London. I knew that in order to acclimatise to really cold water we needed to start swimming before the water temperature dropped. There were some tentative enquiries – “Are wetsuits allowed?” – and a few people who expressed interest but never made it to the pond at all. By the end of September, our winter swimming club was whittled down to a hardcore but enthusiastic gang of regular swimmers and co-workers who assembled every week.
To start with, it was easy. Autumn is one of my favourite times to swim. The sun is low and the outdoor swimming venues start to lose their attraction to all but the hardier swimmers, making them peaceful and less populated. But the water is still relatively warm and the air mild. We relished the opportunities to leave the office and lie floating in the pond, staring at the skies and the sun and the building sites that are a feature of this area of town.
The mild weather made the transition from autumn to winter less brutal than it might have been. A few of our gang fell by the wayside as the water temperature dropped below 10C. Every week, we wondered when the water temperature might plummet, sometimes feeling bemused when it went up rather than down. Soon, though, flasks, woolly hats and down jackets started emerging for post-swim recoveries.
And then the sauna was installed and winter came.
Every Tuesday morning I have had a rising sense of hysteria as our meeting time draws closer. Emails fly back and forth: “Who’s going today!?” “Come on – I don’t want to go alone!” We muster up a critical mass, and those who are having second thoughts are cajoled and persuaded into it. As we leave the building, we try to guess what the temperature will be this week. The lowest so far has been 4.3C; that day the lifeguards had to spend the morning smashing the ice that covered the water.
Julia, whose husband is Icelandic, is always the first in. She slips in and starts swimming straight away with a serene, smiling, head-up breaststroke. You’d think she was in a warm bath. I’m usually second. No problem getting in, but I have to spend a few seconds getting my breath before diving below the surface to do a painful few lengths of front crawl. I stop after each length to moan and clutch my temples to alleviate the ice-cream headache. Richard is next. He is built like a runner, not a swimmer. Sitting on the edge of the pond he slips in and quickly and efficiently swims double the distance most of us manage, with an elegant front crawl. Hannah loves it but wrestles with getting in to start. She ducks her body in and then gets out and then paces a bit before finally getting in again and swimming. Nigel, who I met first on a boat in the middle of Lake Windermere before discovering that we worked in the same building, is gung-ho and sometimes dives in, if he’s allowed.
After much cursing and swimming, we dash down to the sauna and sit and chat excitedly and laugh and speak of our love of the water and the cold and the outdoors.
People ask me why I do it: “Why would you want to go swimming for two minutes? Are you mad?” I explain that I think it must be like bungee jumping (not that I’ve ever been). It’s the two hours of dread and nervousness, followed by a heart-pumping adrenaline rush lasting a few minutes, followed by two hours of recovery – and an amazing feeling of wellbeing.
Richard tells me that “overcoming the body, other people, even society saying ‘Don’t do this’ and plunging into freezing water” is a mental challenge. Of course it’s physically challenging, too. But, he smiles: “The initial shock is soon replaced by the realisation – usually at the end of the first length – that it is not that bad and the body can cope.”
I love the “pocket adventure” of swimming in freezing-cold water in your lunch hour. I love the juxtaposition of sitting at a desk in a climate controlled sterile office environment, and the next minute screaming and howling at the cold in a pond, in the middle of a building site. And I love that an hour later I am back at my desk wondering if I dreamt it all up. I love my winter swimming buddies. In reality, outside of a one-hour appointment, once a week, we know next to nothing about one another. But we know that we’re a rare breed, we are made of the same stuff: of a love of the water, of a boldness to step outside of a comfortable life, to be thrilled and challenged, to be chilled to our cores and warmed with laughter and camaraderie. To be legends in our own lunchtimes.
