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PERSONAL HISTORY
SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA
The water temperature was thirty-two degrees, and the shore was a mile off.
BY LYNNE COX

Standing near the stern of the Orlova, a Yugoslav ship bound for the Antarctic Peninsula, I held on tight to the metal guardrails as five-foot waves in the Beagle Channel shattered against the bow, rocking the ship and shooting icy spray into my face. It was eight o’clock on a December evening, two hours before sunset, and I watched the colorful hillside of Ushuaia, the southernmos city in Argentina, fade into an expanding gray sea. Within minutes, sleet and wind gusting to sixty knots drove me into my cabin, where I changed into a warm pair of sweats and climbed up into my bunk bed, preparing for the journey through the Drake Passage, at the edge of the Southern Ocean. If conditions are favorable, it takes about a day and a half to travel from Ushuaia to the Antarctic Peninsula, but everything depends on the weather and the waves. Storm fronts can move in rapidly and sometimes remain in a powerful holding pattern for days. The energy from these storms can affect the entire Southern Ocean and the waters along the coasts of New Zealand, Australia, South America, and South Africa,where waves called cape rollers have been known to punch holes in supertankers. Waves in the Drake Passage itself can reach fifty feet, and as the Orlova sailed east toward the Atlantic I could feel them increasing in size and frequency. In the upper bunk, where I was trying to sleep, there was no guardrail, so I turned onto my side, stuck my hand between the bed and the wall, and held on.Somehow I managed to sleep, until a rogue wave hit the ship and I was thrown to the opposite edge of the bunk. It was two o’clock in the morning. Chairs toppled, cupboards snapped open, luggage clattered to the floor. The ship’s engines suddenly slowed, which meant that the waves were going to get larger still.Soon, twenty-five-foot waves were smashing against the porthole. I had spent the past two years training for a swim through some of the coldest water in the world and onto the shores of Antarctica.Now I wasn’t sure if the boat would evenget there.

When I was three years old, I learned how to swim in a lake called Snow Pond, in Maine, where my mother’s father had taught her to swim. I swam there in the summer, and the rest of the year I took lessons in an indoor heated pool. I started entering swim meets a couple of years later, but itwasn’t until my family moved to California, in 1969, and I participated in a race in the Pacific that I realized how much I loved swimming in open water. In August, 1971, when I was fourteen years old, I swam twenty-seven miles, from Catalina Island, in Southern California, across the Catalina Channel to the mainland. The swim took twelve hours and thirty-six minutes, and, as I touched the shore, I knew that I wanted to swim the English Channel, the Mt. Everest of distance swimming. The water in the English Channel in summer was between 55 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit, about ten degrees colder than the Catalina Channel in August. I believed I could swim the distance— depending on the currents, it could be anything from twenty-one miles to more than thirty miles—but I had no idea whether I would be able to survive the cold. According to English Channel swimming rules, swimmers can wear only a bathing suit, a swim cap, and goggles, although they are permitted to use grease, which is thought to serve as a layer of insulation. Many Channel swimmers have suffered problems with the cold; some have gone into hypothermia, and a few have died from exposure. My father, who is a physician, believed that the more I could acclimate to cold water during the year, the less stressful my swim would be. I began swimming only in the Pacific Ocean, and I continued during the winter, when the water temperature dropped as low as fifty degrees. I wore light clothes all year long, and always slept without blankets and with the windows open. My father was right. When I was fifteen, I broke the men’s and women’s records for swimming the English Channel, completing a twenty-seven-mile crossing in nine hours and fifty-seven minutes. The following year, the record was broken by a man; I returned, and broke it again, finishing a thirty-three-mile swim in nine hours and thirty-six minutes. There are swimmers who return year after year to cross the Channel, but I wanted to do something that had never been done before. I heard about a swim across the Cook Strait, between the North and South Islands of New Zealand. Three men had crossed successfully; a handful of women had tried, but none of them had finished. The islands are about ten miles apart, and I thought that I could complete the crossing in about four hours. In February, 1975, after five hours of swimming, I was farther from the finish than when I had started. The waves were nine feet high, the winds gusting to forty knots, and I doubted that I could continue. The crew in the support boat next to me included a radio announcer who was broadcasting news about the swim. Listeners began calling in, and the announcer relayed their words to me.Somehow, the confi- dence and concern in their messages forced me on, and, after twelve hours in the water, I reached South Island. The next day, church bells rang throughout the country to celebrate the swim. I felt as though New Zealanders had shared my struggle when I was in the water, and it made me realize that a swim could be more than an athletic event. It was a way of bringing people together. A year later, in 1976, I crossed the Strait of Magellan, off the southern coast of Chile. In the following years, I swam around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of South Africa; across Lake Titicaca, from Bolivia to Peru; and through the Gulf of Aqaba, from Egypt to Israel and then from Israel to Jordan. In 1987, when I was thirty years old, I completed my most challenging swim— crossing the Bering Strait, from the United States to the Soviet Union. It had taken eleven years to secure permissionfrom the Soviet Union, and dense fog in the strait sent me dangerously off course, but after two hours I reached the shore, where a Soviet welcoming committee was waiting.

