Wed, Jan-29-20, 14:32
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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There was a great article in The New Yorker this weekend about open water swimming. It's rather long, so you'll have to click on the link to read bit in full.
The Subversive Joy of Cold-Water Swimming
Britons are skipping the heated pool and rediscovering the pleasures of lakes, rivers, and seas—even in winter.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...water-swimming?
Quote:
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The sport’s attractions can be hard to imagine if your vision of outdoor swimming revolves around sunshine, warm water, fine-grained sand, and a trashy novel to read afterward. Britain has an abundance of “blue space”—a term used to characterize rivers, ponds, lakes, and seas by people who argue for the health benefits of having access to them. There are about forty thousand lakes in Britain, and it’s estimated that nobody in the U.K. is ever more than seventy miles from a stretch of coastline. But British waters are incontrovertibly cold. Sea temperatures rarely creep above twenty degrees Celsius, or sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and England’s freshwater bodies, which are often fed by underground springs, tend to be even chillier. Last year, by mid-October—generally regarded as the end of the outdoor-swimming season—the Serpentine Lido, the designated swimming spot in the Serpentine lake, in London’s Hyde Park had dropped to the low fifties. The hardiest wild swimmers keep going even when water temperatures fall below freezing; they pack, along with a microfibre towel and a thermos of tea, an axe, for breaking a channel through the ice.
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