Why half a million Britons are skipping the heated pool and rediscovering the pleasures of lakes, rivers, and seas—even in winter.
I continued to swim at the Ladies’ Pond through the spring. A mother duck and her fluffy queue of ducklings circled the pond with me and the other swimmers. We were ignored by the heron that sometimes came to rest, heavily, in the boughs of a tree that bent over the water. Bit by bit, the water temperature rose; by late July, it had reached as high as twenty degrees Celsius, or sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
Advocates of cold-water swimming dwell less on its risks than on the health benefits that it allegedly bestows. Anecdotal claims are often made that swimming in low temperatures boosts the immune system, and enthusiasts swear that the mental-health benefits are transformative.
Denton’s respondents also noted that the sense of a close, and possibly risky, encounter with the natural world was part of what made the activity appealing. “All your senses get absolutely overwhelmed, and it brings on a bit of clarity,” one of her interviewees said. For people who have experienced trauma, the focus that’s required for cold-water swimming may be helpful, paradoxically, in generating a sense of calm and control.
McArthur is a member of an informal band of swimmers, the Buoy 13 club, named for a marker moored about five hundred feet from shore. As we descended through the woodland that borders the lake, she told me that usually there were only half a dozen swimmers; this weekend, though, the Kendal Mountain Festival, devoted to outdoor sports and activities, was taking place, and at least forty early risers were gathered at a boathouse and a dock by the water.
An hour or so later, my nausea had abated and my teeth had stopped chattering, and I joined many of the Buoy 13 swimmers as they gathered at the town hall in Kendal for the Mountain Festival’s session on outdoor swimming. The event, hosted bymagazine, was packed, with three hundred festivalgoers seated in the lofty Victorian room. The stage was equipped with a lectern and a video screen.
Her swim, which was done to raise awareness of plastic and other detritus in the Thames, began near the river’s source, in the Cotswolds. The journey was gruelling, she said, but sometimes surprisingly companionable: people occasionally appeared amid the reeds in the countryside and asked if they could join her in the water. She stayed overnight at pubs.
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