Before dawn on a cold January morning in 2014, Veronica Sosa, a relative newcomer to long-distance canoeing, set out with a teammate on a 62-mile paddle race down the Colorado River.
The temperature hovered in the upper teens, and almost immediately after Sosa launched from beneath the Interstate 35 bridge on Austin’s Lady Bird Lake, she started shivering in her seat. She was still shaking about an hour into the race, when she and her partner sloshed through ankle-deep water and dragged their canoe up a bank and around a small dam.
It felt like a selfie moment, so Sosa snapped a picture with her phone. And that’s when she noticed it. “Oh my God, is there ice in my hair?” Sosa recalls asking her teammate, who confirmed that, yes, her braids were covered in caterpillar-size icicles. At the next checkpoint, sixteen miles downstream, the wife of another paddler took one look at Sosa and tossed her the fleece jacket off her back, then handed her a Styrofoam cup of hot cocoa. Sti