Swim Thursdays and Swimming in October

If you haven't been following this blog at all, Rich invented something this summer called Swim Thursday. See, he is the only one in our house who has a real job with an actual schedule (Josh does art whenever, I do nothing), and he realized he would be missing a lot of swimming this summer (one of his favorite things to do), so he finagled his schedule to get him out at 3 on Thursdays. This meant that every Thursday was "Swim Thursday." I missed a few due to visiting Maine or Mass or New York, but otherwise did most of them. And I also did the worst ones. See, if it was raining or freezing cold, it didn't matter- it was still Swim Thursday, and that meant swimming was in order. 

3 weeks ago, on September 22nd, I'm pretty sure I caught mild hypothermia.

It was pretty cold and pretty ugly. It had been raining for at least a day, and luckily the skies opened up for our swimming, but still, it was cooooold. We went to Ellacoya State Park, which has probably become my favorite place to swim (other than Fernal Shores) because of its coolness, perfect sand, and size. Too often though, the place is understandably packed. Not today!

ghost town

We went in and I was the first to get past my waist. It was COLD. Like, shockingly, how-on-earth-am-I-going-to-swim-after-this cold. It hurt. But we all kept saying we were getting used to it, and it wasn't so bad, etc. So we just threw the B like champs as cars slowed down on the road nearby to stare in disbelief. I kept jumping for the B and going fully underwater, laughing and saying that no, how could I be cold? This water feels great! 

But I started to feel WEIRD. I felt hot inside, and started to not feel the coldness on the outside of my body anymore. I told Rich and Josh this, and they were like "yea that's not good dude." Then I started to feel kind of light headed and just not right- like I was drunk or something. At one point (as a joke), I fell face first and just floated there for a moment to illustrate how messed up I felt. I heard Rich say "imagine if this was real? like he just didn't get up?" and from underwater, I started to feel like that wasn't entirely a crazy idea- I FELT like I could have actually collapsed for real. It was at this time that I decided I had to get out of the water. 

I got out and realized that I had moved on from just being comfortably numb- I was actually kind of hot. Not good. SO, I was incredibly smart, and instead of getting out of the water, I got back in and sat in it, taking pictures of everything, playing with HDR on my phone. 

Some came out pretty awesome:

Rich and Josh, the true champs of Swim Thursday:

We got out and Rich's car is so stupid it would only defog if he had the AC on. And we headed to an ice cream place to get ice cream. And I of course ate some, because I'm a big fat idiot. All that night, I felt just incredibly wrong. I stayed kind of light headed, dizzy, hot, etc. I had never felt like this before, and I hated it. I got how I had turned numb while swimming. I got how parts of me were systematically being shut down by my brain to keep me alive. That all made sense. But why I was still feeling this messed up hours later, I had no idea. I went to bed certain that I would wake up with a horrible cold, and prayed that the awful feeling would disappear in the morning. 

I somehow woke up feeling fine, and to this day, I have no idea what was wrong with me, other than my guess- that I started to get hypothermia but somehow curbed it and survived. Swim Thursday is dangerous.

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A week later, I headed back from Maine on a rainy, cold, unbelievably ugly Thursday afternoon. I had already told both Rich and Josh that, after last week, I had no interest in swimming. I'd hang out, I'd go to dinner, etc. But I was not swimming. I didn't want to feel that awful feeling ever again. 

I walked in to hear Josh say "ohh!! just in time for swimming!!" I could see on Rich's face that he was trying to get out of it, but didn't want to admit that he didn't want to swim. Against everything that I believed, I let the peer pressure/one-upness/show-the-other-guy-up-and-act-like-you're-tougher-than-them thing hit, and said I'd go along and watch them swim. "Why do you have a towel if you're not swimming?" asked Josh. "Well, just, you know, in case you guys need one or something..."

