2025-01-08
35 分钟This is the Guardian, the Guardian Archive.
Long Read.
Hello, I'm Wendell Stevenson, I'm a writer and I'm the author of Cold How Cold Water Swimming Cured My Broken Heart that was published in the long read in 2021.
What drew me to the story was really the sea and the experience of being in the sea.
And over that winter, the first winter when I was cold water swimming, I was also keeping a journal and I remember being in touch with editors at the Long Read and I said, I want to do something about why cold water helps and helps people feeling low and with depression and other ailments like inflammat.
And I described to them why I had started doing it.
And I think it was Claire Longrigg, who's kind of brilliant, said, this is a personal essay, Wendy, we just want you to write about what happened to you.
So that's how it happened.
And then I thought, hang on a second, I've got this journal I've been keeping.
This is almost perfect.
So it was a very natural evolution from swimming to writing to condensing that into a story.
When I wrote the article, cold water swimming was really taking off and becoming a real trend, almost a fad, particularly in lockdown.
I think a lot of people with bit more time on their hands went swimming and went to the coast and started getting into the sea.
And I think there was a friend of mine who slightly rolled her eyes at me and she said, oh, another middle aged woman writing about how coleswater swimming has helped them through their travails of life.
It's interesting that this has continued and I see, I live in Brittany in the north coast of France and I see every year more and more people in the sea.
I still swim when I'm here every day and I think that as much as it's a fad, it's a sort of rediscovery of being outside and outdoors and in nature and getting away from to.
I think the idea of holiday swimming, of fair weather swimming, that it doesn't matter if it's raining or it's cloudy or it's cold or it's sunny, that weather is always interesting and light and water are always good things to experience on your skin and they fizz your brain.
Another thing that's really happened is that people are much more aware by swimming a lot more of their environment and that you can clearly see that there's been a real frustration and anger about the pollution that we're now a lot more aware of around the British coast and in other places and I think it just makes people more engaged and more interested in what's going on around them and what's happening in their local environments.
And that's also a real positive.
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