#winterbathing

[asomegirls]

Elien Janssen

[alfabryggan]

JOIN THE WINTER BATHERS EMBRACE THE COLD

Vinterbad är inte en trend. Det är en ritual som funnits långt innan sociala medier, biohacking och wellness-appar. En stillsam men kraftfull tradition där kyla möter närvaro, och där gemenskap ofta betyder mer än själva doppet.

Vi ser just nu hur vinterbad växer snabbt i hela Norden. Inte bara bland privatpersoner, utan även hos kommuner, föreningar och anläggningar som vill skapa hållbara mötesplatser året runt.

Det är i den verkligheten vår vinterbadbrygga tar form.

Anläggningen bygger på den beprövade Låg-Susanna-konstruktionen, tillverkad och levererad sedan 1980-talet av Laakson Laiturit. Det här är ingen experimentell lösning, utan en robust konstruktion som använts i decennier på offentliga badplatser i nordiskt klimat.

Hjärtat i anläggningen är en generös badplattform på 6,4 × 8,9 meter. En plats där flera personer kan bada samtidigt, stanna i vattnet, prata och dela upplevelsen. Plattformen har en flytbrygga och en stabil landgång med landfäste som leder tryggt ut till badet, oavsett årstid.

Den U-formade designen med bred trappa ner till en nedsänkt plattform gör badet både säkert och socialt. Det är en plats för gemenskap, inte bara för snabba dopp.

För att vinterbadet ska fungera på riktigt ingår: – Eluppvärmda badstegar – Pumpanläggning som håller vattnet isfritt runt bryggan – Räcken, flera badstegar och livräddningsutrustning – Stabil förankring anpassad för nordiska förhållanden

Pontonerna är tillverkade i polyeten – ett material med mycket lång livslängd som är OSPAR- och Blå Flagg-anpassat och som inte läcker plast i vattnet. En självklarhet när man bygger i och nära naturen.

Bakom lösningen står AlfaBryggan. Vi har levererat flytbryggor och pontoner över hela Sverige sedan 2009 och har många nöjda kunder. Vill du se vad våra kunder säger kan du läsa omdömen här: 👉 https://alfabryggan.se/omdomen/

Vi kallas ibland pontonkungen – inte för att vi säljer mest, utan för att vi vet när rätt lösning faktiskt är rätt. Varje anläggning byggs utifrån platsens förutsättningar och kundens önskemål.

En vinterbadbrygga är mer än en brygga. Det är en mötesplats. En investering i hälsa, gemenskap och attraktiv offentlig miljö.

Winter Bathing. Strength. Togetherness.

Vill ni skapa en vinterbadanläggning för offentlig miljö, förening eller kommersiell verksamhet? Kontakta oss så hjälper vi er från idé till färdig lösning.

[homespun-stories]

The Winter Bathers

I’m a woman for all seasons. They help me carve up the elephant-sized year into something manageable, so I don’t freak out at the prospect of 365 unchanging days. I joke with friends about the abject misery of cold and wet winters in Denmark, where I have lived for the last eight years, but I inwardly rejoice at the cashmere and candles and casseroles that accompany them. I always think of that Bill Hicks line on people who live in L.A bragging about it being hot and sunny every day: “What are you, a fucking lizard?” Our summers are so much sweeter in Scandinavia for knowing we’ve weathered the worst and we’re duly rewarded with long days, soft breezes, and lush greenery. If you’ll allow me a moment of cringe, I believe that the seasons teach us the power of rituals. And rituals are how we endure.

There’s a saying in Denmark which you learn pretty fast when the first cold snap hits: there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. Which is all well and good, but does nothing to explain the frantic energy with which the Danes also remove all their clothes entirely and throw themselves into the sea during the coldest months of the year. This particular form of brutality is known as ‘winter bathing’, a coy name which implies retreating to some Edwardian copper tub filled with steaming, eucalyptus-scented water whilst the snow falls gently outside. The reality is a gaggle of naked people, nipples to the wind on a frozen pontoon, wading into water colder than the base temperature of my fridge.

