Chill seekers: The pleasure and pain of ice swimming

Saturday, 26 July 2025

Ice swimmers admit they’re “next level nuts”. But they also insist the benefits of their sport are incredible. Mike White travelled to the New Zealand championships in Central Otago, in the middle of winter, to discover why so many are taking up the icy challenge.

Brent Bythell: Part 1

Brent Bythell lifted his head out of the water.

Then he sank a little, till only the top of his swimming cap was visible, a saucer of black silicone.

But then his face emerged above the surface again, eyes opening slowly.

Every time he raised his head, he could hear it: A hundred people on shore, just 50m away, screaming encouragement, exhorting him to keep going, an impassioned cacophony stretching across the freezing lake, willing him home.

By this stage, Bythell had been swimming in 5 deg water for more than 40 minutes, as he closed in on his 1km goal.

The cold had fogged and befuddled his brain. It had seized his shoulders.

But now he could hear the cheering, hear his name, over and over. “Go Brent, go…”

Bythell began sinking again, and as the water swallowed him, the supporters’ cries that had become his lifeline, were drowned out.

So he heaved himself up, closed his eyes, lifted his arm, and started swimming again.

How’s the water?

“Crazy people doing crazy things” laughs organiser Laeti Berten as the first swimmers stripped and readied themselves at the recent New Zealand Ice Swimming Championships at Blue Lake in St Bathans.

The snow that had coated Central Otago’s hills for the last fortnight was fast disappearing, but Blue Lake’s temperature sat just below 5 deg, the maximum allowed for ice swimming.

Anything above 5C is just a “nice swim”, says Berten.

The rules of ice swimming are simple: Only togs, a cap, and goggles can be worn, and competitors must carry a buoy.

Distances range from 250m to 2km.

Swimmers are shadowed by a boat, then swaddled in blankets and hot water bottles in the medical tent afterwards, as they endure the shivering agony of thawing.

Duncan Kukard was one of the founders of ice swimming in New Zealand, and has heard every jibe about the sanity of those involved.

“It’s just a challenge. I’ve got five kids, and other than needing to be healthy, I just like to do some crazy stuff now and again to prove to my kids they can do anything they want to do.

“It sets a bit of an example: ‘Go on an adventure.’”

Kukard admits ice swimmers can enter dark spaces in the water.

“You start to struggle as soon as you begin. As you jump in, you’re like, ‘Why am I doing this? I could be booking a holiday in Tahiti.’

“And the first minute is absolute torture because you can’t breathe, you’re hyperventilating, and literally every cell in your body is saying, ‘Get out’.”

Then you get control, get into a rhythm, Kukard says, counting strokes, focusing on your breathing.

Gradually, the water takes its toll, though.

“In your head you think you look like Michael Phelps, but your body isn’t listening, and isn’t doing what you want it to do.

“And if you lose concentration, all of a sudden the doubts start creeping in - ‘Am I OK? Can I carry on?’ - and it’s an opportunity to stop.

“It’s survival, it literally is.”

The 50-year-old had already completed four ice miles, and slipped off a long green coat as he prepared for another.

He flexed his arms, one patterned with colourful tattoos, bearing the names of his children.

“I was young and had a six-pack and thought a tattoo would look good,” Kukard says, remembering how he first inked the name of his oldest child.

“And then when the rest of the kids popped out, I had to have them on there as well, so it just got bigger and bigger.

“But their names keep me motivated.”

Kukard was checked by officials and given the green light to swim.

“Just for the record,” he said, glancing around the supporters, “this is a f…..g crazy sport - and that’s why we love it.”

Then he strode to the lake’s edge, adjusted his goggles, plunged in, and let the torture begin.

Brent Bythell: Part 2

Brent Bythell didn’t plunge in. He rolled off a chair and flopped into the water.

Fifteen years ago, Bythell suffered serious spinal injuries when he fell from a building.

After two months, doctors were gently preparing him for life in a wheelchair.

And then Bythell wiggled his big toe.

Three months later, in something that seemed little short of a miracle, he walked out of the hospital.

But the damage to his spinal cord meant he couldn’t feel his feet.

And when he cut his foot at the beach one day, he didn’t notice it becoming infected. The infection got into the bone, and Bythell’s right leg was amputated below the knee.

Before all this, he’d red-lined life, every sport done to the extreme and full tilt.

