> A man in the cold is not necessarily a cold man,” says Tipton. “If you keep moving and you are reasonably insulated you will produce enough heat to stay warm. At maximum exercise, it is like you are running a 2kW fire. When you exercise reasonably hard you can do that in shorts and t-shirt in the cold...
I think about this a lot as a runner in the Midwest US. I regularly go out in 20-30F weather in wool socks, running shorts, a long-sleeve shell, and a hat and gloves. I add running tights and a bit of vaseline on my cheekbones and nose if it's under 20. This last weekend it was 45 and blissfully sunny; it felt like spring, I left my hat and gloves at home and did my first shirtless workout of the season.
The article reminds me of the quote from Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (full text at [1]):
> His idea of running until he arrived at the camp and the boys presented one problem: he lacked the endurance.
Guðlaugur did have the endurance! Good on him.
It does make me think, however, what would happen if I were to sprain an ankle or break a leg and be unable to run to generate heat. If I could only hobble, would I be able to, say, sit down to do sit-ups and push-ups until I could warm up and resume hobbling? Fortunately, I'm not far from from shore on a dark sea, my routes never take me further than about two miles from civilization.
The article mentions that plastic bags work better than emergency "space" blankets since they block moisture and thus evaporative cooling. A large industrial trash bag is part of my emergency supplies on cold backpacking trips. It's cheap, weighs almost nothing, and provides protection from both radiative and convective cooling.
Funny, this Californian ran a half marathon in northern norway rain (during the summer, though, so it was about 45f). I inadvertently tested this plastic bag theory.
My luggage had been lost by the airlines, so I didn't have my rain shell, just the most basic running clothes that I wisely chose to put in my carryon.
I ended up running the race in t-shirt and shorts covered by a free plastic poncho handed out by a restaurant. I quickly saturated my clothes from a combination of sweat and rain getting in, but it functioned like a wet suit in that it prevented the fresh rain and wind from cooling me evaporatively, while my body kept my wet clothes warm.
While it was a bit stuffy, I was afraid I'd get cold very quickly in the wind and rain if I took it off (which I did in the last few miles, and yes, it got cold quickly). As soon as I stopped running, even with a space blanket, even going indoors, my temperature plummeted EXTREMELY rapidly.
At 45f in the dry I'd typically use long sleeves (and I repeated this experiment this past weekend in Napa) although, again, it's really just to keep you warm while you wait to start; once you're running, it's no problem to get by with only short sleeves and shorts.
Related: I used ziploc bags as vapor barriers nested between two pairs of socks while on a multi-month winter hiking trip in trail shoes. It was extremely effective. I could posthole in deep snow all day in my running shoes and not get frostbite.
I'm surprised. I've lined up before races in the cold and I've found an emergency blanket keeps me warmer than a trash bag. I've tried both. Neither beats used sweats from Good Will, but that's too much to run with.
I don't know if that's true. In the nonideal world a Faraday cage must have a minimum thickness to function, which is a factor of the wavelengths you are trying to block and the conductivity of the material, I think.
Long distance snow walkers (snowshoes/backcountry skis) will take the opposite approach. Oversized insulation + air permeable shell. Oversized clothing allows for complete ventilation when needed/possible. Air permeable shell allows vapor to escape or freeze onto interior surface and flake off under movement.
As for light/fast: I’ve worn a small running fanny pack with an emergency blanket and whistle at times.
I don't really understand this 'breathable' clothing from a physics perspective.
Every liter of water lost through breathable clothing is 2.3MJ of lost heat. So one would presumably prefer to have non-breathable clothing, keep that water in and potentially get 'clammy', yet stay warmer.
Yet nobody seems to do this. Is there a physics based reason other than 'it feels icky and is uncomfortable'?
Perhaps because even when in very cold environments there are occasions when the body is too hot and needs to loose heat?
Some cold weather gear works on that principle. Synthetic string vest for example, keeps you warm even when sweaty. It dries off quickly too when you are no longer sweaty. The main thing is that you are warm and never cold and that you shouldn't worry about soggy undergarment.
