HEALTH AND THE BODY
"I don't really see the swimming as exercise. I see it as a sort of mental relief."
Almost all of my participants discussed the impact of their pond swimming on their health. This was something I had expected going into the project - much of the writing online about cold water swimming espouses its mental health benefits - but for my participants, the areas in which their pond swimming impacted their lives varied across the mental and the physical.
One participant had suffered from severe insomnia and anxiety, and found that their swimming practice had alleviated this. Another participant had various sensory processing issues that had manifested in the form of muscular issues, seizures and panic attacks throughout their life; cold water swimming - and swimming at the ponds in winter specifically - had transformed their management of these conditions, and was something they regularly spoke to their physiotherapist about. Another participant began swimming as they were suffering from a combination of long COVID and post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome. They described starting to swim at the ponds two or three times a week, and it being one of the biggest factors in their symptoms improving.
"By going regularly swimming I sort of found this ability to calm down and I started sleeping again. I put a lot of that down to the sensation when you get out of the cold water that sort of rush of endorphins and peace. I think it's very addictive and very calming."
"Something about it just like recalibrates my nervous system… when I think about my health now and where it was three years ago, the difference is unbelievable."
Two participants talked about how their experience of swimming at the ponds has given them management techniques they've been able to take into their wider lives. One spoke about seizures - the swimming had been so beneficial in preventing these, that they now know to take a cold shower when they feel one coming on as they know the sensory impact. Another spoke at length about struggles with anger management and processing feelings when overwhelmed - that the experience of self calming that the shock of the cold water necessitates is something they are able to situate in other situations. On a different note, another participant talked about how they had always felt the cold to an extreme degree; since regularly swimming at the ponds their flat thermostat rests at 16 degrees instead of 20.
"Now if I get really overwhelmed, I kind of picture myself in the pond and try and focus on slowing down my breathing. And it's made a lot of situations I would normally have boiled over in much more bearable and normal."
Several participants observed that where they regularly track themselves when it comes to other forms of physical activity or exercise in their lives, this is in no way associated with their swimming practice at the pond. "The quantified self", as Lupton terms it, is not one that exists in the pond itself even if it exists in other areas of participants lives (Lupton, 2016). One of my participants observed that in other cold water swimming spaces where they swim - and cold water swimmers who they follow on Instagram - they observe self quantification using apple watches for heart rate and time, electric thermometers to monitor temperature, and the app Strava - but this isn't something they've observed at the pond. Most participants exercised in other ways, and often measured this by speed of runs, kilometres covered, or lengths swum at the gym, but introduced none of this self-quantification into cold water swimming. One participant discussed machines at the gym measuring in calories as the easiest way to track progress, and how swimming at the pond felt like the antithesis of this.
"It has so much to do with the body, but not in a weight-related or physique-related way."
So swimming for my participants hugely impacted their health and bodies, but sat entirely outside self-quantification practices used in other areas of their lives. The "data" they took onwards was qualitative as opposed to quantitive. As someone whose exercise practice exists entirely in social settings of team sport, I could not relate to distinction between self-quantification in other areas of cardio and pond swimming as an activity that existed outside this. However I did have a long bout of COVID during the research period of this project and felt pretty rubbish in the weeks following. Swimming with participants, and alone, was definitely one of the things that helped me recondition my body, and feel hardier and stronger. If I could swim in sub-10 degree water, then I must be fine.