OPEN WATER HEROES BREAKING
In 2007 Lewis Gordon Pugh became the first man to swim a kilometre at the North Pole. But how did he do it? And why? Sarah Warwick went in search of the truth behind the headlines…
What’s the coldest water you’ve ever swum in? 15ºC? 11? 5? 0.1? How about -1.7 degrees Centigrade? No? The fact is you
probably haven’t swum in water below zero for two big reasons: fi rst, water is usually frozen at this temperature, and second, most people would die aſt er being exposed to water of such frigidity for any amount of time. When the explorer Ranulph Fiennes fell into water of similar temperature back in 2000 – for just a couple of minutes – his fi ngertips froze so badly and were so painful that he got a hacksaw and sawed them off . It seems remarkable, then – if not ut er madness – that in 2007 swimmer and environmental activist Lewis Gordon Pugh went for a swim in the North Pole. Aſt er managing to complete his bonkers goal of a kilometre of front crawl in minus 1.7 degree water, Pugh is in the near-unique position of being able to say what water this cold feels like. “It’s f****** freezing,” he tells me, and an audience of a thousand- odd, in a speech about his cold-water exploits to the Royal Geographical Society earlier this year. “You are on fi re, and the cold goes all through your muscles and into your bones… the water freezes the cells in your fi ngers which swell until they burst. I couldn’t feel my fi ngers for four months aſt erwards.” So, what was it that made a seemingly sane man – recipient of degrees from Cambridge and the University of Cape Town, and a successful maritime lawyer – give up his career to pursue marathon swimming in some of the most extreme conditions on earth? What was it that made it worth risking his fi ngertips, his life savings and even his life?
“I am doing what I am doing because this is what I am supposed to be doing with my life,” he tells me. “I realised that it was fundamentally wrong for us to live our lives with the knowledge of climate change without doing something to change it. It needs to be there for our children and grandchildren. We need justice between generations.” In some respects Pugh speaks like a politician: his gestures fi rm yet economic and his speech, which has a gentle South African lilt, is full of rhetoric and humour. His voice sounds as if it issues from the depths of his considerable convictions. He looks like a politician too: his handsome, aquiline features and steely gaze might be those of a president or multinational CEO, except that his tall fi gure has no hint of the campaign- trail paunch or boardroom bloat about it. His is a body of action: long, lean and with imposing shoulders born of a thousand crawl strokes. His journey to the Arctic started with his father, who taught him
a love of nature. “He told me something simple yet profound that I have always remembered,” Pugh says. “’You will only ever protect what you love.’” Moving to South Africa for his father’s army career when he
was 10, Lewis remembers the excitement of being surrounded by elephants aſt er encountering nothing wilder than sheep, and of happy family days exploring the national parks. His childhood in South Africa was also where Pugh learned to swim. A comparatively late starter, he says he had his “fi rst proper lesson at 17”, but within a month had completed the 7.5km swim from Cape Town to Robben Island. His delayed entrance to the swimming world meant that it was an incredible learning curve that he traversed to complete a successful Channel crossing in 1992, at the age of 22.
THE WATER WAS SO COLD I COULDN’T FEEL MY FINGERS FOR FOUR MONTHS AFTERWARDS
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