Sea Swimming is ‘Good for your Head, Body, Soul, all that Craic’

By Charlotte Vanacore

In a rugged and rough country like Ireland, there are many different ways that people take care of their bodies and one of these methods is implementing extreme cold and hot temperatures in a range of practices. With the Atlantic Ocean at our doorstep, not only do we get to admire the wilderness of the waves, but many people choose to engage with them in the form of cold-water sea swimming. Others choose a warmer environment such as saunas to sweat out toxins and fight off illnesses for the harsh winter months.

When I first moved to Galway, I was in shock at the idea of people getting into water that was below 20 degrees and finding pleasure into submerging their entire body below the waves throughout the entire year. After a few weeks of scepticism, I finally decided to test out cold-water swimming and immediately understood why people practiced this regularly.

Blackrock regulars

I started to make this a part of my weekly routine, and I met my John, who is a regular at Blackrock. I was keen to chat to him as I found out that for the last ten years of his life John has been swimming in the ocean almost every single day. You would think that at this stage it would be easier, but the water still stings as much as it did on the first day.

“I never want to get into the cold water ever,” he says. “Like no part of me wants to do it. I hate it. It’s like my least favourite thing.”

I fully understood what he meant by these words, because despite the experience not being extremely comfortable to endure, there is something about the ocean that calls you back. But how does one get into cold-water sea swimming?

At times, the city of Galway can be scarce with activities to do that don’t require going to the pub, and people in the West get creative. John was 16 when he started sea swimming and it all happened because he was bored on a February day and he and his friend decided to head out to Blackrock for a dip. From that day, John started to implement this into his routine, heading out for a swim before school and continuing the ritual throughout college and now in his everyday life. After heading into the sea for a couple of days in a row, the temperature of the water supposedly gets warmer, and it just puts you in a good mood to start the day.

Lure of the ocean

I was curious to know what drives his love for sea swimming, and he described it as “getting a factory reset”.  Not only that, but doing something this difficult in the morning, if one may say so, allows the rest of your worries to diminish and seem less daunting. He mentions that keeping up with the habit of going into the ocean every day, has built his willpower, and he notices that when he stops engaging with the swimming, the willpower for everyday bits and bobs starts to dwindle.

“If someone is good craic,” he says, “they’ll most likely go for a swim with you in December.”

John describes that the connectedness to nature is what gathers people down to the ocean. At first, he would have thought that people were simply crazy, but now the common denominator amongst all sea swimmers is the yearning of that spiritual feeling one gets when swimming in the wild Atlantic waves. The community down at Blackrock is one of a friendly and caring nature allowing anyone and everyone to part-take and engage with sea swimming.

Not only did the concept of cold-water swimming catch my attention, I noticed that saunas were also quite a holistic thing that people in Ireland did. I suppose that in ancient times the country had so many sweat houses, and this practice was primarily used to cure sickness but was also considered as a place of reflection.

Sauna ritual

Recently in Blackrock, a sauna opened and I went over to have a chat with Tina, the manager of the sauna to get some insight as to why people engage with these hot sweaty rooms. And once again, found that the people who go to saunas tend to do it for their health.

“We live in such a world where we can focus more on our health, and we’re so fortunate to be focussing on that,” he believes. 

Even though the ocean and the sauna provide people with different experiences, the ritual leads to this sense of feeling alive. It also allows people to care for their health, as both cold-water swimming and hot saunas allow the body to build up better immunity. Besides the health aspect to this practice, like sea swimming, it is a “healthier” way for people to socialise, and this builds a like-minded community down at Blackrock sauna.

There is something deeply holistic and almost religious in the act of submerging your head in the ocean or sitting in a hot enclosed space to sweat out the toxins trapped in your body, and this allows us to define a snippet of the culture in the West Coast of Ireland. Whether you are a pro or a complete beginner to sea swimming or saunas, you should definitely dip your toes in one of these extreme temperature activities to get a grasp of practices that have existed for hundreds of years.