Washington, DC, does have generally mild winters. The coldest I have been has been in cold rains, which are no fun to run in. One can almost always run in shorts, but below a certain temperature and with a wind blowing, you do need something windproof over or under your shorts.
> It does make me think, however, what would happen if I were to sprain an ankle or break a leg and be unable to run to generate heat.
This is a big fear of mine as well. If I'm going out of cell coverage, I always bring the 10 essentials and at least one extra layer. Even if my legs are cold, at least I'll have a fleece jacket.
While I'm happy for your health, I think running shirtless outside at 7 Celsius a bit risky, no? You may be able to sustain it for a while. But if any small accident happens (twisting the ankle for example) it's gonna get cold quickly.
I remember snowshoeing in the Colorado Rockies years ago. It was around -15, with strong wind blowing. But we were at high altitude and the sheer exertion of it was making me sweat after a while, so much that I actually unzipped my coat.
As it happens I'm leaving for a camping trip in the snow tomorrow morning. It's the sierras (relatively warm) and I'm leading a bunch of inexperienced scouts (so not a particularly grueling trip) but still with opportunities for danger. I was surprised how many of these SV kids signed up and were then pulled by their parents -- 50%! Only a few years ago these trips were immediately oversubscribed, with nobody getting pulled even when it turned out to be blizzard conditions. The kids, at least, are enthusiastic.
Winter conditions in the continental US are, by comparison with the Icelandic conditions in this article, rather clement. The worst I've been in here has been -15 F (-26 C) though that was before the wind...oh the wind! But I have friends who camp out and work in northern Canada, Alaska, and Antarctica. They have to deal with real cold! Me, I go out for a week with my dog and a friend and then presto I'm back in toasty civilization. Not really rugged at all. But it is why I drive a dinosaur-burner.
That's tragic--but let's keep it in context. It happened before WWII. Some of these young boys were wearing shorts and sandals (without hats) in a blizzard, climbing up a mountain slope with a 70% gradient (black diamond ski slopes start at 40%), without any sort of topological or detailed map, no lights, no ability to communicate with the outside world and one adult to supervise 27 students. I can't imagine any of those things are true for Gumby's trip.
Lack of preparation and lack of looking ahead causes most problems. Of the three times I have come close to dying in the backcountry (all of them due to stupidity on my part!) two of them were due to failure to look ahead. Both times I was saved by my dog.
Thinking you know what to do is a recipe for disaster. Its the same thing that causes you not to check the return value from a system call "hey, this can't fail".
I teach adults how to be out there safely and how to train and look after kids who of course don't yet have appropriate judgement.
FWIW, did a winter camping trip with kid's SV troop a few weeks back. no one got pulled, and had a few last minute joins. with that said, it was unreasonably warm that weekend (it barely got down to -1 C at night), which was a bummer.
Only one parent did give that explanation (I don't care about the explanation -- why put people on the spot?) though frankly being outside away from other people is likely the safest place you could be in that regard!
I was recently in Northern-ish Ontario, and I had to pump some gas, so I was in the shade of the roof overhead the pumps. It was about -40 degrees.
I was standing there in relatively dense clothing, since it was cold, and I was out there for maybe 1-2 minutes.
It was the first time I really felt and could believe that standing out there in that temperature would cause me to simply die in not very long. I could feel the bite through my thick coat, through my boots, through my hat. I could feel the heat leaching out. Cold like that is no joke.
> Unable to move far in the deep snow, his plan was to stay put, which under the circumstances was not a bad one.
It is almost always the correct decision, no matter what the situation. At his home he had access to all sorts of materials, and was clearly visible from the air.
And a shelter in the snow is pretty warm -- regardless of how cold it is outside it will pretty much stay at 0 C. The problem is that you can't be seen from the air (or by someone walking by!) when you're in the shelter and little sound will likely get through either. So you need to make a useful marker, which is slightly touched on in this article.
I have taught numerous people to make these emergency shelters out of material at hand (I'm a wilderness and snow survival instructor) and have been told that it has saved at least one life.
