Jack Frost

Image result for freezing + images

I love swimming, it's my favourite way of exercising, but I have to admit I'm a bit of a 'big jessie' when it comes to getting wet, if the air and/or water temperature is cold or even a bit chilly.

I'm one of those people who faffs around with the water up to my knees before finally taking the plunge although what I'm talking about is swimming somewhere in the Mediterranean in the cooler spring or autumn months, not the waters of Antarctica.

So while I enjoyed this article in The Times about Lewis Pugh from Devon who swims regularly with icebergs I couldn't help feeling that the poor chap must be off his head.  


Lewis Pugh: swimming with icebergs


Lewis Pugh swims off Peter I Island in the Antarctic last month - Photo: Kelvin Trautman

By Giles Whittell - The Times

It’s no wonder Lewis Pugh has been dubbed the human polar bear – the former lawyer from Devon has survived the Arctic and Antarctic oceans in nothing but a pair of Speedos

Lewis Pugh grew up in Devon, but he wasn’t there to see the daffs come out last month. He was in Antarctica, in the stretch of sea nearest to the South Pole, in swimming trunks.

The southern winter was drawing in. From Pugh’s boat you could look down on the water of the Bay of Whales and see grey pancake ice thickening the waves. A 40-knot wind off the Ross ice shelf meant the air temperature was minus 37C including windchill. It was so fantastically cold that when Pugh’s wife went out in a Zodiac to check the water for killer whales and leopard seals and a wave crashed over the dinghy, she didn’t actually get wet. “I saw the water come out and in the air I saw it turn into ice,” he says. “It landed on her as ice.”

When the Zodiac came back it was time to do what he’d come to do. He took off his outer layer and jumped in from a piece of floating pack ice. No wetsuit, no goose fat, just Speedos and a swimming cap. In that first gasping moment he paused as he always does to put on goggles, but the thick water ripped them off. “The water is so dense because it’s about to freeze,” he explains. Salt water freezes at minus 1.8C. It was minus 1C when he got in, cold enough to freeze his eyeballs, but the goggles were gone and there was no time to get others, so he started swimming.

The idea was to swim a kilometre – “a proper symbolic swim” – but immediately he could see the water freezing on his arms as he lifted them for each stroke. At 250 metres he saw that two knuckles on his left hand were white, frozen, “done”.

“I get to 300 metres and I’m thinking, phhhuh. I get to 330 metres and I realise if I carry on any longer I’m actually going to lose my hands right here.”

He reached for the Zodiac and was pulled aboard by a support crew wrapped in polar exploration kit. He had to be pulled in gently to minimise the damage to his frozen fingers.

“Duvet!” A duvet was thrown over him and the expedition doctor held it down against the wind in the bottom of the dinghy as it raced to the mother ship. The dinghy was winched aboard because Pugh couldn’t walk. It took the best part of an hour in a hot shower to get his core body temperature back to normal.

A week later he is in the offices of The Times. Aged 45, he looks OK but tired, and there is an unexpected hint of yellow to his face. I ask if he’s confident that the polar swimming he does at appalling risk to his life, to raise awareness of the steady destruction of the world’s wild places, hasn’t done him permanent damage. I’m thinking extremities, but also heart and who knows what else.

“No,” he says. As in, not confident. “I try not to think about it.”

The uncut footage that Pugh’s team has brought back from Antarctica has several things in common with a video of his first famous polar swim, across the North Pole, eight years ago. There’s the super-abundant, swirling cold and the blackness of the water, but more striking than both is the condemned look on Pugh’s face. There is no humour or talk of any kind before he gets in and no fist-pumping or back-slapping when he gets out. Just utter seriousness. The overwhelming emotions, he says, are fear and relief. Fear of dying. Relief that he’s not dead. It’s that awful.

But isn’t this, you might ask, the Lewis Pugh that people call the human polar bear? The hot ex-army guy who cut a faintly comical figure swimming the length of the Thames many years ago and has since starred in the most spectacular images committed to film of Homo sapiens diving off icebergs? He is, the very same. But what is quickly clear when you meet him is that he doesn’t do this stuff for the thrill of it. “I have no death wish. I take these risks because of life, because I want to protect life, because I care about these things.” But if he’d stayed in the water in the Bay of Whales any longer, what would have happened? “I reckon you’d be dead within ten minutes, maximum.”

Pugh does these swims because he’s found they are effective at putting him in the public eye, where he can talk about what matters to him. A bit of myth-making goes with the territory, not that he takes credit for it. In fact, he blames most of it on the British press. He says there are two misconceptions about him. One is that he’s somehow superhuman. The other is that he enjoys cold water. “Anybody who’s been cold and says they enjoy the cold, well, they haven’t really been cold.”