I moved to Denmark during a heatwave. Those first weeks in Copenhagen were spent in a spritz-fuelled haze as the long summer days melted into ambient warm nights, and I did little more than bounce between the bars and cafes that lined the historic canals and cobbled streets. When I filed the papers for my residency card and was asked to give the reason for my relocation, there was no box for me to tick. I had no job, no studies, no family here to reunite with. I had, quite plainly, moved for life. And Copenhagen appeared to be where I was best suited for living it. Even the inevitable winter, and my staggeringly bad clothing, couldn’t diminish the joy with which I embraced my new hygge lifestyle. I lit a lot of candles, I consumed vast quantities of buttered potatoes, bread and pastry, and I persisted in ordering glasses of red wine in local dive bars that only served beer on tap. Denmark and I—we were made for each other.

By the time I was ushering in my third winter, I’d leveled up my clothing to include the kind of coat that stops people dying on the side of Mount Everest. I’d completed my first ‘Viking biking’ experience having cycled in snow without losing my mind or my two front teeth. And I’d also moved to a neighbourhood in Copenhagen that is locally known as “Shit Island” for reasons that seem to involve a blighted history of municipal waste disposal and a whispered disdain of working class people. It offered affordable housing that was minutes away from a protected nature reserve and one of the city’s longest and cleanest public beaches. And that was where I first saw them: the Winter Bathers. A mass of flushed naked bodies waddling around the turquoise wooden dock at the top of the beach whilst I was scowling at my partner through the biting wind, my survival gear zipped up to my nose.

I’d had a primer on European nudity when I went skiing with some friends in Austria a few years earlier. I say “I went skiing” but this is a significant overstatement of the facts given I had never placed a single ski boot on my feet before the trip. “I went crying on the side of a mountain whilst my friends had a blast” would be a more accurate description for the “holiday” for which I forked over vast quantities of cash I could not afford. I can think of no other experience where you pay so much to be routinely hurt and humiliated, aside from the kinds of activities that take place between consenting adults in sex dungeons.

After three days of crying on the side of a mountain called—I kid you not—the Grimming, the weather went from Loads of Snow to Too Much Snow and offered me a blessed exit ramp from the nursery slopes and my perennially hungover 19-year-old ski instructor. My friends and I huddled together back at the lodge, throwing logs into the only form of heating—a single raging furnace we’d named The Beast—and weighed up our options for things to do at a ski resort that didn’t include skiing in a blizzard. My friend, whose family owned the house, suggested we try out the local spa he’d been to before. We wondered why he was so quick to volunteer for dinner duty instead, but desire for warmth soon overcame intrigue as we trotted off with borrowed swimsuits to poach ourselves in pools of water whilst our friend laughed into his snaps and thawed some sausages on The Beast for our return.

Whatever vision I’d had of a cozy alpine spa retreat quickly evaporated as we pulled up outside something the size and comportment of a department store. This was a serious multi-level bathing complex and it was packed with locals. If we’d taken a beat longer at the reception desk, we would have reckoned with the enormous sign that declared the complex “textile frei” beyond the kids’ paddling pool, but we’d paid our entrance fees and suddenly found ourselves surrounded by hundreds—literally, hundreds—of naked Austrian strangers.

One of our party, an American, was so overwhelmed by what he called “this European obsession with nudity” that he stormed off to the deck chairs outside the cafe and put a towel over his head. The rest of us pushed on, slowly peeling off our layers and keeping our eyes resolutely above the neck as we gingerly headed towards one of 50 or more steam rooms. Before long, the simple fact of our nakedness melted into the background. I guess it’s hard to stay uptight when the environment you’re in is expressly designed to do the opposite. I found myself gazing at naked strangers through the steam in the way you might look at potatoes in the produce aisle—no intention or judgment, just browsing the various lumps and bumps. Most of the men were curiously hairfree below the earlobes, like upright seals in toupees, and their wives and girlfriends wore blue frosted eye shadow and gold jewelry despite the water and the heat and the fact it wasn’t 1982 anymore. Everyone looked like they ate boiled potatoes and pork chops three times a day.