I think you have nothing better to do with your time and so should do both. Search and rescue pilots are trained to look for the V, but who knows who might be looking.
Destroy the signal when you are rescued of course!
> “The SOS signal is what most people know, but the downside is it is very curvy,” says Krebs. “Most of nature is curvy – it is rounded hills and lakes and streams, so curvy blends in.”
> In the military Krebs was taught to use the letter “V” to request general help or an “X” specifically for medical assistance. The long straight lines stand out on a hillside. It also takes less time to create two straight lines 30 feet long compared to two loopy Ss and one O, each 10 feet high.
This is the current fad in magazine-style journalism. You essentially take two narratives:
* A personal anecdotal account to provide human interest and color.
* A relatively dry scientific narrative that explains the larger context.
And then you weave the two together. The human interest side keeps readers engaged enough to wade through the otherwise tedious sciency part. The sciency part makes readers feel they are learning something more practical than just one person's story. The jumps between the two narratives can be done well but often it's pretty arbitrary.
I have an affinity towards the second one. I cannot bear ones, which start as novels... and you need to go through a few sections to understand what it is about, if it is a true or fake story, etc.
In this case, the problem is not with the balance between facts and narration (for my taste, it is fine) but with stories being shattered. I read a paragraph and need to guess if it is a new story, if it relates to the previous one, did it happen before or after, etc.
BTW: I did enjoy Memento the movie. But in this one the order was designed carefully.
Sometimes adding a Breaking Bad-style flashforward of extreme peril at the beginning to draw you in, followed by the journalistic equivalent of a "two hours earlier" caption.
Though you were exaggerating, but holy cow batman, thought I was reading about an Icelandic fisherman, then a multi-paragraph divert into cold weather effects on the body, to emerge in more multi-paragraphs talking about an off-the-grid Alaska guy whose house burned down. I had forgot that the article wasn't about the Alaska guy by the time the meandering story returned to Iceland~
This is just the style of modern story writing. Words, a lot of words. Just too many of them. I have tried to read such stories and most of the time there are just words and not much substance.
It's amazing how we used to read entire stacks of bound leaves of paper. Some contained dozens of events and interwoven narratives. I don't have time for that.
There’s a difference between reading for pleasure and for extracting some information. Some people might read this article for pleasure and that’s fine, but for most they just want the bare facts. An executive summary, if you will, because we have a lot more information vying for our attention than at any previous moment in history.
Just a few weeks ago I was snowboarding in deep powder snow with temperatures down to -20 C and I was overheating to the point of being seriously worried about heat stroke. I had just a ski jacket and a thin under-layer.
A few days before that I was "freezing to death" while standing still in a queue outside. It was +3 C and I had three layers on!
Or how about feeling like you're freezing to death in an office if the AC is set to 19C. Been there, and it gets cold real fast because you're not moving.
Less is more was definitely one of the first lessons I learned skiing. Overheating on the downhill usually means you'll be freezing from cold sweat at the top of the lift, too.
Snowboarding gear tends to actually be fairly good also. Probably with the three layers you didn't have insulated trousers? It's the non insulated bits that tend to get you.
All the videos I've seen about Wim are incredibly frustrating - none of them are remotely technical and none of them go into any kind of depth as to how to actually practice the method - just a bunch of montages of Wim doing Wim stuff and talking about his magic breathing.
Granted, I haven't searched in a few years now, perhaps things have changed....
I want to believe but I don't have enough information to try anything and I don't want to pay for his retreat to find out.
> none of them go into any kind of depth as to how to actually practice the method
Wim is selling his technique (https://www.wimhofmethod.com/experience-wim-hof), so that's probably why he doesn't go into much detail. Turns out even the transcendence of human boundaries has a well specified monetary value ;))
This is not true, the breathing technique is pretty simple.
You just breathe very deep and just relax and breathe out (not fully, just as much as comfortable). You breathe with a rhythm, faster or slower, anyway you like.
After breathing for a while you'll feel tingles or warm/cold sensations all over and then you breathe out and hold. After about 90-180 seconds (some people do more) you inhale, hold the breath for 15 seconds and start breathing normally.
