LYNN — Neighbors glanced as JB Lanza — the ninth Massachusetts resident, 53rd American and 475th person to swim a mile in ice-cold water — sat in an ice-water tub on her front porch and discussed her highly unique, and extremely cool, sport of choice.
On Dec. 3, Lanza, who works as an organic chemist in Boston, drove out to Ohio Street Beach in Chicago, Illinois to swim a mile in 3.19 degree Celsius (about 38 degree Fahrenheit) water. Lanza has always been a swimmer. In 2019, she planned to take on a triathlon. It was after finding an open-water swimmers group on Facebook that Lanza discovered the L Street Ice Swimmers, a subset of year-round, hardcore swimmers, many of whom are from New England.
“They are amazing swimmers, and they swim all year round in just a bathing suit. Some people will wear neoprene gloves or booties — especially if it’s really low tide and you’re walking in, the shells sometimes will cut your feet, and if they get numb, you can’t feel that you’ve been cut,” Lanza said.
In October 2019, Lanza took her first cold water swim with the L Street Ice Swimmers at Nahant Beach. At first, she seriously regretted the decision, but by the end of the swim, she said that the experience had become much more bearable.
“October the first year, I remember going to Nahant Beach, still in a wetsuit, and my face was just bitter cold and I was like, ‘This is going to be my last swim,’ and then within three or four minutes, my face wasn’t cold anymore,” Lanza said.
Within a year, Lanza, who initially thought it was crazy to swim in ice-cold water without a wetsuit, became one the pack. She said that by ‘swimming down the season,’ from early fall into the winter, she acclimates her body to withstand extremely cold temperatures.
Competing in an International Ice Swimming Association (IISA) ice mile requires an observer — for safety and statistical reasons — along with a 1 kilometer qualifier swim, and an EKG test. Lanza said that by early last summer, she had decided she wanted to swim an ice mile this winter.
“At the beginning of the summer, I kept asking, ‘Is anyone in our area a certified observer?’ [I was] trying to find out, and no one was, unfortunately, so I started doing a little more research and then decided this summer that I was going to do one this winter. The question was: Was I going to do it at the beginning of the winter or the end of the winter season?”
From the late fall until her Dec. 3 plunge, Lanza trained extensively, swimming with U.S. Masters, an adult competitive swimming training organization. In November, Lanza caught COVID-19 at a swimming event. She was halfway through the fall season but couldn’t leave her house for four days — yet still had to acclimate her body to cold water. She sat in her ice-water tub for her initial quarantine period, and then another week late in November after a COVID resurgence. Frozen with ice cubes, and, some days, dry ice from her chemistry job, she sat in her ice tub every day for about two weeks prior to her Chicago trip.
“I moved it out here and overnight and it would frost, and then I’d add ice cubes, or I’d freeze some old Greek yogurt cups — like the big Greek yogurt containers. Sometimes I might snag some dry ice from work on some of the warmer nights,” Lanza said.
While some might find it intriguing to swim with little-to-no protection in bone-chilling temperatures in the middle of winter, Lanza warned that there are serious risks associated with the sport.
“Either you’ll have some type of physical impairment sometime afterwards where, you know, your hands are nearly frostbitten, or your toes, where you have trouble walking because your feet are bending. There’s also mental impairment, because sometimes your brain will just kind of start to go, and things will go fuzzy. That’s usually what people are more worried about,” she said.
One Christmas morning, Lanza, who had spent the night prior at her sister’s warm home, went for an ice swim, and, on her way back to a friend’s house, experienced some frightening symptoms.
“It was this really weird tunnel vision,” Lanza said. “ I got in the car because we were driving them to our friend’s house who lives down the street from one of the places we were swimming … all of a sudden in the car I started shaking, and then don’t remember driving all the way to the friend’s house, which is maybe quarter of a mile from there. I remember parking and seeing someone else get out of a car in front and walking up the stairs to the house that I parked in front of and I just followed them.”
Lanza said that although the experience was frightening, she believes it was brought on by a lack of sleep and the fact that she had slept in a warm environment the night before. She said that she now avoids alternating temperatures and has not experienced similar symptoms since.
Ice swimming, Lanza said, is not a sport that someone can simply plunge into — it requires at least a full season of acclimation and gradual training to ensure the swimmer’s safety.
Lanza’s next feat will be to become the third American and fourth person to complete an “Ice Sevens” challenge, in which a swimmer swims one ice mile on each continent with at least one of the mile-long swims in water that is less than zero degrees Celsius. In January, if the water’s cold enough, Lanza plans to head to England to make her first European ice mile swim.
“So I’m hoping to go to England in January to do my second ice mile to get my European one out of the way,” Lanza said. “ It’s a really cool sport. I think as long as you make sure that you know what you’re doing, and you’re talking to someone who knows what they’re doing to mentor you, it’s a great time.”
