Swam straight into one about a half mile into the Galway bay swim a couple of years back. Took it straight across the face. Started sore and got worse, but not til I finished about three hours later did the full horror visit. I’d been feeling generally more tired and unwell in the last hour of the swim than I’d expected, and my face was sort of burning, but within ten mins if getting out my face was on fire and my feet were twitching like I’d a disease. Herself said “you’ve lines of welts like you’ve been whipped across your face”. I took paracetamol, neurofen, aspirin, codeine and antihistamine, rubbed in vinegar, but the only thing bizarrely which stopped the pain instantly was a hot towel over the face. As soon as I took it off or it cooled down, the pain came back. Finally eased off that evening after a couple of pints of Guinness, about ten or twelve hours after. 
You poor cunt
I wonder maybe you’re a hard man, getting a lions mane across the face and going on the lash.
Thinly-veiled ‘herself dropped the knickers and relieved herself across my face to save me’.
Fucking brilliant! I love when a fella outdrinks his ailment!
Listening to lad from Irish water on Pat Kenny today at lunch speaking about raw sewage pipes flowing into the sea at Roundstone only 50m from shore. ‘Keep your head out of the water if swimming’
Had to go to the ceremony as you get your finishers medal, it’s a really really nice evening, and the lad I was over with won the fastest swimmer. I’d not have missed that for anything.
After a good few weeks laid up with a couple of back issues I started back running this week. Went to the gym tonight and did a tough enough squat session, said I would go for a soak in the sea after as recovery and before the rain forecast came.
Ventured out here around 6pm and it was practically empty aside from two ladies having a dip with a sharp enough wind which meant the water was lovely and choppy. Tide was on the way back in and the water was perfect. Waded around in it for 10 minutes or so.
I ventured into the little changing area at the bottom of the steps to take shelter from the wind to get dressed when what did I see before me only a pack of pink snacks with two left in their wrapper untouched that someone had left behind/forgot. The perfect post swim nourishment. Winner winner chicken dinner
Like all my Christmases came at once
The last stand of Lewis Pugh, the human polar bear
The extreme swimmer tackles the world’s coldest waters to highlight climate change. But his latest stunt, dodging Arctic icebergs, has to be his last, he tells Simon Nixon
United Nations Patron of the Oceans Lewis Pugh swimming off the coast of Dover
KELVIN TRAUTMAN/SWNS
Simon Nixon
Wednesday September 01 2021, 12.01am BST, The Times
When I speak to Lewis Pugh he’s in his guest house in the Inuit village of Ilulissat in western Greenland preparing to go out for his morning swim. The day before, he swam 700m in two 10-minute bursts in zero-degree water, dressed only in his Speedos.
He plans to keep doing this for the next ten days or so until he’s swum across the mouth of the Ilulissat glacier, the fastest-moving in the world. It’s 7.6km in a direct line, but he will have to swim around icebergs the size of suitcases, so his actual swim distance will be much longer.
It’s the latest extraordinary challenge by the man sometimes dubbed the human polar bear. Plymouth-born Pugh, 51, who went to school in Devon and South Africa and got a law degree from Cambridge University, gave up his job as a City lawyer in his mid-thirties to focus on campaigns for marine conservation and draw attention to the impact of climate change on polar regions.
Pugh: ”Cold water swimming is unlike any other sport in the world”
Previous expeditions have included swimming a kilometre in Antarctica, and across the highest lake on Everest. In 2018 he swam the English Channel to highlight a campaign for 30 per cent of the world’s oceans to be protected by 2030.
However, this challenge, which will keep him away from home in South Africa, where he lives with his wife and two stepchildren, for a month, is his most demanding yet. I’m a cold water swimmer myself, but there is a world of difference between breaking the ice for a quick dip in the Serpentine on a frosty morning and plunging into the 1,000m-deep waters of Greenland.
More than the icebergs, the greatest hazard is brash ice, Pugh says. “Brash ice is extremely sharp so you have to slow down. You’ve got to swim breaststroke because if you take a big stroke with the hand and you whack ice you’re going to hurt yourself.”
Then there’s the uncertainty of the effects of repeated hypothermia. “There’s no science on this, you know, we’re out here, we’re learning each day. A kilometre normally takes me anything between 18 and 20 minutes in this extreme cold water. We thought that if we were to do that across the field day after day after day it’s just not sustainable, the human body cannot withstand that. When I did my swim across the North Pole, where the water was -1.7 [seawater freezes at -2] — this was in 2007 — I couldn’t feel my left hand for I think three months afterwards.”
Pugh dodging sea ice during training
Instead the decision was taken on medical grounds to break the challenge down into two daily swims. As every cold water swimmer knows, the moment of maximum danger of hypothermia is typically after you get out of the water. That’s because as soon as you get out, the cold blood in your arms and legs just goes straight back to the heart so your core body temperature continues to drop.
To manage this risk, every day he swallows a small capsule that enables his team to measure his body temperature. After his swim the previous day, his temperature had dropped to 35.4C, well below the normal body temperature of 37C.