Feeling more confident, and leaving our friend to scrub his mind free of rampant nudity, the three of us girded our loins and explored the deeper environs of the spa complex where the saunas were located. My partner nonchalantly strolled ahead of us into some kind of potting shed, the door of which was firmly slammed in our faces by a towel-clad man with a glistening shoulder-length perm. He was, it transpired, a gus meister—a sadist with control of the thermostat and a penchant for using his towel as a whip. My friend and I peered through the porthole, as my partner was scolded in front of the sweating crowd for letting the heat out. He was now in the hands of a man who looked like he’d eaten Kenny G for breakfast and there was nothing we could do to save him. Less than an hour into our spa experience, and we were two men down.

And so, the two of us left standing headed into the empty sauna next door. It happened to provide a stunning, moonlit view of the snow covered ground and the potting shed where unspeakable things were happening. We gazed out into the starlit night in convivial silence, brows beading with sweat as the sand timer trickled down, grateful to rest our eyes on something that wasn’t flesh. Then the door to the potting shed was flung open, disgorging 20 or so bright pink people whereupon they promptly threw themselves onto the snow-covered ground and started rolling around. “Oh, would you look at that..”, my friend quietly muttered. Oh, would you look, indeed—for there was my partner, resplendent in the full moon as he writhed around naked in the snow with his new friends.

***

Back in Denmark, in early 2016, I had developed a lingering curiosity for the eccentric ritual that was being performed at my local beach. Asking around, I learned that the turquoise pontoon was the location of a longstanding winter bathing club, where members rotated between the frigid sea and pine-clad saunas every day of the week, every week of the year. Applications for this obscure membership were open during the first hour on the first day of October to anyone who could navigate the website that had been built in 1997. Correspondingly, the fee for such a bewildering process was less than 20 cents a day. Somehow, my partner and I signed up. So, too, did friends in the neighbourhood, and so we headed off together for an induction session that was totally in Danish which I totally didn’t speak.

Passing over the little wooden bridge from the beach into the winter bathing club for the very first time is like passing some mythical border where The Emperor’s New Clothes is operating at scale, in that lots of people are naked but no one talks about it. You, the one in the arctic base layers and wind-breaker, start to feel like the weirdo in a land where clothing isn’t part of the religion.

Having run the gauntlet of nudity, we finally huddled together in a cabin and waited for class to begin. It was a brisk reminder that Denmark has a national obsession with rules, and despite the seemingly carefree nature of the activity at hand, there were many, many rules for winter bathing. My friend kindly noted the most important ones down on his phone, in English, and periodically showed them to me. You must enter the water ass first, he revealed at one point. I couldn’t picture the pretzel-like distortions I would have to put my body through to conjure such a feat, but Mamma Gus—the grey-haired matriarch delivering the commandments when she wasn’t whipping people in the sauna—was already onto the next bathing diktat which my friend was frantically transcribing. “Who are these people?” I wondered to myself as I gazed across the packed room, before catching my reflection in the window.

People joked, when I first moved to Denmark, that I had relocated for the weather. Lately, because I am not a fucking lizard, I have come to agree. If I must spend a winter somewhere, as a woman for all seasons, then I’d rather spend it here. From the unencumbered vantage point of where the land meets sea, and the weather plays out on an enormous canvas, you understand that the Danish winter contains multitudes. There are days on the dock when the sky is cerulean blue and you can see your toes through the water as the sun shimmies off the ripples. There are days when the slate-grey sky rains down on the churning waves and you hold on to the ladder for your own dear life. And there are days when the sea freezes over, and they cut a hole in the ice so you can swim through the slush as the snow quietly settles around you.