You can immediatelly start another round of breathing.
I dunno...I was doubtful at first but I had a thought that perhaps what the doctor said about raising adrenaline while lowering cortisol has something to do with activation of the vagus nerve.
Breathing techniques are of course used in various relaxation techniques, this could be an extremely refined version. Perhaps each person has a particularly optimum frequency of breath that must be discovered.
I've noticed that if I hold my breath and flex my core muscles to send blood pressure to my head, while relaxing my upper body, if I breath out after holding that for a few seconds I get a euphoric light headedness on exhaling. But I feel like I'm going to pass out and it's terrifying every time.
Maybe I should try it while jumping into an ice cold lake.
The breathing technique is a no BS technique. You just need to get the air in. You have to keep inhaling until you start feeling the effects of raised blood ph levels (dizziness, passing out, tingles etc.). You can breathe through nose or mouth, you can take as many breaths as you want, they have to be deep inhale, not that much of an exhale and that is it.
Optimum frequency is mostly just finding the breath rhythm that will get you to the state you need. You can experiment and try to go further and see what happens (worst case you pass out or start having some seizures).
I also experience a euphoric light headedness after one round. Sometimes I need to do a second round to experience it.
I felt the same until I realized that is all it is- a breathing technique, coupled with gradually adapting yourself to cold over time. The breathing mostly just serves to keep you calm while your body activates it's natural cold responses such as uncoupling the mitochondria in brown fat.
I remember watching a program where they interviewed him afterwards and from what I remember he had lost an incredible/insane amount of weight during the ordeal.
My ancestry is Celtic (Scottish on one side, Irish the other) and I have a high resistance to cold, until I lived with my partner I’d have the the windows ajar even in winter and rarely put the heating on, I’m rarely cold even when cycling long distances on days with the temperature around zero and I wear t-shirts year around, I find jumpers and shirts stifling in any normal temperature room.
I joke that my ancestors evolved for cold drizzle.
I'm Vietnamese and I was born and still live in Canada. My body has adapted to the cold quite well and I prefer it over the summer heat. This makes me feel that ancestry is not a part of cold resistance.
Your article looks like junk to me. At least from the abstract, there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to control for the environment (and climate) that the subjects grew up in.
I'm English as far back as I can find out, and I'm neither great in hot weather or cold weather. I think we're just genetically predisposed to complaints about the weather.
I do marginally prefer the cold to the heat though, for what that's worth.
Oh I’m the exact same version of mutt as yourself (incidentally, born and raised Canadian) and am much the same. I’ve always said I “run hot” because it can be the dead of winter but as soon as I walk in the building in the morning I’ll start sweating. I have to unzip my coat and take my hat off on the bus and subway or I’ll sweat through. Humid summertimes have to be managed accordingly.
I use the same phrase. Public transportation is the bane of my life - here in London they seem to turn the heaters on full blast between specified dates regardless of the actual temperature. I find myself taking off and carrying coat, hat, bag, umbrella on the tube (subway) and still sweating. It's worse having a toddler because I'm either chasing him around like mad and overheating, or freezing my ass off standing still for long periods of time while he examines a leaf!
On that point, I wanted to share something you may relate to: my Filipino wife is always freezing in SF. I'm from Scandinavian descent, I could live as naked as a jaybird in the Bay Area weather.
Where can't I find a blanket thick on the left, thin on the right? :)
Things Americans do that completely baffle me: In a double bed, they have two pillows, but only one blanket, and end up having fights and struggles about the blanket.
You've already solved the problem with the pillows. You don't fight over a shared pillow. Come on, you can figure out how to solve the problem with the blanket as well.
Right? That's what's so incredibly baffling about this thing. The solution to the problem is right in front of everyone's eyes. And most Americans have no idea how to solve the problem. They keep complaining about it, but they never solve it. It's even a common sitcom trope, ffs.
My wife and I figured that out right away, after about a week back and forth blanket stealing at night we just started keeping two sets of blankets in bed.
Whatever floats your boat, man. I have friends who prefer the opposite, they have two single beds pushed together, but a shared blanket. Whatever.
