Next Saturday’s Polar Bear Plunge is a. Good b. Bad for You

Next Saturday, December 16 at 9:30 a.m., the Polar Bear Plunge takes place at Cooper’s Beach in Southampton. This event has been going on for quite a number of years without much fanfare, but during the last five years, it has become, snuggled in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, practically another national holiday for the people of the Hamptons. About 200 people rush into the water when the horn sounds. About 2,000 people cheer them on. There’s a whole lot of splashing and whooping and hollering. And then as the various participants come running out, most of whom are covered with goosebumps and shivering, friends find them and rub them dry with towels.

It costs absolutely nothing to jump in the ocean on Polar Bear Swim day. But if you want to do it at Cooper’s Beach that day in between the flags, it will cost you a donation equal to whatever sum you raise through the pledges of friends and acquaintances who sponsor your effort. Just meet at the back of the beach to arrange things first. All the money raised from the Southampton Polar Bear Plunge goes to Human Resources of the Hamptons.

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With more and more people showing up to do the plunge, I wondered whether it makes you healthier to be leaping into cold water, or if it makes you more susceptible to getting sick. I looked into it.

The Swedes have been enjoying the benefits of perspiring in a sweat house and then dashing out into a zero degree snowstorm with nothing on and then running around for ten minutes while their skin gets all goosebumps and tingly. The lifespan of the average Swede is several years longer than the average American.

But when you sign up for this Polar Bear Plunge you have to sign a form which says that you understand this event involves risks of serious bodily injury, including permanent disability, paralysis and death, which may be caused by your own actions, or inactions, those of others participating in the event, the conditions in which the event takes place or the negligence of others. Something like that.

Why is that?

Perhaps the most famous polar bear swimmer in America is Louie Scarcella, the organizer of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. He says the ocean is “nature’s anti-inflammatory.” He swims every day from November to April and says he hasn’t had a cold in thirty years. He also claims it improves his sex life and overall vigor.

Kate Rew had this to say after doing the Southampton Polar Bear Plunge last year. “When I got out, I felt like my body was on fire, in a great way. It was invigorating and I felt alive.”

And David Scharf said this: “I remember screaming louder than I ever thought possible when I went in, then feeling a rhythmic, piercing pain in my legs and finally numbness. Once you’re numb, you can stay in forever.”

Nevertheless, here in Southampton, there is an ambulance at the back of the beach. And there are four ambulances at the back of the Coney Island Beach. And also at plunges in Nantucket, Block Island, Boston, Atlantic City and Buffalo, New York where they go into Lake Erie. Why do they have ambulances?

The main problem is hypothermia, according to a paramedic of the Southampton Ambulance Squad. You can stay in, not even knowing something is going bad.

Bob Amick, who is an American Red Cross Community Disaster Education Instructor, says immersion hypothermia occurs about 30 times more quickly than wind chill conductive/convective hypothermia due to a complete lack of insulation and direct exposure to chilled water.

“Heat is quickly lost through the armpits and groin,” Ms. Amick continued. “There is shivering and slow breathing. And it can be very subtle and vague, which can be deceptive.”

At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, researchers have found that reducing the body core temperature in mice results in their living longer.

But, Dr. Dan Danzi, a leading expert on hypothermia and director of emergency medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky says that the Polar Bear Plunge presents little risk for healthy people. “It can be a problem for children and the elderly. Also thin people who do not have much body fat.”

Sufferers of hypothermia can limit the danger if they wrap themselves in a silver heat reflective robe immediately after they get out of the water rather than a towel. During the swim, the danger can be minimized by dunking your head only at the very end of the swim. Keeping your head warm to the end delays heat loss.

At last year’s swim at Cooper’s Beach, some people dried themselves with towels, only to note that they quickly froze into interesting and fascinating shapes. Janet McLaren, who has an art gallery in Port Jefferson but was at the Polar Bear here last year, was seen photographing them for a photo exhibition she mounted in the spring.

In hospitals in Poland, there is a popular treatment called Cryotherapy. Physicians have patients stand in chambers filled with cold, dry air at temperatures as low as — 135 degrees Centigrade for periods as long as ten minutes. Doctors say this helps heal muscle injuries and helps lessen depression. Here in America, many professional sports teams have Cryotherapy Chambers.

However, a physiotherapist in Southampton, Tony Wilson, claims you can get the same benefit just from taking a cold bath.

On the other hand, many long distance marathon runners end their pre-race regimen by taking a five-minute ice bath. Top marathoner Paula Radcliffe says that five hours before the start of a race she eats a big bowl of cereal, some banana, some biscuits, yoghurt and chocolate, then relaxes for five minutes, then takes a shower and an ice bath.

Dr. Chris Bleakley, a physiotherapist at the University of Ulster, has an explanation for this.

“Cold causes a decrease in the size of blood vessels, and heat causes an increase — and this contrast creates a pumping mechanism which increases the blood flow to flush out the toxins in the area, a bit like massage,” he says.

Dr. Merritt White of Bridgehampton says that any group activity involving strenuous exercise and sports can result in improved vitality and frame of mind.

Then again, there are sharks in the water here.

Then again, only a very small percentage of these sharks bite people.

A British physician, Dr. Lisa Silver of Oxfordshire, takes a dimmer view of jumping into freezing cold water. “I would urge people with heart problems or airways diseases such as asthma to avoid extreme cold. Patients with these who expose themselves to sudden cold are at risk of sudden death.”

Yet nobody has ever had anything bad happen to him or her either at the Southampton Polar Bear Plunge or at the Coney Island Plunge in twenty years.

Some say that people who go to plunges where a Conch Shell is blown to summon the participants to the water’s edge to ask permission from King Neptune, god of the sea, to enter his domain ahead of time, do better.

So there you have it. You’ll be fine. Maybe.