Below Ten

Who writes here

I live twenty minutes from a shingle beach and fifteen from a reed-fringed lake, and I swim in one or the other at least twice a week in every month of the year, without a wetsuit, with a bright tow float and a thermometer on a string. The kit dries over the bath. The flask lives by the front door. The swims in January are shorter than this paragraph would take to read aloud, and that is the point.

These notes are about habits more than heroics: how the body behaves in cold water, how long is long enough, what afterdrop feels like, and the routines that have kept me safe and coming back. I am not a coach or a doctor. I am someone who got in one July and never found a good reason to stop.