Several times over the years, scientists have asked me if I would participate in cold studies. Most people find swimming or sitting in cold water uncomfortable, so there are few volunteers for these studies and little data on cold-water endurance. Barbara Drinkwater, an exercise physiologist at the Institute of Environmental Stress at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wanted to find out how I was able to swim in cold water without going into hypothermia. The studies would be a way for me to understand how my body functioned, enabling me to explore my own limits.So in 1976 I became a human research subject. In one experiment at the institute, I sat for an hour in my swimsuit in water that was fifty degrees, and a rectal probe was used to measure my temperature.Myresponse was unusual: all the other participants in the test shivered, and their core temperatures dropped; I did not shiver, and my temperature remained stable. Heat loss in cold water happens up to twenty-five times faster than in cold air, and it can be deadly. For most people, exercise in cold water increases this heat loss.During physical activity, blood from the body’s core is sent out to the working muscles in the extremities—the arms, legs, fingers, and toes. The blood close to the skin’s surface is then cooled by the surrounding water and air before it’s pumped back. The body attempts to combat the cold and maintain heat by vasoconstriction—closing down the blood vessels to the surface and the extremities and keeping the body’s heat around vital organs like the heart and the brain. At some point, though, in a process known as vasodilation, the blood flow opens again as a way of insuring that oxygen gets to the tissues in the extremities. Once again, colder blood is returned to the core, and people may become hypothermic, disoriented, unresponsive, severely dehydrated, develop an irregular heartbeat, and go into cardiac arrest. That fall, I began training for a December swim across the Strait of Magellan. The biggest obstacle would be the water temperature, which was between 42 and 44 degrees Fahrenheit. No one had attempted the swim before, and little was known about how the human body would respond. Drinkwater accompanied me and gathered data on a training swim in the ocean off Santa Barbara. After four hours of swimming in fifty-degree water,my body temperature actually increased, from my normal temperature of 97.6 to 102 degrees. Drinkwater believed that my body was good at closing down blood flow to its peripheral areas. This ability, coupled with the fact that, like most women, I have an even distribution of fat throughout my body, acted as an internal wetsuit. I have large muscles, and was exercising so vigorously in the water, Drinkwater said, that I was able to create more heat than I lost. In the early nineteen-nineties,William Keatinge, one of the world’s leading experts on hypothermia, asked me if I would participate in a study in his lab, at the University of London. During one part of the study, I sat in a Jacuzzi that was set at forty-two degrees for an hour and a half,moving my arms back and forth. My core temperature dipped for a short time, but quickly stabilized. (The only other person whose temperature didn’t plummet during this experiment was an Icelandic fisherman who had survived a shipwreck in frigid waters near the Westman Islands. All four of his shipmates had perished, but he had acclimated to extremely cold temperatures while working on the deck of a fishing boat, and he was able to swim three miles to shore.) However, my skin temperature had cooled down to the temperature of the water, and as soon as I got out my core temperature dropped. Keatinge advised me to get into a warm bath to rewarm. It was painful. My skin began to sting and itch, and it became splotchy. Being immersed in warm water caused further vasodilation, and by the time I climbed out of the warm bath the inside of my body was colder than it had been when I was sitting in the Jacuzzi. Another part of the study examined whether blood flow could be regulated at the fingertips. Along with seventy-six premed students, I had to immerse my left hand in thirty-two-degree water for half an hour. Fresh water freezes at thirty-two degrees, but in the experiment the water was constantly circulated, to prevent it from crystallizing and to maintain an even temperature. The pain was intense. Some of the students shouted and pounded on the wall, and one sang. I stayed absolutely still, and talked myself into keeping my hand in the water. Keatinge believed that, through my cold-water training, I was able to control blood flow at my fingertips, so that I didn’t lose heat to the water. The results made me wonder: If I could immerse my hand in water that cold, would I be able to swim in it?