We went to a section of river in Sanford that we had swam in before and seen a giant snapping turtle.  It's a weird spot, but it's pretty good for swimming. It was a ghost town there, and it only got more rainy and miserable the closer we got to the water. 

me and my BADASS towel

Rich is usually the guy who goes under first. He has this thing where he says "see, the thing about me is, I just go in." It was his way of getting away from the slow creeping in and wimpy way he and some people (Josh) swim. So he's always the first one under. But I seem to be the first one to go in above my waist. And this was BAD. Because I knew we weren't going to swim as much, I knew I didn't have to worry about being in the water too long. I knew I wouldn't feel like I did at Ellacoya, so honestly, the water didn't bother me as much. Rich and Josh said it was way worse, but somehow I had psyched myself into believing that it wasn't. 

But it was cold. Oh yes, it was very cold. There was lots of screaming, very little frisbee throwing, and lots of us just standing there moving our hands around so they didn't go numb. I had noticed how bad that felt at Ellacoya, and it was worse here. My feet went numb pretty quickly and didn't really hurt much. But my fingers were a different story- it was piercing ice needle death every time I put my hands underwater. And opening your eyes while underwater when it's that cold? Wow, that's a weird feeling. 

I didn't bring my camera, so we used Josh's old crappy one, but we were able to at least have proof that we had gone in. It was rough. It was raining pretty hard when we got out and we had nowhere to change, so we drove home wet, through probably the worst thunderstorm I'd seen all summer. Friendly's tasted DELICIOUS. 

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Since the beginning of summer, I had been saying that I would swim in October. I don't think I had ever done it, and it fit in nicely with my refusal to admit that summer was over and stop swimming. So sure enough, the next week was October. It was the 6th, to be exact, and it fell after a week of slowly declining temperatures. In fact, the night before, it had been in the low 30s, possibly hitting the 20s at some point. Water gets COLD when it's regularly in the 30s at night. 

I was incredibly nervous about this Swim Thursday. I even had a dream about it the night before, and woke up waiting for Rich and Josh to tell me that you know what, it was fun, but we weren't doing it anymore. Was I backing out of something I said I'd do? No- see, I wanted to swim in October. That was it. Rich and Josh decided if we were going to swim in October, we should swim at the Kanc, where the water is painfully cold in the middle of July. See, they had done this once before, and dared themselves into doing it again. Why not swim in the coldest water we could find? I never once said I wanted to do this. To me, the Kanc gets old and is very far away, not to mention that the water would be pretty much ice by this time. I had no interest in going there, and was praying that they'd somehow get their brains in order and decide to swim elsewhere. 

The first tweet I saw when I checked twitter was Josh saying WHO'S READY FOR SOME SWIMMING!?!? I was doomed. 

Our house retains cold like nothing I've ever seen. I slept the night before with 3 blankets and even a winter hat at one point because of how uncomfortably cold I was. I woke up and couldn't get my core temperature up. I was FREEZING, and sat in my room in sweatpants, a hooded sweatshirt, and a ridiculously warm and ridiculous looking hat. I didn't want to go to the Kanc, at all. I was miserable. 

Rich got home, and I was a sarcastic jerk. "Awesome, let's drive an hour to die. Great." I could tell they didn't really want to do it either, but they were staying headstrong and pretending they were psyched about it. I began to pretty much tell them that I wasn't going in, and I'd just go swimming by myself the next day to cross "swim in October" off my list. 

We stopped at a gas station, and a crow seemed to further spell out our doom. 

We got there and hopped out of the car to see that not only were there a ton of people there sight-seeing, but the water was also higher and scarier looking than I'd ever seen it there. 

All those spots were calm before, with barely any moving water. This was the Kanc in full-on beast mode. 

Do these look like people who are about to go swimming?

(most of these pics were taken by Rich)

I began to psych myself into it, and sure enough was the first person to even think about getting in the water. 

Two words: holy shit. I grew up on a lake and have felt what the water that doesn't quite freeze or the water through a crack of ice feels like. Honestly, this wasn't far off- maybe 10 degrees warmer. I wish I had a thermometer. It was really, truly, frighteningly cold. My foot was instantly numb. 

