It’s not cold, it’s just your skin
As a competitive swimmer in Tallahassee, we trained outdoors year round, winters included. In this northernmost part of Florida, winters get damned cold. When the pool deck froze into a solid sheet of ice, you had to walk – in your Speedo, mind you – from the locker room to the pool at just the right speed…quick enough that your feet didn’t stick to the ice, fast enough that you didn’t slip and fall. Miscalculate and you died of exposure.
OK. So that only happened once. The pool deck freezing over, that is. No one ever died of exposure.
But we all thought we might die of exposure. Which wasn’t such a crazy thought, given all we had were 15 cm of lycra and 5% body fat stretched over our shivering bones. Even if the whole deck only froze over once, kickboards did freeze onto the deck and icicles did form off the starting blocks whenever it dropped below 32 degrees. On those days, we undressed very slowly. We vowed to quit swimming and take up a nice indoor sport like knitting. Then we huddled at the door of the warm locker room, immobilized by the impossibility of the present, cruel situation.
At which point Coach came over and growled: It’s not cold; it’s just your skin. Read more…