SwimSwam Podcast: Chris Ballard on Ice Swimming, Cold Water, and The Plunge

Ice swimming is an odd outpost on the sting of our sport. It’s actual, rising, and intense, however nonetheless outdoors the formal World Aquatics construction. In this GMM takeover of the SwimSwam Podcast, we sit down with Chris Ballard, writer of THE PLUNGE: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water.

The e book drops June ninth from Simon & Schuster.

Ballard, a senior author at Sports Illustrated and an award-winning writer, doesn’t dip a toe into this icy world and name it reporting. He spent three years writing the e book, chasing chilly water throughout Norway, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Boston, and Copenhagen, coaching contained in the tradition as an alternative of merely observing it. Along the best way, he turned an age-group nationwide champion in ice swimming and raced on the World Championships in Italy, with mentorship from legendary cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox.

If you’ve learn Born To Run,  you’ll love The Plunge.

This just isn’t a wellness cash-grab. It is immersive journalism, an excellent literary status journey you need to take. Ballard put his personal physique into the experiment to know why individuals maintain coming again to chilly water, what separates pool swimming, open water, and ice swimming, and why this area of interest nook of the game has grow to be a worldwide curiosity.

Our dialog covers why he took-on this struggling, and we dig into the science with out getting too deep within the weeds. Ballard’s sober and neutral discussing analysis round dopamine, noradrenaline, cortisol, and stress response, together with the concept that chilly publicity can produce measurable modifications in temper, resilience, and long-term well being. He will get into one of many extra compelling paradoxes within the analysis: chilly water can depart individuals feeling each alert and relaxed on the similar time. He additionally talks by means of the thought of “healthy hardship,” the place temporary, managed stress can sharpen the physique and thoughts somewhat than put on them down.

The strongest narrative thread on this dialog is cultural. Ballard reviews that cold-water swimming has grown as a result of fashionable life has grow to be too frictionless, and individuals are hungry for actual adversity. And in that excessive discomfort, he finds one thing swimmers already know effectively: a powerful sense of readability and neighborhood.

I hope you want our dialog. If you’ve gotten questions I missed, drop them within the feedback.

Chris’s bio: Chris Ballard, a senior author at Sports Illustrated for twenty years, is the award-winning writer of 4 books, together with One Shot at Forever.