Josh stepped it up by putting two feet in. 

Then we started seeing how far out we could all go.

I went the farthest because I was the only one wearing my suit. It hit a point where we all were saying it was absurd to even think about going in. It was numbingly cold, and my legs were already bright red from being in the water for 30 seconds or so. I started just saying "I'll go in right now, but I need my towel." Then the "well, your towel is in the car, which is far away" "ok, well then let's go get my towel" "I don't know man, if we go all the way back there, we probably should just leave" "I'll jump in right now and run to my towel" "eh.. I don't know man" thing started up. They clearly didn't want anything to do with swimming here, and I didn't either, but was willing to do it since we had driven that far and I had already gone in that far. It became a "I can say I just jumped in" kind of thing- where stories would be told for years to come about my bravery and manliness. But on the way back to the car, we got hit with some wind at the same time that a huge tour bus showed up full of tourists who had been bused to the white mountains from Boston, and I think before that, another country. The idea of nearly killing ourselves but then having a tour bus of people laughing at the fat stupid guys kind of made us decide that we didn't need to be that dumb- they had already done this once (even though the air (and probably water) was much warmer), and I never really said I'd do it, so risking full on hypothermia/death just didn't need to happen. We smartly decided to go to Chocorua Lake instead, even though this meant that we would now be swimming in the dark, with temperatures even lower. 

I don't know if Rich and Josh believe me, but I honestly was ready to jump in. I really was going to. I think I'm very happy that we talked ourselves out of it though. 

By the time we got to Chocorua Lake, it was this dark out:

And it was cold. My phone said Somersworth (an hour south) was 54 degrees, meaning it was probably colder here. I would guess that if the water at the Saco River was 54, the Kanc was probably like 45 and this was probably 50. It's tough to tell, but just a few degrees can make a huge difference, and logistics and semantics aside, this "warmer" water was still chillingly cold, and it was beyond stupid that we were going in at 7 at night. 

Here's video, simply because I feel that swimming in October is worth visual evidence. And listening to us scream and panic is kind of funny. You can also hear some of the deadly game of "oh, you're getting out? Maybe I'll stay in..."

"Swimming in October" from Mike Alexander on Vimeo

That first time I went in hurt. It was so shockingly cold that it actually took a little while for the cold to actually kick in- like my body didn't register it at first. Standing in the water for a minute or however long it was was deadly- my lower half was slowly going numb, and my upper half had that kind of burning warmth that is part of freezing to death. So, the second time I went in was one of the worst experiences of my life. I think that's what got me so bad at Ellacoya- I kept going back under, which meant I kept subjecting an upper body and head that was trying to protect itself continuously to the cold evil it was trying to protect itself from. Jumping in headfirst this night was just death. I don't even know what happened. There was no water, there was no Rich and Josh, there was no me, there was just pain. Cold, deathly pain. My whole body stiffened up and I even hurt my back a little bit from the soul-stiffening shock. It was just screaming and blackness. Don't ever do this. Look at when josh goes in headfirst at 2:20, he's screaming before he's even underwater!

I don't know how the polar bear club crazies do this. For one, my understanding is that they run in, run out and warm up- they don't stay in there and keep going in. I'm guessing they're all in better shape and don't have bad hearts either, because my heart is ok but I felt like it was close to stopping the second time I went in. 

When I got out, I got naked FAST and got as much water off me as I could while moving as fast as I could. I had laid out my clothes in advance- lined windpants, warm socks and underwear, shoes, short sleeve shirt, long sleeve shirt, hooded sweatshirt, epic winter hat, and even gloves. Once I got the longsleeve on, I was happy, but the hat was heaven. 

We got in Rich's car, pumped some heat, headed to Friendly's, watched a movie, and somehow none of us woke up sick the next day. Quite the end to Swim Thursdays. It was a fun summer guys. 

SWIM THURSDAY SOLDIERS

currently listening to: Journal- Unlorja