Cold water immersion, much like the culture around it, is something you acclimate to. What was once an affront to the system—the temperature, the nudity—becomes the norm. I quickly learned the right way to compose myself for winter bathing, ensuring I didn’t squeal when I entered the water, and placed a towel between my butt and the bench of the welcoming sauna. I came to understand that the rules are a necessary part of the ritual, because they hammer out the pointier parts of our personalities and let us live the simple mantra of the seasoned bather: cold, heat, and repeat.

Every week I do this ritual a few times over the course of an hour, and when I am done my skin is buttery, my muscles loosened, and whatever thoughts were raging around my head have floated to the bottom of the sea. In the absence of any kind of spirituality that would find me convening in places of worship, winter bathing is where I go—for solace, for connection, and to grapple with the very meaning of things. I do not know what I did or who I was before I became A Winter Bather. How small my life must have been without this tremendous cracking open and repair. It has become a constant amidst chaos and the answer to my questions.

I have asked it many questions, lately. Last year was bruised by loss—the loss of a job, the loss of a home, and the loss of a much-wanted pregnancy. In the aftermath of the very worst day, when I joined that dreaded clutch of women who go to hospital pregnant and leave without a baby, I longed for the cold water. No swimming, the miscarriage pamphlet had advised, due to the risk of infection. I waited and waited whilst I bled each day, deep red and clotted, unable to fathom the cruelty of the loss as the memories bounced around the lockbox in my mind. I needed an ocean to pour them into.

When the time finally came and the bleeding stopped, it was a quiet weekday afternoon. A couple of lunchtime bathers were already packing up their things, leaving me and a pair of ducks to enjoy the moment in companionable silence. The winter bathing club actually has a name: Det Kolde Gys. It roughly translates as ‘the cold shudder’, which is strangely enigmatic for a language which is so blindingly matter-of-factual. It points to the shared sensation of every single person who heads down the ladder and into the water, no matter how seasoned the bather. Like the rumble of an engine turning over, the cold shudder is the sign of life. That day I welcomed the shock, drawing it deep into my body and wrapping my arms around the pain before I released it into the water. The balm of the heat in the sauna just moments later made me weep. Isak Dineson was right when she said that “the cure for anything is saltwater - sweat, tears or the salt sea.”

Cold, heat, and repeat; winter, spring, summer and autumn. Rituals are how we endure.

[homespun-stories]

The cold shock

As Copenhagen finally shifted into what the Danes wearily refer to as Green Winter, the last weeks have been peppered with those cerulean blue skies that make you forgive all the misgivings of the slate grey months just passed and remember why you chose to live here anyway because it sure as shit wasn’t for the weather.

On these kinds of days, Copenhagen can do no wrong in my eyes. I am heady with the blush of first love in the Springtime, looking for any opportunity to bike over bridges and through parks as the trees bulge with blossom and the light shimmers off the water. When Copenhagen comes back to life, so do I. 

After I had spent a lot of time thinking, and writing, about space, I started thinking about rituals. Like everything else at home, these two things often intersect as spaces become places where rituals unfurl, and rituals themselves often determine the intention of the space at hand. I was prompted, no doubt, by the handover from Winter to Spring as I found myself performing one of the first rituals of the new season: packing away my winter coats in the basement. It’s a ritual enforced by the lack of space in our closet, but it has the unintended consequence of making me take stock - not just of the items in my wardrobe, but of myself. Not to get all ‘wooh’ about it, but sometimes I’ll whisper a wee thank you to the coats in question for getting me through another one. We did it, lads; it’s jacket season now.

