What I Learned From a Year Swimming the Coldest Seas in the World, Canada Reviews

I felt numb. Nothing seemed to matter and nothing I did seemed to make any difference. It was a work thing: my job had evolved and changed without me realising; new bosses had come and gone with three new heads of my department in the last two years alone, new demands were being made and I was not keeping up with it at all. I was overloaded with stress to the point that I had lost the ability to do anything about it.

I stopped caring, and I can’t stress enough that that is not like me at all. I was going through the motions. I felt like a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond. I could see the daylight glimmering a bit above me, but I knew it would take a lot of effort to get back to the surface. It was easier, always easier, to let go and stay numb, to sink a little deeper. But I didn’t want to feel like that. I was numb inside and starting to go numb all over and I wanted to shock myself back to life. I wanted to feel things again. 

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For a moment, everything was ice. My lungs tightened. I tried to pull in as much oxygen as I could, but I couldn’t get it to go in deep enough. I panted it into the top of my chest and then out again, shallow as a puddle. The cold burned my skin. There were no thoughts beyond bare survival – in fact, all the racing thoughts that had been filling my time, stopping me from sleeping, making me tetchy, dissolved in an instant.

My breaststroke was gaspingly hectic, desperately rapid. It was the panicky stroke of someone new to swimming, afraid of the unknown, someone on the verge of drowning. I was in the ice-cold water for a minute, maybe less, dipped in, holding on to the metal ladder before letting go and swimming for an ice-cold second or two, until I wrestled the tiniest fingertip of control on my breath, calmed down a beat or two, and then I was out, across the wooden decking and wrapped in a towel. My first dip, my first winter swim, was over in a flash. As I exited the water, a bald man in his sixties wearing pink Bermuda shorts executed an energetic dive, entering the freezing cold water headfirst.  

It was mid-morning on an early November day in Copenhagen, and all around me students and retirement-aged men and women were dotted along the long wooden quay unwinding their long woolly scarves and folding up their puffer jackets and laughing. The faded sun was shining through the grey sky across the dark water to the city’s newest harbour swimming area. Heads bobbed around a section of water the size of a small swimming pool, separated from pleasure boats and ferries by a string of round yellow buoys.  

Out of the water, standing on the quay, I was breathing normally again. My skin pinked as I rubbed it roughly with my towel, and then I pulled and dragged my clothes over its still-damp surface. It was too cold to stand in a wet swimming costume for long. I could feel the skin all over my body pulsing. Right through to the end of the day, I had this electrifying sense of my body, and particularly my skin, in a way I had never experienced before. I felt like I was giving off waves of energy.  

More than anything else, I felt alive.  

🏊‍♀️ Read Laura’s guide to the most beautiful swimming spots in the Nordics

This is an extract from Laura Hall’s new book The Year I Lay My Head In Water, published by Icon Books. Laura is based in Copenhagen. At , all of our travel guides are written by experts across Europe.