They call their group ‘The Washing Machine’. At the back of a neighbourhood eatery, Lola Stays, most days of the week around 8 am you will find a group of happy cold-water warriors. They may be shivering in their padded jackets and their lips might be a delicate shade of blue but there is no doubting the effervescent effect of their exercise.
No surprises there. Cold water swimming has been trending for some time – probably since the dawn of time. Diving in and breaking the ice was a test in the muscular Christianity regimes of British boarding schools last century and the century before that. More recently, contemporary research methodology has rounded out the reasons for the feel-good factor: mental health, heart health, spinal health – you name it and a plunge into icy water is good for it.
Dougal Dunlop (known as ‘The Mayor’ to the group) started doing it 12 years ago because of a painful back. Surgeons told him that cold water swimming would be the best remedy and so he swam his way towards a better back.
Others joined him and the group now numbers about 200 with visitors from overseas welcome. They come because of the world’s seven big swims, one of which is Cook Strait. There are also many foreign nationals in the group, such as the aptly named Marina, a marine biologist from Brazil: ‘It’s magical. It changes how you see the world. And it makes you feel good in your own skin because when you’re out there you learn how to make peace with yourself. And that just expands through all the other dimensions in your life. I think as a scientist I’m an overthinker and when I’m in the water, my brain activity just drops and I think wow, I’m at peace now.’
The mental health benefits are a recurring motif: ‘It makes me feel amazing. I mean, for me, it’s helped my mid-life crisis, it’s really helped me through some quite tough times. When you’re out there, you’re with people but you’re by yourself, no people around, it’s extraordinary – you’re in the moment. You empty your head. And it’s got me to meet this whole community of people that I didn’t know before and that’s been good’.
Put more simply, one young man says: ‘I get grumpy if I don’t exercise’.
The anaesthetising quality of cold water got local resident Peter Cullen plunging in: ‘I had a sore knee for a long time and, for me, the colder the better because I lost all feeling. When you get out you just feel on top of the world, it feels great to be alive. The other thing is that you see the world through new eyes so one of the most beautiful things is sunrise when you’re swimming. The timing varies of course but when it’s a beautiful pink sunrise and you just see it as you stroke from the corner of each eye, you see the city in a different way, and it just gives you a sense of the rhythm of life. We’ve got an artificial rhythm living in a city but out there you get this slow, long rhythm of nature that you link into for a little while and it gives you a sense of peace.’
For others, the sense of community is strong: ‘I love the time when we all mingle, happily mingle before, and then in the water you have to swim with somebody, and we feel happy afterwards’ and ‘I’ve always been a water baby; I get a big buzz out of it and it’s nice to meet people as crazy as me.’
The only things to stop them are when heavy rain causes an overflow of wastewater or there is a big thunderstorm with lightning.
The saying ‘cold as charity’ takes on a new meaning with this group. They plunge into freezing water and the result is a sense of charity in its broadest sense – amity, benevolence, generosity, goodwill – to themselves, to their group and to others.
— Bay View newsletter, November 2024