Eight years ago, a mate who did ironman races challenged Bythell to see who could have cold showers for the longest.

The ironman reached for the hot tap after three months. Bythell is still going.

That led to homemade ice baths in an old chest freezer destined for the dump, with noticeable health benefits.

And then the 49-year-old Blenheim call-centre worker saw something about ice swimming.

“It seemed crazy. But I thought, I can handle the cold for a little while, I can swim a little bit - and it’s gone from there and been great.

“It’s an adventure - getting in the water and seeing if you make it back.

“And you don’t feel disabled, or like an amputee, in the water, because it doesn’t particularly matter.”

But it does make you slower.

Bythell’s left leg is weak because of his back injury, and he can’t bend his foot, so it drags like a size-10 sea anchor when he swims.

It means he can’t kick, relying entirely on his arms to propel him.

So as Bythell got closer to Blue Lake’s shore, and becoming the first amputee in the southern hemisphere to swim a kilometre in sub-5 deg water, his legs couldn’t help.

Nothing could, really, except his mind, determined not to stop, constantly repeating the mantra, “You’ve got this.”

Calm and cocaine

Most ice swimmers say they switch off while in the water.

“I don’t do meditation,” says Jackson Arlidge, a 34-year-old Wellington software engineer.

“But swimming ends up being meditation. I just blank my mind, and think of the breath, the stroke - nothing else really matters.”

On shore, Arlidge’s wife, Sophie, says her husband’s sport is a foreign world to her.

“This is my worst nightmare.

“I’m happy when he’s back on dry land, thawed out, speaking full sentences, and chattering words, not his teeth.

“But he’s so beautiful to watch.”

Ice swimmers all speak of the incredible high when they finish. It’s like cocaine, the more risqué whisper, but better, because the rush lasts much longer.

It’s part elation at achieving their goals, part pushing themselves to their limits. And part relief at surviving, some admit.

Sixty-one-year-old public servant Sonia Christensen starts every day with a 6.30am swim in Wellington’s harbour.

It gets her ready for work, clears her head.

Ice swimming is just an extreme version of that, Christensen says.

“It’s the ultimate. Just knowing you’ve made your body go that hard, and you’ve come out the other end.”

Christensen celebrated swimming her first ice mile with a martini at the Vulcan pub in St Bathans. For lunch.

“Shaken not stirred. It was great.”

Auckland kindergarten teacher Stephen Moore believes ice swimming is 90% mental strength, and is a sport well suited to the bloody-minded and boneheaded.

“This is a bunch of very mad people - completely bonkers.

“Can you imagine sane people doing this?”

But for Doug Leef, ice swimming is beautiful.

“Just accepting it, being at peace with it.”

Leef only learnt to swim in 2018, and began by blowing bubbles in a pool and kicking using a board.

But 25m became 200, became 500. Now he swims more than 3km in training.

This was Leef’s first attempt at ice swimming, and he admits entering the water was a shock.

“It was like, holy shit, shit just got real.”

In the last 300m his body started cramping, the wind tangled his float around his arms, “and there was a lot of fs and bs coming out of my mouth.

“But I knew I could push through it, no matter what.

And when Leef reached the shore, the 51-year-old West Aucklander says he was “high as a kite” as the shivering shock set in, and he began laughing because it beat crying.

Swimming had been a godsend for Leef. He wishes he’d found it earlier.

It’s his full-body workout, his safe place, his mental health reset.

“They talk about being present. And when you’re in ice cold water, you can’t not be present.”

Brent Bythell: Part 3

From the shore, each stroke looked as if it would be Brent Bythell’s last.

But then his arm would break the water behind him, lift slowly over his head, and crash back in. Then the other. Then another.

Borne by the chorus of support, driven by his own determination, Bythell suddenly felt the pebbles of the lake’s shallows under his fingers.

Arms swooped under his, lifting him from the water.

Others cradled his legs and carried him to the medical tent.

He’d been scared, he’d been at his absolute limits, he’d looked finished for all money.

But somehow, with the help of everyone watching and willing him to make it, he’d got there.

Barely anyone had a dry eye.

In the world of sport full of faux heroes and hype and hubris, the idea of ice swimming providing such scenes might seem unlikely.

But on that day, at that moment, the only unlikely thing was that there could have been another sporting moment anywhere on the planet as emotional and inspiring as Brent Bythell’s icy swim.