Every winter you encounter them in the news, Minnesota’s perverse answer to Sports Illustrated swimsuit models: pale, shivering people taking part in polar plunges for charity. Huddled like doomed, featherless penguins, their ample pink flesh turning blue, they suddenly rush past the camera men and on-site ambulances to flail briefly in the water of some local lake, then are swaddled and rushed away to warmth. All the while they are oblivious to the fact that what the charities really need is their money, not their sense of shame.
There is a different kind of ice swimmer, though, a more solitary and humble figure who typically operates in the evening, and who jumps into the frigid water not for attention or duty, but because he actually wants to. Such people are the discipline’s true devotees, freezing their buns off for the sheer love of it. Seeking to understand this demented behavior, I decided to engage in it.
Thus I found myself on a February night, with the temperature near zero and a brittle moon overhead, exiting a sauna and strolling nearly naked onto Lake Gegoka, near Isabella, Minnesota. A stone’s throw away, the square hole on the lake’s white surface was ominously black, a beckoning invitation to hypothermia. I moved toward it like a zombie—an especially quick zombie.
Earlier in the evening, Mark Wendt, who owns the nearby National Forest Lodge, had shoveled snow from around the hole, cleared freshly formed ice with a chainsaw, propped a stepladder in the chest-high water, and stoked a fire in the sauna. An enthusiastic proponent of the ice-plunging ritual, Wendt takes pride in creating a quality experience for his guests at the lodge, most of whom are cross-country skiers.
The Finnish have a word for this business, avantouinti (“ice hole swimming”), and are some of its foremost practitioners. They’ve even got an Avantouinti Society that promotes the benefits of a bone-chilling bath, and Helsinki boasts several public avanto holes with dressing rooms and rubber-treaded steps. Its adherents claim health benefits that range from improved circulation to cold-fighting powers. But the most powerful lure is more fundamental.
“I’ve introduced lots of people to this, and I’ll ask them afterwards, ‘How are you feeling?’” Wendt said. “And they say, ‘Man, I’m just feeling great.’ And you do—all tingly, super-relaxed, but yet not dulled out. There is nothing like having a big day of outdoor activity in the cold, and then going down to that sauna, getting totally warm, and jumping in the lake a few times. You sleep like an absolute baby.”
Other ice-plunge veterans offer similarly gushing testimonials that take on a spiritual tone. But Wendt still has a hard sell on his hands, and considers it a high turnout if one-third of his guests on a given weekend actually jump into the icy water.
“A lot of people just can’t conceive of it,” he admits.
Merely going from the sauna out into the cold, or even rolling in the snow, are inferior substitutes, he says dismissively. And don’t even get him started on the hot tub, which has stolen some of the ice hole’s box office.
“It just doesn’t get you to the same place.”
Wendt stokes the sauna to 160 degrees or so. Thrill seekers might take it to 180, and push-it-to-the-limit types can send the needle to 200—but sauna etiquette eschews heat competitions. It’s a Finnish-style sauna, with dippers to pour water onto scalding rocks. The idea is to stay in as long as you can, sweating your brains out until you absolutely can’t stand it anymore. Then take the plunge, reheat, and repeat. Aficionados say at least three leaps are needed for maximum effect.
Science backs up some of these claims. Several medical studies have shown that ice swimming makes the hypothalamus release beta-endorphins, the morphine-like hormones behind the “runner’s high” and other feel-good effects of exercise. But other researchers are quite willing to throw cold water on other cherished beliefs.
“A sauna, even if you exclude the cold water part of it, is a working stress,” says Professor Larry Wittmers, director of the Hypothermia Laboratory of the University of Minnesota Duluth. “It dilates your peripheral vessels and it runs up your heart rate. It’s just like working.”
Combine this with an icy plunge, he says, and “There is a danger of kind of assaulting your cardiovascular system. You basically are in a situation in which you’re maximally vasodilated, and all of a sudden you hit the water, so you’re going to vasoconstrict, which is going to put a heavy load on your heart.”
Of course, naysayers like Wittmers were nowhere in sight as I prepared for my debut dip. I was surrounded in the sauna by several other eager ice plungers, and we all egged each other on, steaming ourselves to a state of near delirium. Then I stepped out for my first plunge. The frigid, piney air was enormously refreshing to my heat-wracked body, and my thoughts suddenly crispened in the cold as I took in the shimmering field of stars overhead. It seemed a lot like existential reverie, but it may have just been my nervous system’s dawning realization that I might soon freeze to death.
When my body hit the water, the shock was profound, but, thanks to my superheated body core, not a lot different from other cold-water dunkings I’ve endured. When I surfaced, I emitted a party whoop that carried an edge of panic. I paused before exiting, because I’d been told staying in the water briefly heightened the effects (though it’s called ice swimming, it’s really more like ice bobbing).
Back in the sauna, it took a good ten minutes to work back up to a rolling sweat. I repeated the process two more times, then headed for the shower. A warm one. At dinnertime, as advertised, I felt a swelling inner glow and an overwhelming physical calm, as if I’d just had a massage. Mark asked how I was doing. He’d heard my answer before, of course: “Great,” I said. “Just great.”
—Keith Goetzman
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