“Anybody Want To Go Swimming?”
“I Don’t Want To Scare You but if you don’t have a little anxiety about being out there, don’t go out,” says Greg O’Connor to the 93 swimmers who have committed to launching themselves – at various times over the next two days – into a lap pool that has been carved into the thick ice of Lake Memphremagog in Newport, Vermont.
It’s a Saturday morning in late February, and O’Connor, 51, who serves as safety director for the annual Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival, is holding a quick briefing inside the East Side Restaurant & Pub. The tavern doubles as a staging area about a hundred metres from the competition zone.
As the only subzero meet of its kind in North America, the Winter Swimming Festival is free to make its own rules. The frigid “pool” is limited to two lanes and 25 metres. Races range from 25-200 metres and include the classic swim-meet strokes of freestyle, breaststroke and butterfly, plus various relays. While parka-clad volunteers clock times, competitors’ race attire must be chillingly confined to English Channel rules: just a cap, goggles and a standard swimsuit.
This set-up means no flip turns. (“If you turn wrong, you end up under the ice,” O’Connor says.) No holding the ladder or the wall too long at the end. (“It gets icy and your hand can freeze to it.”) And no matter what, you need to stay in touch with how you’re feeling. (“You can go downhill really fast.”) Why would anybody subject their body and mind to the mortal dangers of an excruciatingly sustained polar plunge? And yet people do. More and more of them. The popularity of ice swimming has surged in recent years, so nearly half the field at the festival is new. If you don’t have anxiety, O’Connor clarifies, “it means you have no idea