When I was seventeen and in NewZ ealand, preparing to attempt the Cook Strait crossing, I was met on the beach after a practice swim by a member of the local lifesaving association. He handed me a small blue penguin. It was soft, fuzzy, and warm, the size of a calico cat. The man said that it had swum all the way from Antarctica.When I asked him how a baby penguin could swim across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand, he laughed. He was joking, he said, and explained that this breed, a fairy penguin, was indigenous to New Zealand. I supported the penguin under its feet, and held it close to me. It wriggled, turned, and bit me hard on the neck. Afterward, every time I thought about the penguin, I thought of Antarctica. A year later, after I’d swum across the Magellan Strait, I met two tourists in Chile who had flown across Antarctica. I longed to go there, too, but I had to get back to college in California. In 1978, when I swam around the Cape of Good Hope, I encountered twenty-foot waves generated by storms near Antarctica, more than two thousand miles away. And many years later, in 1990, when I returned to South America to swim across the Beagle Channel, which separates Argentina and Chile, an admiral in the Argentine Navy, who had provided support during the swim, offered me passage on a military supply ship heading to an Argentine base camp in the Antarctic Peninsula. It fascinated me, because it was a place without borders, but, once again, I had to get back home. I was beginning to feel like James Cook. I had completely circled Antarctica but had never been there. Three years ago, I swam across the northern lakes of Italy. This swim was just for fun, and I even asked a friend who was an opera singer to sing to me asI swam. But afterward I felt that something was lacking. I was forty-three years old, and I needed a project that was more challenging, one that would draw on all my experience, and it suddenly occurred to me that what I wanted to do was swim to Antarctica. The coldest water I’d swum in was in the Bering Strait, where the temperature dropped from forty-two degrees to thirty-eight degrees for the last thirty minutes of my two-hour swim. The water along the Antarctic Peninsula could be as much as four or five degrees colder. No one knew how far someone would be able to swim in those temperatures, and I wondered what the effect of he cold would be for every degree below thirty-eight degrees. During the Second World War, pilots and submariners who were rescued from waters at these temperatures often suffered from “immersion injury,” which involved swelling of the extremities and, in some cases, debilitating nerve and muscle damage. After Keatinge’s hand experiment, it was three months before full sensation returned to my fingertips. I wasn’t sure what would happen in Antarctic waters, but I intended to swim as fast as I possibly could. I’m a distance swimmer, not a sprinter, and I would have to build strength and speed. Between December, 2000, and December, 2001, I worked out at the gym, and in the ocean, five days a week, two or three hours a day. After a year, I still wasn’t strong enough, so I started working with Jonathan Moch, a trainer and former high-school wrestler. In Antarctica, I planned to swim mostly with my head up, to prevent heat loss. That spring, Moch and I began with strength training, using free weights and making sure that I kept my head up throughout the workout. Then we developed stability and balance to help me in the water.And, finally, we worked on endurance.Swimming with the head up increases the drag of a swimmer’s body in the water, and it can feel as though you’re swimming uphill. In preparation for this, I was doing every exercise in the workout to the point of fatigue. I also walked five or six miles a day with a friend from my home town of Los Alamitos, Barry Binder, who had accompanied me on past swims and who was planning to come to Antarctica. In the afternoon, I swam fast for an hour in an unheated back-yard pool. And every weekend I sprinted—swimming as fast as I could for three to four miles in the Pacific Ocean, off Seal Beach, in California. Between workouts, I spent hours drafting letters, making phone calls, setting up meetings, and making presentations to possible sponsors. Quark Expeditions, a Connecticutbased company that runs educational tours to Antarctica, agreed to help, allowing me to use one of its ships as the base for the swim as well as providing logistical support.

