Mario Vittone

It's interesting they only focus on the cold shower. I would have thought it would be short and barely give you enough time to get over the initial shock(cold shock response) - around a minute or so when the gag reflex hits and what would potentially drown you in open water. After that shock, things change.

My personal experience is with swimming in the sea year round for 3 to 4 years. 2 to 3 times a week every week. I started in August to help acclimatise to the change in the temperature as it cooled. Temperature ranges from 18C in August to 4C in early March, give or take.

The effects were great over all and I thought I was healthier for it. I understand the tightening of the muscle which some of the others mentioned as an experience. I got used to this and it seemed to relax me. I never really got the tight muscles thing except afterwards when I kind of wanted to tighten up.

I would walk in at a reasonable pace. As others have said, with a meditative feeling. Once fully emerged and the shock had passed I could swim for a maximum of around 5 to 10 minutes at the coldest part of the year. Sometimes it was more a splash around for as long as I could stand it. I generally stopped and got out when my wrists started to cramp. I'm guessing the cold water would send the blood circulation internally away from the skin.

It always felt the warmest in late September early October for some reason. The coldest place I ever swam was between two San Juan islands in August!

Once out…

Arguably, there is a minimum threshold that needs to be exceeded in order to even make these evaluation

Arguably? How many separate things are there in the world that kill 5 or more people in the US each year? An awful lot. IIRC the number of people killed in newspaper related accidents in the UK is about that high.

Society only has so much attention, people only spend so much time learning about the world every day, and people only have so much capacity for worry. To the extent that we use up our worry on things that aren't important we lose the ability to worry about the things that are. I don't expect all the ink spilled on this shooting to save a single life, but if a similar amount of popular attention was devoted to teaching people what drowning really looked like it would probably save about 50 lives every year[1].

If you're going to cross the street it doesn't make sense to split your attention between looking to either side for oncoming cars and looking up for falling objects. Falling objects are very rare, and to the extent that you waste time worrying about them you're more likely to get run over.

[1]http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/

In France there is four times more deaths from suicide than deaths in a car crash. Yet we have countless cops constantly roaming around, and millions spent on automated speed cameras, in the name of a policy vowed to reduce "unacceptable" life losses, but ignores the fact that 32k people actually die here per year out of sheer helplessness and despair. Somehow I can't help but think that people up there are missing something when they keep throwing money at compressing a number resulting from statistically ineluctable collisions of numerous moving objects (whose seriousness and frequency drops could just as well be explained by combined and massive improvements made to car safety, making the policy look like even more futile), while a little education of people would actually help some of us recognize early and/or late signs of depression on third parties, allowing for professional help to be reached soon enough. Depression is a bit like drowning: it actually looks nothing like you think it does, but one can be trained to recognize it [0] and reach for competent help accordingly.

[0]: http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/

Consider this before you do.

Some time ago, I saw another article on HN that I value greatly: Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning [1]. At face value, drowning and slavery -- maybe more aptly, revolution -- don't have much to do with startup culture, but there is a more valuable lesson that is shared between them.

As entrepreneurs we are constantly on the lookout for success and failure. However, just like drowning and revolution, these successes and failures don't always look like we expect them to. Success is often the result of applying good principles, rather than setting out to succeed at a specific task. Butler possessed the ability to "feel" those around him. He knew that -- in principle, and as a practical matter -- he would need the support of his men to succeed in defending the fort. Out of those actions, great things happened.

If that isn't a lesson for entrepreneurs, I don't know what is.

1 - http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/

Interestingly, that's not because you'll get a thermal shock that will kill you. The body is surprisingly good at maintaining temperature for a while after being plunged in icy cold stuff. The problem is, it's so good at it, that it will block off the arteries to your legs and arms to stop them from leaking so much heat (better survive without limbs than die with them), and you'll drown because you can't swim. As far as hypothermia is concerned, you have about an hour before passing out due to hypothermia. But you have about 10 minutes if you're not wearing a life jacket.

http://mariovittone.com/2010/10/1-10-1/