Swimming outdoors used to involve quickly stripping down to your cossie and stepping over painful pebbles to throw yourself into the nearest grey-ish body of water.
These days however, to do it properly you have to be “wild”. And by wild, we mean not-quite-wild-enough-to-attempt-to-swim-without-a-whole-load-of-protective-gear levels of savagery.
Turns out that, while the rest of us were off buying an ice cream, swimming became commercialised, monetised and very much a “thing”. Just as expensive exercise wear found its way onto the school run, so extreme outdoor swimming paraphernalia is cropping up in ponds and lakes across the country.
Forget those New Year’s Eve bathers who run into the sea in nothing more than a Santa hat, this lot won’t even put a toe in the water without a designer thermal swim sock. Here are the ways that wild swimmers have ruined the unassuming dip for the rest of us:
They’re not really wild
Those as old as me will remember a poignant 1980s comedy sketch in which Victoria Wood (playing a schoolgirl) attempted a Channel swim with nothing more than a lard rubdown and a swimming cap. Spoiler: she was never seen again.
In real life, however, Gertrude Ederle fared better when she became the first woman to swim the Channel back in 1926, tackling a 14-hour front crawl with just a swimsuit, a bathing hat and motorcycle goggles sealed with paraffin.
Though the jaunt was said to have further damaged her already bad hearing, the endeavour and flood of ensuing marriage proposals prompted a song that warbled, “Tell Me Trudy, Who Is Going To Be The Lucky One?”.
Ederle really was wild – refreshingly untamable – so she turned all her suitors down. These days, things are different.
Plenty of love affairs have started with a quick breastroke and a shared Spotify playlist of songs with “swim” in the title, so there’s now the option to get married in a wild swimming elopement ceremony. Congratulations to those who have booked one, you very much deserve each other.
They need prohibitively expensive gear
Why? You ask. Because in the 21st-century, wild swimmers don’t just take to the water with a coating of grease and the hope of returning with at least one working ear. Though innovations in swimming apparel have undoubtedly made tackling extreme stretches much safer, they’re also been adopted by less hardcore devotees.
To look the part, and sometimes even to gain entry into a UK pond or lake, you now need tow floats, wetsuits, robes, hats, gloves and specialist chafing ointment (approximate cost: £400).
And pay to enter the water
Still in the black? Fear not. Many of the UK’s swimmable natural bodies of water require a fee to enter which, in some cases, is significantly higher than at the indoor pools maintained specifically for the purpose.
They’re part of a ‘community’
As smug as a bunch of cyclists in a LTN, wild swimmers love the sense of belonging that comes from meeting like-minded people, starting a Facebook group and then congratulating each other on achieving their water-based goals. These groups have names like ladiesofthelake and sexyfishes, as well as fetching swimming hats emblazoned with them.
On the plus side, the communities are friendly and open to all - except maybe the one in three UK adults who can’t swim and the one in five who are struggling to afford food and heating, let alone a Finisterre swimsuit.
If it wasn’t on social, it didn’t happen
Yes, she swam Windermere with Melissa from pilates as part of her “empowering” 40th celebrations. Nobody needs the flashback to remember that she didn’t sink.
They’ve sparked another irritating trend
Back in the day, you’d find an ice cream seller and perhaps a donkey on an English beach. Nowadays, small heated huts are taking up valuable sand space in Sussex, Dorset and Kent as the UK embraces the beachside sauna.
For “UK”, read “wild swimmers escaping the cold” because sweating very close to a near-naked stranger is enough to make most Brits reach hastily for their winceyette pyjamas.
And some package holidays
Turns out these are a thing. Book a specialist wild swimming break and you can swim in a river, lake or even the sea before heading back to your hotel for a slap-up dinner.
Though most holidays entail swimming in a river, lake or even the sea before heading back to your hotel for a slap-up dinner, going it alone will mean missing out on enforced communal meals and meaningless promises to keep in touch.
The whole thing’s a little bit dirty
On hot summer days when outdoor swimming should be sheer pleasure, bathers in some of the UK’s most popular spots face a tenacious enemy – duck mites. They sound manageable, until you understand what they really are: microscopic parasites that burrow into the skin before dying in situ.
The resulting red welts are said to be cured by a quick rinse-off in vinegar or an Epsom salt bath. Or by making for the UK’s sewage-infested sea water instead. Remember: emerging smelly, and possibly with some kind of unidentifiable disease, is all part of the fun.
There are rules
Wild swimmers love to talk about the freedom that their dips bring (and there’s no doubt that the bona fide outdoor enthusiasts who tackle extreme swims must feel thoroughly invigorated). However, there’s nothing freeing about compulsory swimming tests, enforced wetsuit use or a lifeguard barking at you that handstands are banned.
Foreigners are laughing at us
Swimming in Switzerland involves picking a lake and jumping in. In France, they wade into rivers willy-nilly. In Austria, they’ve been jumping into the Danube since way before wiener schnitzel.
The UK’s new and highly regulated penchant for un-wild wild swimming is therefore viewed as further confirmation that we can’t get anything quite right.
Lord Byron got their first
Before wild swimming, there was “hydromania”, an equally pretentiously-monikered pastime beloved of the great poets that was essentially the same thing. During the craze, Lord Byron, who would definitely have claimed to be the original wild swimmer, took to the Hellespont to stage a recreation of Leander’s famous nightly journeys to see Hero, the love of his life.
In a poem commemorating the event, Byron wrote that Leander, “swam for Love, as I for Glory”. These days, one imagines he would get exactly what he wanted, greeted at the other end by an adoring fan holding up a dryrobe and somebody else documenting the whole thing for Instagram.
What do you think about wild swimming? Please share your thoughts in the comments below
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