Maybe another way of talking about rituals is traditions, and I reach for those too. Having a child makes me reflect harder on how we mark moments like birthdays and holidays, because I can think of nothing sadder than an adult who has no formative memories of what their family did or didn’t do to honour, celebrate and generally give reason for joy and connection. Ritual and tradition is repetition - between a family, throughout a community, across the years, spanning generations. As Easter rolled around for the third time as a constellation of three in our small atheist household, I suddenly realised I needed to think about this properly. What Easter rituals did I want to carry over from my lapsed-Catholic-skewed-Christian-madly-artistic childhood into this hatchling of a family my husband and I were nurturing for ourselves? And how did we want to blend the things we were familiar with from the UK, with the local flavours and quirks of Denmark? Tradition can appear like the lazy option - it takes guts to break out of the mold - but I’m finally understanding how much work tradition takes to build and maintain. In the end, we introduced our toddler to the Easter Bunny as a distributor of her favourite craft materials, and headed to a restaurant for a classic Danish lunch. In our new rituals, I guess we also get to choose when two frazzled parents with full time jobs get to outsource the cooking and cleaning for once.

Through the research we’ve been doing at IKEA, we can plot a neat line between the rituals we perform and our mental wellbeing. Most people don’t actually talk about ‘rituals’, we tend to talk about hobbies or personal projects, but what’s underneath them all is a sense of intention. It’s not a ritual when you drop your kid off at school at the same time, stop working for lunch at midday, and start cooking dinner at 6pm - that’s just routine. It’s a ritual when you intend it to be something that’s more meaningful for you. Sometimes people build rituals around tasks, but I just can’t shake this feeling that it’s a symptom of the way performance culture has spilled into everyday living. Why read a book when you can listen to it at twice the speed on audio? Why go for a walk during the day when you can get up at 4am and do two hours of body conditioning before your first meeting? It all just makes me want to lie down in a dark room. Rituals aren’t about getting things done, but the very nature of the doing. They demand time or patience we don’t believe we have. 

In my home, we have a ritual of making pizzas from scratch on Saturday evenings with our increasingly strong-willed toddler. Let me gently inform you that this is the most inefficient and deeply stressful way to make pizza unless you like red sauce all over the floor and the majority of toppings in your child’s mouth before they make it to the oven. I am literally sweating by the time we sit down to eat; there are so many easier ways to make dinner. But we don’t do it because we want to eat pizza, we do it because we want to give our daughter the opportunity to learn how food is made, and for us to come together as a family to prepare a meal.

A few weeks ago, my colleague and I shared some of the findings from our most recent research into the connection between mental wellbeing and life at home during an internal event for a company-wide Health Week. It came the day before I was due to take 10 days off for what I was calling a ‘wellbeing break’ - something that precedes the more defining request for sick leave. Burn out, exhaustion, stress… These are all actually different things, but we tend to use them interchangeably to express what many of us are experiencing: an inability to touch the edges of ourselves any more; a feeling of being marooned within your own body and mind, unsure how to proceed. My tipping point was a culmination of demands my personal and professional lives placed on me, layering one on top of the other like material strata, hardening under pressure. And then I snapped, in front of my child, and knew that something had to change immediately or I would shatter completely. Faced with this reality, I understood that the best way back to myself was through a tried-and-tested ritual. One that I had increasingly failed to make the time for as the tasks gnawed away at my waking hours, month after month. One that was only for me.

Let me state here, very clearly, that I’m extraordinarily lucky to have the tools and resources to put my health first, not least the simple fact of living in a country with a gold-standard social welfare system. I take none of this for granted. But I also live in a country where an alarming number of people take all their clothes off and swim in the sea 12 months of the year. Reader, I am one of those people. 

Living in the UK, I would have scoffed at this proposition - Nudity? In public? In the winter? - but here we are and here I am, gladly stripping in a wooden cabin and gliding into water colder than the base temperature of my fridge. The upside is that as soon as I get out, I scuttle over to a sauna and sweat away for 15 minutes. 

I have been during the coldest winters, when they have to cut a hole in the ice to let you in; during autumn’s sideways wind and rain when the sea churns like grey porridge and you can’t hear yourself shout; and when those spring and summer blue skies open up above mirror-still waters and you can see your toes all the way down on the sandy floor. This ritual is all the sweeter because of how much it differs, season to season, come rain or shine, with the same guaranteed result. It teaches me patience and gratitude; it fosters resilience and balance.