But the crazy thing is that every single goddamn store that sells bedding, will sell you solutions to your problem. It's not like you go to one store for single-person beds and their matching single-person bedding, and then a different store for double beds with matching double bedding. No, the same store that sells pillows and sheets and blankets sells them in different sizes and you can mix and match as you please.
Oh, and that reminds me. Many people for some reason become aghast when they learn that my blanket/bedsheet/pillowcase don't match i.e. they're from different sets, and have very different visuall styles. Apparently, the colours must match or you won't sleep well.
Even better - I have a Sunbeam six zone mattress pad. Three zones (head, middle, foot) for me and three for Ms. Wrycoder.
We put it on something like 3:3:4 3:3:4 to preheat for a toasty bed to climb into in the winter and then turn one side off. I like to have 0:0:2 to keep my feet warm.
To be fair, I've never been so cold than on a windy September day in SF. I'm from The Netherlands and we get the occasional cold spell in the winter, but the cold wind coming from the bay on what seemed to be a very nice, sunny day just went right through me.
> Comic strip characters have a tendency to wear the same clothes all the time, for the ease of both artist habit and reader recognition. But with Jay, there's a reason. He's one of them. You personally know at least one. They're almost like normal humans, except they have no knowledge of what it means to be cold. Jay doesn't even own a coat.
When I was in college I met a fella from Michigan. The first “winter” here in Florida he was wearing shorts and laughing at us wearing sweaters and coats.
That summer every time I saw him he was soaking wet.
The next winter he was wearing sweaters also.
I think "jumper" tends to be Northern English, I don't think it's used around London, (but I could be wrong). I believe our Viking cousins in Norway and Iceland use "jumper" as well.
Well I hail from the similar ancestry, but while I was immune to cold in my teens, anyway sandals in winter snow and I have clear memory of traversing bitter winter drifts with nothing but summer suit and a Crombie overcoat, this almost fifty year old thinks the cold leis an diabhlaíocht.
Of Norwegian and Irish decent, I have the same thing. My roommates have always been so confused because I prefer a 60 degree house with short sleeves. Even in -10 or -2 degrees fahrenheit I’ll often just wear a light jacket and feel totally fine.
Dunno. Half my ancestry is from Guangdong, China, a tropical climate. I grew up in Massachusetts, and I do fine with cold.
My wife is Taiwanese (also tropical) and grew up in California and hates the cold.
Then again, the other half of my ancestry is from Ireland & England. Am I fine with cold because it's more about where you grew up and became accustomed to, or because I got my mom's genes? It's a good question, but the rest of my dad's family (currently living in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal) seems to do okay.
I grew up in The Netherlands, and so did my parents and my parents parents, etc...
I hate the cold. I prefer to sweat from too much heat compared to shivering from too much cold. So I emigrated to a tropical country.
Perhaps part of the reason why I hate the cold, is that it makes it harder for me to do my work. If my fingers are cold, typing is more difficult, for example. And in the cold I think too much about staying warm.
It's funny, I hate winter, not because it's cold, but rather because it's dark all the time. I like running in the snow, skiing, etc. I also don't like summer because I'm always too hot.
I want a place that's always Sunny but doesn't get too hot. Ideally here you can ski in winter and climb in summer.
> I want a place that's always Sunny but doesn't get too hot
I feel similar and for me elevated cities (at ~2000m) in sunny climates are perfect. For example Mexico City, Bogota or Arequipa (Peru). I know, the total list of suitable cities is probably narrow but it is by far my favorite climate.
Yeah, I think it's more to do with where you grew up and your adaptation to it than your precise heritage. Phenotype over genotype. My family is all from cold places but I grew up in a warm place, and while I like cold air on my face, I could never walk around on a 4°C day wearing short shorts.
eh. My family is Australian since a while back, and I moved to the Yukon to live.
I thoroughly enjoy riding my bike to work at and beyond -40(C/F), and am always out snowshoeing, snowboarding, ice fishing, bison hunting etc when it's in range of -25 to -40C.
