Day 24 - A nice Day Out - Coldest to date

Today was the day I met up with a fellow Toughness Group (see links) member - lets call him Mr E!. We had been trying to get together for a while but today was the day. I had shuffled my diary so I could meet up mid-afternoon. I arrived at his place and we sat and exchanged conversation and experiences for a time before running a cold bath. He also showed me some of his favourite video clips from Youtube on this subject.

It turns out that his building has an exposed cold water tank on the roof so the water from his tap is about 3C colder than mine. We both had our thermometers with us so we compared notes and agreed that the water was (after adjustment) around 6C.

Mr E! went first and stayed in for 5 minutes only so as not to warm the water up too much for me. I was the second in the water by this time it was around 7C ( a good 2C colder than I have experienced before).

Observations:

• Getting into the water was actually quite easy (even though for a few days before this I had not had such cold water available)
• My breathing was quite controlled
• I ducked my head under at least twice during the session
• Having someone to talk to passed the time a lot quicker than just looking at the clock
• I moved around and had my hands in the water the whole time yet did not feel a lot of pain in them (am i getting used to this?)
  
• Having exercise equipment (static bike) to warm up on afterwards was great - better than press-ups or sit-ups for warming up. Anyone have one to loan or sell me?
  
• I find really cold water easier to handle than cold, cool or even tepid water because I think it shocks the skin more into closing the pores and sends the correct messages to the brain to bring blood back to the core of your body. Anyone else feel this?
• I was expecting to not be able to stay in for a full 10 minutes at this temperature but found it relatively easy to do a full 10 minutes
• I decided want to go colder still

All in all a good day for me. I need to concentrate on the exercise this weekend and get my weight down some. Maybe Mr E! (who I know reads this blog) would like to comment anonymously on today's session and give his thoughts and impressions of how I am doing in my cold water escapades.

Temperature: 7C
Duration: 10 Minutes 40 Seconds

Starting Out

Let's call this post a ground zero type of day. Why start off here, and why cold water therapy?

Well..... I have a fascination for and enjoy very much taking a steambath or sauna and following that with a dip in a cold plunge pool - I have always wanted to go straight from the steam/sauna into an ice hole in frozen lake (an ambition yet to be achieved - but open to invites from readers to experience this). However, I have also wanted to build an endurance to cold so that I could stay for longer or an undetermined period in cool or cold water without discomfort (or at least recognising when I am reaching a point where I am in danger of hypothermia or find ways to overcome it). I always seem to stay in the plunge pools longer than most other steam/sauna users after a steam/sauna session- sort of a mind-over-matter thing for me I guess (comments such as "how can you stay in there so long" or "you are crazy!" are not uncommon).

Normal commercial cold plunge pools are only at around 16-20C with some even warmer than that so not down to the level of cold that I now want to experience. Questions such as:

• What is it like to be in water that is close to freezing point?
• How long can I be in that temperature water for?
• What effects will it have on my body?
• How do I know when it is dangerous for me (it's different for each person, I know, as we all have different tolerances and metabolisms to deal with it)?
• What can I do to reverse the effects of the cold?

All of these questions I hope to answer on my quest.

In addition, after having put weight on over the past months I now need to lose it and I think to combine my fascination for cold with an exercise regime would be good. As I am a bit nomadic a gym membership is not a good investment so I think the exercise regime is going to have to be walking or running in whatever place I find myself - be that in a city, town or country setting - and in whatever weather comes along. So the gear I need to do this is minimal (running shoes and shorts) for the exercise part and a bathroom with bath and a cold water tap or a cold water swimming pool, river, lake or sea for the cold water therapy part.

How did I decide that this was the way to go? Well, I was looking at Youtube and found a number of vidoes that show cold water swims, dips as well as rolling around in snow (I have a few vids listed as favourites that show people doing this: http://uk.youtube.com/user/tremendimouse). Amongst these videos I followed an obscure link to a yahoo group: http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/Toughness . I joined this group and thought the advice was good and made sense so I decided to follow the advice of its owner and some of the posts on it.

This Blog will diarise my experiences and will hopefully be an inspiration for others to conquer their fears and phobias as well to overcome mental barriers of pain, cold, heat and other things in order to determine the limits of endurance of their bodies. It will be a voyage of discovery for both me in experiencing this, and you, the reader.

Please e-mail me or leave a comment if you have a question or a comment for any of the posts. It is the only way I will know if anyone out there is actually interested in this.

Today is a bit of a catch-up day as I have to post all the things I did this past week. After today I hope it gets easier 'cos this takes a ton of time and thought.