On the first day of my break, I packed my towel and set off to the jetty by the beach when I would ordinarily be opening up my emails. It was sunny and still, and the water temperature hovered around 8 degrees; a perfect day for bathing. There were only a handful of other people using the facilities that morning, all of us nodding a small smile to each other as we quietly undressed. Denuded, I wrapped my towel around me and walked out onto the chilled wooden decking, inhaling deeply after months of anxiety-addled shallow breathing. And so it began. 

A hearty share of the benefit of any ritual comes from implicitly knowing the sequence of things that happen so you don’t have to think about it - this, then that, and that. Sea, then sauna, and repeat. My mind emptied out as my body moved from sea to sauna, idly watching the returning swallows skim the surface of the water and chatter to each other. I started to feel the outer edges of myself again. It was going to be ok.

I began writing this piece whilst I was babysitting for dear friends, propped up on their sofa that faces out towards the incredible harbour skyline in central Copenhagen. I’m finishing it in a cafe just down the road from where I go winter bathing. In the weeks in between, I’ve consistently carved out time for my ritual and I am all the better for it. So much so that I packed a towel in my work bag – just as soon as I’ve dropped the final full stop of this essay, you’ll find me out on the jetty. Right here.

[design-at-work]

Here @umagedesign we started the day feeling very healthy! #greatcolleagues #winterbathing #vinterbadning (her: UMAGE) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca5HVY7s-JW/?utm_medium=tumblr

[alimbek-ulan]

#winterbathing. Ну что, кто сегодня купался? В Алматы сегодня было +10°С, мне кажется в такую погоду скучно купаться. 🔵Всегда думал, что на моей странице слишком много фоток-постов (так как многие так думают), но недавно наткнулся на какого-то дядьку с Казахстана, у которого в инстаграме почти 60000 фоток (забыл его инста, а то бы тут указал), где он закидывает фотки с друзьями, родными, коллегами и т.д. Как говорится, есть к чему стремиться...я вот хотел добить до 10К, теперь буду целиться на 100К. 🆘На заметку: я обычно веду свой блог только на @instagram, и многие посты также закидываю в @facebook, VK, @twitter, @tumblr и т.д. Но всё же рекомендую найти меня в инстаграме, чтобы первыми быть в курсе дел. 📸Фото старое, сделано ещё пару лет назад, когда мы просто так зимой купались в одном из озёр национального парка Бурабай, который называют Текеколь или Майбалык. [8729] 🔴Озеро Текеколь – один из малопосещаемых, но говорят самое прозрачное и чистое озеро ГНПП "Бурабай". (at Burabay National Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs0yTWmgs2I/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11mivlklrzscs

[jenniferneil84]

Do you enjoy a bath? #bathing #bubbles #bathbubbles #bathandbubbles #winterbathing #bubblebath #enjoybubbles #toxicfreebubbles #careforyourskin https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp6Mq_ElvQf/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1qc7yp44n88k1

[youareyogadk-blog]

Winter bathing @detkoldegys I love coming here. It makes me feel so good. From yoga I have learnt that you must make time for activities and people in your life that make you feel good. There is nothing wrong with letting go of habits and relationships that make you don’t feel good about. There are so many things that can make you feel good. Waste no time on allowing time and space for things that bring you down and make you less yourself. Start doing more that brings you greater well-being and happiness. Give your self permission to make changes that you look forward to embracing. Do more of what is good for you. When you feel good then you are in a better place to help others. The essence of yoga for me is listening to yourself, your body, your mind, your emotions, your thoughts, bringing it all into greater integration in your own awareness. You can start by recognising what feels good to you and make time for more of that. A feeling of great well being is your right, so exercise it! #yoga #wellness #wellbeing #winterbathing #detkoldegys #copenhagen #feelgood #youareyoga #sea #sun #amagerstrand (at Det Kolde Gys)