How I Started Cold Water Swimming

This article first appeared in the Kenwood Ladies Pond Newsletter, July 2024.

I came across the pond by accident. I am a writer and I made a decision, on impulse, to place a character there in a novel I was writing. Eliza was an isolated woman embarking on middle age. I remember pausing at my laptop, wondering what middle-aged women do in London, and I recalled a friend of mine had begun swimming at the pond and referred to it often. Half an hour later, I had placed Eliza, a thirty-eight-year-old loner, swimming in the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. I thought no more about it until I submitted the manuscript to my editor.

This was to be my second novel. My first, The Vanishing Tide, was loosely set on the Wirral Peninsula, where I grew up. I knew the coast intimately, and it felt natural to put my characters there. When my editor returned my draft to me, she asked me where the water had gone. My audience liked reading what I had to say about water, she explained. I was good at describing it.

This paragraph, halfway through the manuscript, when Eliza’s in the pond. You need to expand on that, my editor said. And by that, I mean right the way through the book.

Meanwhile, my friend was swimming through her third winter. I interviewed her. I sent her a questionnaire. She told me I should join her. I declined because it wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t like being cold. In December 2021, I went with her to take notes as she swam, and I began to talk to the group of women she swam with.

Just come, they said. It’s amazing. I shook my head.

In the spring of 2022, I had written most of a second draft. The pond now featured heavily throughout the novel. I had read every available book and watched every documentary I could, but I began to feel like a fraud for writing about something I hadn’t experienced first-hand.

The rope came down and the water warmed, slowly. I firmed up my draft and I knew it wasn’t good enough.

I went for my first swim in May, 2022. The water was sixteen degrees. I had to swim almost to the end of the pond before I got my breath under control, something that stayed with me for months. Until one day, the water stopped feeling cold, and I stopped feeling nervous.

I told myself I would stop swimming when the book was finished. I swam though my first winter and began to absorb all of those unknowable details. The way that the ice sung on the surface of the water; that sometimes, you climbed out with a muddy line around your chin. That I could witness the beauty of nature, and also its cruelty in the space of a minute. I wrote a third draft, then a fourth, and I swam through my second winter. I finished my novel last year. Where Water Lies was published in June. And I am still swimming.