Taking the Plunge

As promised a post about the Polar Bear Swim. It has been over a week now since I did the swim but I have been waiting for the pictures. Every year Raintree, where I live, has a Polar Bear swim and for the past 2 years I have come up with reasons not to do it, but I figured this was my last year here, and it had been slightly warmer for the two days before, so I decided to go ahead. The idea of the swim is you dive into an unheated pool, in the middle of February, in Utah and swim there and back, if you make it you get a free T-shirt (only with college students would that work). So my roommate Katie and I headed down at 7 so we could get small shirts (we dove in at like 7:15 and they had already run out so we settled for mediums) our roommates Hailey and Karlie were supposed to do it with us but they came outside then ran away. So here is a picture of us before we went outside into the cold and rain.

We got outside to find tons of people waiting to dive in so we went and signed our lives away, or signed a form saying if we died it wasn't Raintree's fault. There on the table is the coveted T-shirt!

We then went over with our forms and had to hand them to someone once he had five those people lined up and on the count of three dove on in! I'm on the end in this picture, not really paying attention, I think I was talking to someone, well whatever I was doing I missed the count but got in within a second of everyone else. Oh and I was wearing the rash guard so I could dive in and not worry about my suit coming down, not to keep me warm.

I originally thought I would swim with my head in the water because you swim faster than if you doggy paddle, I was totally wrong once I dove in and my head was under I knew that wasn't going to happen. In this picture again look to the far side of the pool but that is me on the return trip (Katie is nest to me and a little behind me).

It was a strange feeling, I could feel my muscle control slowly leaving me and it got harder and harder to move my arms and legs. Getting out of the pool was a little difficult my arms did not want to work to pull me out, but as soon as I was out I was pretty warm or at least numb enough that I didn't feel cold anymore. So finally our victorious picture, I look weird but that's ok. So we went over got a shirts and jumped into the hot tub. So that was the Polar Swim cold but worth it.