Last November, after nearly two years of training, I visited Dr. Robert (Brownie) Schoene, a pulmonary specialist at the University of Washington who had helped me prepare for previous swims. Dr. Schoene ran a series of pulmonary-function and maximumexercise tests, which showed that I was in excellent physical shape. Still, I had some concerns about the tides, weather, ice conditions, and water temperatures in Antarctica. A friend who had spent nine seasons diving there told me that he once watched a leopard seal fling a penguin fifteen feet into the air, and then rip it out of its skin. He advised me to get out of the water quickly if I saw a leopard seal or an orca—a killer whale.There had been only one report of a killer whale attacking a person in the wild, but I decided I needed to find a swimsuit that was not black, white, or red. I didn’t want to look like a penguin or signal that I was an injured animal. I was interested, though, in the ways in which Antarctic animals adapt to the cold; perhaps I could learn something that would help me extend my time inthe water. Penguins have a double layerof feathers, and the air between the layersserves as insulation. I decided to growmy hair long so that I could pile it up onmy head, trapping air in my swim cap,like penguin feathers. When penguinsdive into the ocean, their feathers getpressed together and no longer provideinsulation, and the birds rely on theirbody fat to act as an internal wetsuit.Antarctic seals—Weddell, Ross, crabeater,leopard, and elephant—stay warmby building up layers of blubber. By thetime the water temperature dropped tofifty degrees in the back-yard pool, I hadput on twelve pounds by adding morecarbohydrates and fat to my diet. JohnHeyning, a marine-mammal expert withthe Natural History Museum of LosAngeles County, who has studied thermoregulationin whales, told me thathumpback whales were able to stay warmwhile feeding by diverting the heat intheir blood from their tongues back intotheir bodies. I had never considered whateffect getting cold water in my mouth,or ingesting it, would have on my temperature.Another concern was the effectthat intense cold would have on myteeth and ears. A friend recalled readinga book about the Antarctic explorerApsley Cherry-Garrard which describedhow his teeth had shattered in minussixty-six-degree weather. Temperaturesalong the Antarctic Peninsula rarely dropmuch below freezing in summer, but Iwondered if my teeth would conductthe cold. My dentist, Dr.William Poe,explained that because teeth have microscopicpores they are often sensitive tothe cold. He gave me a series of fluoride treatments that filled these pores.He also offered to make custom earplugs out of dental impression, which would fit snugly in my ears, preventing water from seeping in and damaging my eardrums. The period after the swim was potentially dangerous, possibly more critical than the swim itself, because I would no longer be exercising.During the Antarctic winter, male emperor penguins incubate the eggs containing their offspring, huddling together on the ice to conserve body heat. When I crossed the Bering Strait, a Russian expert on hypothermia, who had been sent from Moscow, assisted afterward.She made me get into a sleeping bag, and then placed hot-water bottles on the arteries on either side of my neck, under my arms, and in the groin area while she leaned against me to give me her body heat; it was much less painful than immediately immersing myself in a hot bath. For the Antarctic swim,one of my friends designed a scarf, top, and pants for the rewarming phase. She sewed two felt pockets into the scarf, two pockets under the arms of the top, and two in the front of the pants, where we would place hand warmers. At the end of the swim, the crew would huddle around me, to block the wind, and help me put on the warm clothes. For knowledge about tides, weather, and currents, I relied on Susan Adie, the expedition leader for Quark Expeditions. In the past, I had started every swim from one landmass and finished on another, but for this swim there was no land I could start from. Adie and I decided that I would swim from the ship to the shore. Once the Orlova reached the sub-Antarctic islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, Adie and the ship’s Russian ice master, Valery Eremin, would determine whether conditions were safe enough for me to attempt a swim. Landing places would be limited. There aren’t many beaches on the Antarctic continent, and icebergs sometimes flow into the ones that do exist, making them inaccessible.What’s more, because the weather can change in an instant, from a calm sea with no wind to fivefoot waves and fifty-knot winds, there is no way to predict the tides. Some days there are two tides in a day,Adie told me, sometimes one, and the tidal strength varies. I would be attempting the swim during a neap tide, when the moon was half full, which meant that the tide would not be as strong as it would be during a full moon. “In Antarctica, you just have to be flexible and patient,”Adie said, adding that there could be platelet ice—patches of ice on top of the water— which could cut me. If there was any brash ice—broken or crumbled ice that can reach the size of a Volkswagen— I would not be able to swim. “When the icebergs break off the glaciers and hit the water, they cause mini-tsunamis,” she explained. “If you’re in the water with brash ice when that happens, it could kill you.”

MORE TO COME

ANSWER
My parents were very supportative of my channel swimming. On my early swims, either my father or my mother went along with me on the escort boat. They also took turns walking with me during my training sessions. They helped me learn to maintain my pace. When my mother and I traveled to England so I could attempt the English Channel, my brother and two sisters pitched in and took care of things my Mom would have done if she had been at home. They were all very supportative of my swimming and for a period of time, David, my older brother was my swimming coach.

QUESTION
At age fiftenn, you "achieved your hightest goal in life": crossing the English Channel and subsequently breaking the world record. When did you transition from setting goals of breaking records to setting personal goals that would somehow affect the world?

ANSWER
My swim across the Cook Straits in 1975 was the event that changed everything. After swimming for more than five hours and being pushed backwards the entire time by a very strong current, people through out New Zealand started calling out to my escort boat telling me that I could make the swim. There were so many other wonderful and difficult experiences that I had on that swim, but the most important idea that came out of it was that a swim could be more than an individual athletic challenge. A swim could be a way to connect with people from different countries, and it could be a way to open borders between people.

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