Despite immediately wrapping up in multiple layers, being placed in a sleeping bag with three hot water bottles, covered in blankets and fed two big mugs of hot chocolate, it took his body two and a half hours to regain normal temperature. Then it was time to do it all again.
Scientists have changed his approach to getting into the water too. One of the most common ways in which cold water swimming can prove fatal is cold water shock, which can lead to hyperventilation and involuntary gasping for air, which, if the swimmer’s head is under water, can lead to drowning.
“When I was young there were pictures of me diving just straight in, but the science has moved on quite considerably, so what the scientists are telling me now is you need to slowly get yourself into the water. And so from about 30 seconds up to my knees down a ladder and then for the next 30 seconds up to my chest, you know, over here and hold on and breathe and breathe and breathe because of the cold shock.”
Even so, Pugh says his biggest challenge is mental. “Cold water swimming is unlike any other sport in the world. Normally with sport the more experience you have the better you are able to do it; with cold water swimming it’s the opposite: the more experience you have, the harder it becomes.
With his team in Greenland
“When you’ve been really, really, really cold you never quite warm up because you remember it deep in your bones. And so getting ready for this swim was incredibly difficult because I remember the pain of the North Pole, I remember the panic when I did a big swim in the Ross Sea, I remember the gasping for air when I swam in a lake on Mount Everest. So any subsequent swim you have to forget about that and be ready for the new swim.”
Nonetheless, Pugh is adamant that the pain is worth it. “I’ve just got one mission and that is to undertake a swim across the fastest moving glacier in the northern hemisphere and to shine a light about what is happening 60km away on the Greenland Ice Sheet and the melting which is occurring there.”
Before he started this challenge he took a helicopter ride to the top of the glacier 60km away to see first-hand the startling evidence of the speed at which the ice cap is disappearing. From the air, it is clear that the Ilulissat Glacier is melting away. “It looks like meringue which has just been crumbled up.” Two weeks ago there was rain at the top of the mountain, 3,000m above sea level, for the first time in recorded history.
Pugh’s real target is world leaders and other decision-makers. Indeed, in his capacity as a United Nations Patron of the Oceans, he is almost as determined out of the water as he is in it. After his 2015 swim in the Ross Sea, he was instrumental in persuading the Russian government, the last hold-out to sign up to the creation of the Ross Sea marine protected area, an area of the Antarctic ocean the size of Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
![Pugh: “We have to get it right this year [at Cop26]; we can’t keep kicking this can down the road”](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fbb4f4868-0a7e-11ec-9503-f24d9e0411ae.jpg?crop=1500%2C2000%2C0%2C0&resize=1533)
Pugh: “We have to get it right this year [at Cop26]; we can’t keep kicking this can down the road”
In 2018 he helped to persuade the British government to establish a “blue belt” of 41 marine protected areas around Britain’s overseas territories, the first of 86 countries so far to commit to his campaign to protect 30 per cent of the world’s oceans by 2030.
With his Greenland swim, Pugh has his sights set on the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November, where he hopes to impress on world leaders the need for action to halt climate change. Yet Pugh is also well aware how difficult this is likely to be.
“In a unique way and in a world which, I don’t have to tell you, is a very busy news world, we’re competing against Afghanistan, Covid, Brexit, wars, famines, gender and race inequality, terrorism. These are all very, very serious issues and they require our leaders’ urgent attention, but they’re not an existential threat to life on Earth. It’s nine weeks now until Cop26, the most important climate change negotiation in history, and we need all hands on deck, political, business, members of civil society, all of us now need to come together.”
If there’s an added note of urgency in Pugh’s voice it’s because he reckons time is running out for him too as well as the planet. “This has to be the last stand. I don’t know that my body can handle any more. I mean, it has such a price.
“Two years ago I did a swim in Antarctica and then afterwards I had to go to the Kremlin for a meeting with President Putin’s No 2, and I remember walking across Red Square and I felt every single cobble underneath my feet, my feet were so sore. We have to get it right this year; we can’t keep kicking this can down the road.”
Pugh will be in Glasgow for Cop26 to give a first-hand account of what he’s seeing in the oceans of the world. “I’ve been swimming now for 35 years. I’ve seen such significant change.” After all, the Ilulissat is just one glacier on the west coast of Greenland.
“We also have the Norwegian Arctic, we have the Russian Arctic, we have Alaska, and then we have Antarctica . . . I want people to understand how important ice is. Ice is life, ice keeps our planet in a temperature range in which we can live; no ice, no life. If there is just one thing that comes out of this swim that’s what I want people to understand: we humans are an ice-dependent species.” And with that, he’s off to change into his Speedos.
When would you chance the first, end of April?
End of May. Usually the Whit weekend.
I’d say you felt like the big man after that
I’d alway bow to the superiority of the sea but I gave him plenty of it today alright
I noted this a while back and just got around to reading now, thanks for posting. Some people are superhuman, what an incredible man.
Beautiful this morning lads. Sea is like glass.
The cold shower at Hough end swimming pool is getting very cold. Glorious.