What cold water swimming taught me about change

I hate to go on about it buuuuuuttttt ... cold dips were the yang I didn't know I needed

I saw an internet meme that read “you’ll know if someone’s been cold water swimming … because they’ll tell you about it”. Guilty! In order to avoid being that person, I haven’t written much about swimming outside yet, which I started doing regularly in the summer and have continued so far through the winter. Perhaps I was also worried I wouldn’t stick to it and then I would have painted myself as a swimming person without the habit to back up such a title. Maybe now, four months into my first winter swimming season, I feel enough of a swimming person to share something about it.

Christmas Eve swim at Parliament Hill Fields Lido, north London, UK

But staying a swimming person feels precarious, because cold water swimming is hard and like anything hard, it’s easier not to do it, to stay in a place of comfort, in this case at home in the warm. The longer the periods of time in between swims, the more psychologically challenging it is to get back in the water, and I feel like I’m in danger territory if more than a week goes by since my last swim.

So far so good this winter, bar a couple of weeks of a winter virus. This feels wild to me: I would never have believed you if you’d told me I’d make it through swimming until January. I’m skinny and I feel the cold: in fact I would say that I hate the cold, or I always did, until now. For a long time I felt envious of outdoor swimmers because I wanted to count myself amongst them - with all their determination and their hardy, hearty bodies and faces! - and couldn’t imagine I ever would.

For me, the fear is real when I get into cold water. Not rational fear, I don’t really believe I’ll die or something - I’m pretty cautious and I know how to listen to myself about the right time get out. Instead it’s something existential, some primal fear that fills my clever animal body, sensing danger. Sometimes I don’t feel this fear, and it gets more distant the more I swim and my systems habituate and learn this is not a threat. At other times I simply feel pure resistance - the feeling of oh fuck, this is so hard, why would I do this to myself, shall I just go home instead?

Boxing Day swim with my friend Emma

The first few minutes, when it’s cold enough to take your breath away, before it feels exhilarating or gorgeous, when people in the water wince or screech or swear or are simply consciously using their breath to calm themselves and try and cope - this isn’t pleasant. And this is the point, I think. It’s hard, unenjoyable, and yet here we are doing it.

There’s knowing you can do hard things in your head and there’s the somatic version of that in your body. There’s so many ways to feel this, from marathon running to weight-lifting; for me swimming in cold water feels like a particularly elegant way to understand this, perhaps because other more hardcore approaches have left me feeling depleted and this feels more sustainable. To keep being a swimmer I simply turn up, I get cold then I warm up, and I keep turning up, facing those difficult feelings again and again, knowing how proud I'll be when I’ve done it, knowing how good I’ll feel once I’m finally warm and dry again, eating biscuits and drinking from my thermos, with my friend by the side of the pool.

My local pool - Brockwell Lido in south-east London

I crave comfort a lot but it’s only by making myself uncomfortable sometimes that I feel more equilibrium overall. I understand this now. Once I’ve been swimming my centrally heated life of relative ease feels a bit more balanced, as if I can only understand - again, at the level of my body - the warmth and comfort once I’ve understood the cold and discomfort.

Plus there’s the moment when it stops feeling agonising and instead feels cold but manageable, and I feel the purest sense of being alive. The trees against the sky feel newly miraculous, I could hug a stranger, life is amazing.

One swim at a time, I’ve become something I never thought I would be. Which makes me wonder, who is present me to say what kind person future me will be? Often we become rigid about the kinds of thing we are, want or need, but I see so much change all around me, everywhere and all the time, all this movement. I try and remember this when I feel stuck or feel I am only one thing. Of course patterns are there and often they are strongly woven into us. But also there is this space around us: invisible, inviting us, waiting to transform us into something new.