Ice Mile: How does it feel to swim in a lake barely above freezing?
It doesn’t get much more extreme than standing in your cossie on an icy beach on the shore of a freezing Lake Crackenback, where the water temperature is barely 3.5 degrees.
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It doesn’t get much more extreme than standing in your cossie on an icy beach on the shore of Lake Crackenback with a howling blizzard, it’s almost freezing and the water temperature is barely 3.5 degrees.
Katya Noble took it one step further.
She dived under the frigid water as one of the extreme swimmers trying to join the ice mile club at the weekend by conquering one of the toughest tests in the world.
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“This is considered the Everest of swimming. It is extremely demanding on the body,” Bondi surfer Wyatt Song, 44, who became the first Australian to achieve it in 2014, said yesterday.
With the next stop a charity swim across the English Channel, Ms Noble, from Bondi, is an experienced Bondi long-distance swimmer. She had been had been training in Manly Dam, in chilly Lyell Lake near Lithgow and by sitting in ice baths for up to an hour. But nothing had prepared her for this.
“Think about the coldest water you have jumped in and times it by 1000,” Ms Noble, 49, said yesterday after she had warmed up.
An Ice Mile swim is officially recognised by the International Ice Swimming Association and has to be completed unassisted, without even the help of a wetsuit, wearing just a normal swimming costume, cap and goggles at a water temperature of under five degrees.
Ice swimmers don’t cover themselves in grease, that’s just for ocean swimmers to stop the chaffing from the salt. Fresh water is also less buoyant than the ocean.
Ms Noble had a full medical beforehand, including an ECG. There was a medical team with a defibrillator on site as well as a representative of the ICSA, Mr Song, to ratify all attempts.
Ms Noble had trained to keep her breathing steady because jumping straight into cold water brings on hyperventilation.
Then with only 50m to go, she realised she wouldn’t make it.
Watching from the shore in the Thredbo valley, husband Simon Noble, 58, saw her start to sink as she grabbed onto one of the two kayaks keeping pace with her but she kept slipping off because she was too tired to keep hold.
As one of the other swimmers waiting his turn to try the mile, Mark Mallison, stripped off to his jocks and leapt into the water, Mr Noble waded in fully clothed. He can’t swim.
“At the beach I’m a swim between the flags man. I never go deeper than my chest, it’s definitely not my comfort zone, ” he said.
He said that Katya later played down how much trouble she was in, although there were plenty people to help.
“They are an extraordinary bunch of people and my wife is the most extraordinary of all,” Mr Noble said.
“She was in a lot of trouble. She couldn’t get a grip on the kayak and the kayaker couldn’t bring her back in. She was sinking.
“She really didn’t have far to go but she was veering off course.”
The water was at chest height when he reached her.
“I grabbed her and pulled her to shore. The medics asked her if she knew where she was and she could just mumble,” Mr Noble said.
“She had been in a lot of pain and her breathing was laboured. By this time it was blowing a fully-on blizzard.”
Her body temperature had sunk to 33 degrees, close to hypothermia, and she was wrapped in blankets and rushed to a car where the heater had been running. Back in their chalet at the Lake Crackenback resort, she was put in bed with hot water bottles and her husband’s cuddling in to share body heat.
Within an hour, Ms Noble, a consultant in organisational transformation, was up and feeling fine. It didn’t matter that she didn’t make the mile but she plans to try again.
“I didn’t want to put myself or my colleagues in danger and I knew that I knew I had had enough and needed to get out. I just felt numb,” she said.
“The reason I do this is because I love a challenge, I like to push myself further. There’s no glamour in it.”
Of the 11 people who attempted the ice mile at Lake Crackenback at the weekend, six, including Mr Mallison, and Charm Frend, were successful.
While the weather has been perfect for icy swimming, the snow in the Snowy Mountains and the Blue Mountains will ease from this morning while fresh winds will continue in Sydney until tomorrow.