Real cold is like an ice-cream headache all over, he says, and that’s just the beginning. The longer you stay in water that is nearly freezing, the more of your body nearly freezes. The blood rushes to your core to protect your vital organs but fingers, arms and legs lose feeling and function, in roughly that order. The Lancet has published a study of Pugh’s physiognomy in which it listed the clinical conditions that immersion in very cold water can bring on in seconds in normal people, from massive involuntary hyperventilation to tachycardia, intense peripheral vaso-constriction and respiratory alkalosis.

Pugh’s translation: “You panic. You gasp for air. You drown.”

In these circumstances, even the bravest will start to swim jerkily and upright after a few strokes if they yield to instinct. Pugh is one of very few people in history to have shown that mind can prevail over matter even in polar waters, but he is not immune to skin-piercing ice crystals. He often emerges spotted in blood.

His first long, cold swim was round the North Cape 12 years ago, where the top of Norway bulges into the Arctic Ocean. He returned to the Arctic each year after that for four years, swimming a kilometre across the North Pole in 2007 to show the world in the most emphatic way he could that there was no ice there any more. He has since cheated death in a glacial lake two thirds of the way up Mount Everest, nearly drowning on his first attempt to cross it because he set out too fast, forgetting about the altitude.

His five Antarctic swims last month were intended to jolt Russia, which has form when it comes to cold water, into backing his call for a giant Marine Protected Area (MPA) encompassing the entire Ross Sea. Pugh calls this giant wilderness of ice and ocean the world’s last pristine marine ecosystem. If approved, an MPA here would protect an area bigger than Britain, France and Germany combined. The trouble is, Russia has vetoed the idea for each of the past four years.

Which is why he and his wife, Antoinette, and two photographers headed south from New Zealand three weeks ago as paying passengers aboard an Antarctic cruise ship bound for Argentina via the coldest and most achingly lonely coastline on earth. Their first stop was in a fjord off Campbell Island, 625 miles south of Auckland. The plan was to have a training swim in easy 5C water, but a leopard seal spotted Pugh and headed for him so fast that his team barely managed to heave him into the Zodiac before he was attacked. Leopard seals scare him even more than killer whales because they move so fast and aren’t fussy about their food. (In 2003, one dragged a British Antarctic researcher 200 feet under for its lunch.) “You swim past an iceberg and often you have these animals underneath, waiting for a penguin to jump out,” he says.

So are predators the greatest single risk? Actually, no. The question brings us quickly back to drowning, or rather sinking, and a story from two years ago of a woman swimming the English Channel in mild 15C water. “One moment she’s swimming along fine and the next she’s gone straight down to the bottom, poof, disappeared, gone. It isn’t slow.” This is the Russian roulette scenario in the back of all their minds each time he gets into the water, and he’s pulled the trigger more than most. His wife and two stepchildren (18 and 22) are presumably aware of it. Even so, he says, they’re “hugely supportive”.

Pugh is not as big as I’d expected. He says you have to be big like a walrus for polar swimming and he bulked up from his normal 85kg to 100kg for his latest trip, mainly by eating mounds of carbohydrates late at night. But he cuts the same sort of figure as your average fit bloke and talks extremely quietly, like a doctor imparting bad news.

Bad news such as: “Every year more than 100 million sharks are fished out of the ocean. Deliberately. That’s a quarter of a million every day. If this was happening to a human population, don’t you think there’d be emergency meetings every single day in the [UN] Security Council?”

These are the sorts of things that go through his mind as he gets in the water. He forces himself to think about them, because motive is everything: “Everything is saying to you, ‘This is not a place you should be swimming,’ and as soon as you get in there are two voices in your head. One is saying, ‘Go for it. This is your chance to send a message in a world that’s so cluttered with stories about civil wars and financial crises and I’m a Celebrity. Dive in and go for it.’ And then there’s another voice that says, ‘How are your hands feeling, Lewis? You sure about this? You really think the Chinese are going to listen?’

“The Inuit talk about a bad wolf and a good wolf,” he says. The bad wolf is the one that comes all this way and then chickens out. The good wolf is the one that remembers what he believes in and does the swim. “That’s the wolf you’ve got to feed.”

This is what Pugh wants to talk about, and I reckon he’s earned the right. But those who have followed his career say there’s another thing that helps him handle the cold, and they’re not wrong. It’s a weird physiological thing. When he stands in the freezing wind in his Speedos, his core temperature goes up. It usually goes up about three degrees, to 101F. His doctors have measured it and given it a name: anticipatory thermogenesis. The idea that it is unique to Pugh is what has given rise to the human polar bear theory, but the theory is apparently false.

His doctors say this useful internal warming is acquired, not innate, like a dog’s Pavlovian salivation at the sound of the kibble jar being opened. “They think the cause is that I’ve spent so many years swimming in extreme cold water that I know subconsciously if I don’t heat up my core before I get in I simply won’t survive. And so just as I’m getting into the water I am sweating. I’m sweating and I’m thirsty.”

Popular posts from this blog

SNP - Conspiracy of Silence

LGB Rights - Hijacked By Intolerant Zealots!