The Ice Mile
A mile, in water at 41°F or colder, in a swimsuit, a cap and goggles.
On January 30, 2009, a little after two in the afternoon, Ram Barkai walked into Lake Zurich at the Zürichhorn and swam along the shore to Bellevue, where the lake narrows toward the city. The water was 40°F (4.3°C). He was in for 42 minutes. His friend Andrew Chin swam beside him for the first 22 minutes and got out. A sports doctor from the University of Zurich, Beat Knechtle, followed them along the bank and wrote the swim up as a case report. His notes say Barkai's hands stiffened as he went, that he counted from zero to a hundred over and over to keep his head in order, and that in the last minutes he could no longer count. Cold water does that to a strong swimmer long before hypothermia, which takes half an hour or more to arrive. The sport calls it cold incapacitation. Barkai does not remember leaving the water. On the bank he could not speak or stand without help, and his body went on cooling after he was out, as cold blood came back from his arms and legs into his core. Knechtle had taken his core temperature before the start: 98.6°F (37°C). Twenty minutes after he got out it was 90°F (32°C). It took him three hours to come back.
Barkai knew what it felt like before Zurich. The year before, he had swum a kilometer through a lake in Antarctica for a Guinness record, and he told the Jerusalem Post afterward: "After I dived in, my skin went numb immediately, and then came the burning pain and piercing headache." "It hurts, and I don't recommend it to someone who feels like just waking up one morning and diving in."
In July 2009 he founded the International Ice Swimming Association from Cape Town, where he lived. The rules he wrote that July come from that afternoon. Water at 41°F (5°C) or below. One standard swimsuit, one silicone cap, one pair of goggles, no insulation of any kind. Three waterproof probes go into the water in the half hour before the start. They sit five to twenty inches under the surface. All three have to read 5.0°C or lower, and a reading of 5.01°C fails the swim. The Ice Mile is 1,609 meters of it, with an observer and a witness on the shore and a doctor within reach, an ECG before anyone is allowed to try, and a plain line in the rules that more than thirty minutes in that water is dangerous.
The coldest ratified mile was swum at 30°F (minus 1°C) by the South African Ryan Stramrood in March 2014, in the salt water of Neko Harbor, a glacier-walled inlet on the Antarctic Peninsula. The oldest finisher is Jerrie Roberts, who swam hers in December 2023 at 73, in Loch Morlich, a lake under the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland, with snow on the ground and the water at 37°F (2.7°C). She normally swims a mile in 42 minutes. This one took her just under 55. "It was brutal. It was cold," she told the Torbay Weekly in January 2024. "What a lucky girl I am."