The coldest I ever saw was -48C (-54.4F) as a daytime high (before the windchill). It was about a degree colder overnight. It was glorious, and I hope to crack -52C so I will have seen a 100C temperature swing (it was once +48C in my hometown in Australia)
Unless it's Aboriginal, your ancestry for the purposes were discussing is definitely not Australian. The timescale that non-Aboriginal Australians have been around is pretty small, likely not long enough for substantial adaptations to climate to kick in. As an easy example, consider how different Aboriginal and Eurasian-descended Australians are in skin color (excluding those descended from similarly sunny climates).
Fair enough. I've noticed a lot of south-coast WA people are cold-acclimatised (even more so than south-coast eastern-states, ie, Melbourne) and also see the occasional 48.C day.
I occasionally swim in lakes and don't like to swim below 15C, even with a wetsuit. But some people who swim all year round can handle much colder.
I remember having a BBQ with some British and Brazilians guests here in the UK. The British people were wearing t-shirts and shorts and saying how lovely it was. The Brazilians (who came from the very hot North of Brazil and were only visiting the UK briefly) were wearing jackets and shivering.
I was thinking of this, too. I swim in the water here down to 6 or 7°C in a 7mm wetsuit. It's cold, but it's very bearable and I enjoy it comfortably for the first 45 minutes or so. If I'm diving a lot (I'm usually spearfishing down to 20m or so) I'll often extend that quite a while due to generated heat. I'm not sure what it is, but the exertion of diving combined with breath-holding turns my body into a furnace.
When I first started doing this, I found the water in summer (around 6°C warmer) incredibly cold. I'd shiver if I was snorkelling for a while because my activity was too low. I struggled with that because being so cold would ruin breath-holds. Now I kind of prefer winter dives, because in summer I get unbearably hot. I constantly need to let water into my suit, and I can swim without it for around 1.5 hours.
That adjustment only took a year or so. People are awesome at adapting to environments in that way.
As a Brazilian from the Northeast who loves cold, this is funny to me because I just moved to somewhere cold (The Netherlands), and my coworkers (many even from Russia) sometimes get surprised to see me going out for lunch (in January/February) without a coat.
The Gauls would fight naked in the snow against their enemies [0].
"This practice was common to the Gauls Aul Cellius Lib ix cap 13 quotes the account of the Gaul who fought with Manlius whom he describes as nudus practer soutum et gladi's duos torque atque armillis decoratus; and Plutarch in Mario tells us the Cimbri went naked among the snow of the Alps to shew their enemies how much they defied the cold."
I hiked the Appalachian trail during the winter with a very low bodyfat percentage. I learned to adjust layers constantly. Even in temperatures down near 0*F, you can become drenched in sweat while climbing a mountain. But once you stop moving (especially if you don't stay dry), you've got less than 5 minutes before you start to shiver uncontrollably, and complex tasks like pitching a tent start to become difficult. The most challenging part was moisture management, because gear never dries when it's below freezing and you're not wearing it.
How much of this is just self-selection bias. Some body's are simply more adapted to the cold. I know people with passive metabolism of furnaces, my smart heater doesn't run as often when the my significant other sleeps over. I've seen steam vaporing off some folks who aren't even working that hard in cold gyms. Me, I sweat profusely when exerting myself, would definitely be one of the first to die in a winter military campaign.
When I read self-reported stories on the Internet about cold resistance, I remember that ~40% of people are obese. That's a confounding factor. At that amount of fatness, there's substantial insulation.
I like to think I can stand the cold relatively well, but what always gets me is my ears. The rest of my body will be fine but my ears start hurting in minutes, which then translates into quite the headache.
I have the same issue with my ears in cold weather. They start to hurt pretty quick in cold temps, so I try to always either have some small wrap around ear muffs or a beanie. As long as I keep my ears warm and out of cold wind, I'm able to stay comfortable.
> Gasping and panicking, they inhaled water. Friðþórsson, by contrast, managed to control his breathing. He later described remaining clear-headed throughout his swim.
I wish the article had gone into Friðþórsson's breathing a bit more. It seems like this and/or his body fat are what kept him alive.
