Meditations in Mid-Air Over Cold Water

That was the temperature of the backyard pool today. It's almost in the range for typical leisure swimming.

That doesn't mean I haven't been using the pool, however. As it happens I've been taking dips throughout most of the winter. This is because last fall Red wanted to watch the Tony Robbins documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru.

Red really liked the documentary. I found it less engaging than her (even I'm a big Tony fan from way back in his early informercial days in 1991). One of my favorite parts of the documentary was learning that at his new Florida home, he has a cold-water plunge pool, kept at exactly 57 degrees, in which he submerges himself every morning.

I used this as inspiration to declare that I was going to take cold water plunges in the backyard pool, no matter what the temperature.

As October rolled into November, I quickly learned than anything below 70 feels mighty cold. As the temperature gets colder than that, it really doesn't change much, except that it makes you want to stay in the water less.

Soon the only way I could keep this habit up was by resolving to do so at a given moment, then marching immediately out to the pool as quickly as possible and jumping into the deep end. There is a moment when you are suspended in the air, when you know you can't go back, when you anticipate the coldness to the highest degree. The actual cold water is actually less of a shock.

I very much looked forward to getting down to the Tony's temperature of 57 degrees. It turns out we had a cold rainy winter, and even though I was out of town over the holidays, I still got to experience temperatures down to 52 degrees. In that range, it becomes hard to breathe evenly when submerged, even during the short period of wading to the stairs. I head learned to keep the thick terry cloth robe handy, that Red got me as a Christmas gift.

As the warm weather has approached, the temperature of the water has increased. I've noticed how nonlinear this is. The temperature seems to jump by five degrees and then stay there for a week on end.

This last week has been tantalizingly close to normal swimming. In the meantime I've fallen out of the habit of the plunges. Fifty-two degrees was a nice experiment, but I'm ready for summer.