Article content
By Joanna Cheek
After a year spent counting COVID-19 cases, there’s something new spreading across my West Coast community with similar contagion: cold-water swimming.
We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
Try refreshing your browser.
'Cold water, warm community': For some, winter swimming has become an antidote to pandemic isolation Back to video
While COVID has disrupted many of our social lives, health, and sense of sanity, hordes of people are flocking to cold-water swimming to help them cope.
If you can call it swimming.
Its devotees wear bathing suits (and often heavy gloves and woolly toques) and immerse themselves in outdoor winter water for around 10 minutes. Perhaps it’s generous to call their joyful bouncing, meditating, floating, socializing and shivering swimming. A small proportion do swim, but most gather in socially distanced groups to soak their bodies in oceans or lakes.