You get used to that cold shock, I take a cold shower every day for many many years, and quite frankly I don't feel a "cold shock" anymore, even in winter.
It's really just requires a bit of training to get less sensitive to cold; on the other hand I also have a tendency to get warm a lot quicker, which can be a bit annoying sometimes. I keep my house at 18C and no warmer, when many people I know want 21C or sometime more...
I used to take cold showers when I was in moderate temperature zone, now I am in US/Canada, and recently started having cold showers (for the last 2 months) almost after 10 years.
I agree to all of the things you said, once you get used to the cold showers, in fact you would want more and more cold water running over you. More cold will get to be fine.
However, one thing I find annoyingly bad, given the time of the year is that I feel by body warmer (and feel that I might run a fever) and had to check temperature couple of times to see it is only normal. Not sure if this is going to be a long term thing or I might get used to it eventually.
I'm currently only taking cold showers, this is the third time I've started doing so. The very first one was quite an experience: my vision turned gray for a few seconds, I couldn't breathe, and I nearly fell over. The next day's was a little jarring but tolerable, and it kept on like that, a little less each day.
Then I fell out of the habit. My second and third times getting back into it, I didn't experience nearly the same drastic physiological effects, it was Day Two over and over again.
Do it gradually -- first one arm, shoulder; then the other arm, shoulder, then your front, then your head, then lastly your back. Don't dither about it, but don't dive into it either :-)
Well, nothing scientific than I'm aware of, strictly speaking, but I love the effect.
Right after the shower, you'll get super warm, even in winter. You're system just gets going to equalise your temperature.
Also, you'll be woken up no dithering about in a stupor until your coffee kicks in, it definitely gives you a kick in the backside to get going, so even just for that, it's worth it in my opinion.
And, I never get cold. I can work outside in a t-shirt in winter (UK winter) without feeling any cold.
A physiotherapist suggested it to me and did it himself, and I think the claimed benefit was our modern demon "inflammation". I'm not qualified to judge but it would probably help for people with some kinds of joint/back pain.
Edit: Forgot I also heard about it promoting an energetic response in the body (starting your engine for heat) to wake up for the day ahead and start burning fat before your first meal. I heard Tony Robbins talk about an ice room or something similar in his house that he uses for that. Probably not ideal for night time showers.
I have tried to get used to cold showers several times. I always feel great afterward but I always get sick after a few weeks of cold showers. Not sure why that is.
Not advocating it, but you could look into Wim Hof's method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof. Critics do wonder if it has to do with his brown fat composition.
I lived in Stockholm at the time.We had a night out in central part and eventually I ended up on a train(underground,if I remember correctly, but not even the right one).Fell asleep.Woke up when train was approaching the last stop.They would usually ask everyone to get off and then after 5-10 minutes the train goes back. It was a very Swedish winter with at least -15C if not more.So here I am, standing with my 'not so winter' jacket and nike shoes. It's open type platform,so no walls.I stare at the information screen that shows 8,6,5,4,3,2,... eventually 1 minute left...And goes again to 9,8,7,etc..The train isn't going anywhere for some reason and I'm stuck in the outskirts of Stockholm.No bar or any other place is open. Eventually I ended up spending about 6 hours waiting for the service to continue,while constantly walking around the station.I haven't swore so much in my entire life.At about 8am, the service was up and running again and I could get on a train back to my place.Turns out, there was so much snow on tracks that they couldn't continue until it was cleared.
When I was 14 years old I moved from northern Illinois to Hollywood CA and when I told kids there that on a sunny 40º winter day in Illinois we didn't wear coats because it was "warm out" for us.
They thought for sure I was bullshitting them. To be fair, after living in So. Cal for a few years when it fell to 70º on summer evenings I would get the shivers if I was only wearing a T-shirt.
Nice article. Having some years of experience in outdoor activities (first sailing, then many solo week-long hikes in the mountains, mostly french Alps but also once in a caribbean tropical rainforest) I got to learn some vital lessons and guess I could share some of it.
Obviously everyone has its own level of resilience in the face of harsh conditions but once you're in, you have to deal with what you have.
> “Clothing or equipment is the first line of defense, shelter is second and third is fire,”
Preparation is key, for hiking I try to minimize my backpack weight while keeping gear for all kind of weather. During one summer hike with nice weather forecast for the week, I indeed had hot and sunny days but also rain, wind, cold temperatures and even a sudden snowstorm.
- Staying dry really matters, once wet you get cold much faster.
- Sleep really matters. If you can't find a reasonable place or shelter to rest after an exhausting day, your ability to carry on the next day sharply decreases. Learned that on my caribbean trip where I got stuck above a waterfall one evening, was raining, got wet, cold, no place to lie down and rest and had to admit I wouldn't have the strength to climb back the next day.
- When stuck or in a tough spot, remember that under stress you might not think as straight as you could. Do an inventory of your equipment. My first sleepless night in the rain I used my emergency blanket: such a mild protection, took me a day to realize a had a bigger tarp that proved much more useful as a protection against the elements.
- A bright colored jacket helps rescue teams to locate you. (like a red / orange one)
- Have a map of the terrain, learn to orient / situate yourself. Being lost is not the same as facing a difficult position, better not combine those issues ;)
- Better have some way of communication and people aware of your whereabouts.
- When cold, cover your head, you lose up to half your heat there. Extremities (hands, feet) get cold first, waterproof gloves and shoes can really help.
"Another paper found that people brought very close to the point of hypothermia (their core body temperature was lowered to 35.5C) suffered no decline in cognitive function at all."
Never give up. Equally, you may be aware, of what is happening, right up until the end.
What's remarkable is how easily the human body will fail when exposed to cold, compared to many other animals.
Ducks for example will sleep on open ice as if it was nothing, then idly waddle over to a hole in the ice to sleep some more swimming on the freezing water, occasionally engaging in a bit of food gathering or social interaction.
But if a human survives those conditions with inadequate or compromised tools for more than a few hours we write long form about their feat! It almost seems as if to a human body deprived of tools (clothing, shelter, fire), a freezing cold environment comes surprisingly close to outer space in terms of deadlyness, hours of survival instead of seconds.
It is possible to generate enough heat to prevent frostbite in mild freezing conditions for some hours using a Tibetan thermoregulation technique. They practice this technique in nearly freezing conditions and are required to dry 3 wet soaked towels. It requires much training, patience, and practice to develop this skill. Furthermore, there is a technique to raise the temperature of the extremities as well.
Anyone know the rationale of people that make a room freezing with air-conditioning and then wear a jumper in that room to warm up? I know a few people like this and I’ve always been curious if it’s almost like some kind of glitch in their body temperature regulation, like it might be easier for them to regulate their body warmer or colder but not the other way around or something.
When traveling Tierra del Fuego (Southern tip of South America) I learned about Yaghan people [1] that survived pretty cold winters not wearing much of an essence.
I wonder why the body needs to move to stay warm. Seems like a waste of energy. If I were to "design" the body, I'd make automatic heat generation one of my MVP features.
That’s insane to me. Growing up in sunny California, I’ve never experienced anything below 40°F. And 68° is freezing cold to me. Maybe I’m just unhealthy.
I think about this a lot as a runner in the Midwest US. I regularly go out in 20-30F weather in wool socks, running shorts, a long-sleeve shell, and a hat and gloves. I add running tights and a bit of vaseline on my cheekbones and nose if it's under 20. This last weekend it was 45 and blissfully sunny; it felt like spring, I left my hat and gloves at home and did my first shirtless workout of the season.
The article reminds me of the quote from Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (full text at [1]):
> His idea of running until he arrived at the camp and the boys presented one problem: he lacked the endurance.
Guðlaugur did have the endurance! Good on him.
It does make me think, however, what would happen if I were to sprain an ankle or break a leg and be unable to run to generate heat. If I could only hobble, would I be able to, say, sit down to do sit-ups and push-ups until I could warm up and resume hobbling? Fortunately, I'm not far from from shore on a dark sea, my routes never take me further than about two miles from civilization.
[1]: https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to...