The rules of Winter swimming

Going through the pain barrier in a 0c pool cut from ice.

 Here in the Czech Republic winter swimming is highly developed and extremely well organised with  a group of people closely involved with the sport acting as the governing body and affiliated to the Czech swimming federation. There are many specialist winter swimming clubs alongside more conventional clubs which have a specialist winter swimming section.

This organisation is complimented or maybe even pre-empted by a highly thorough and complex set of rules which is the foundation of the sport. Needless to say there are no problems regarding the length of time a swimmer can swim for, or what distance they can tackle. However, this also means that the competitions are not completely open as even an open water great such as Thomas Lurz could arrive with the intention of swimming in the 750m but if it was his first time in such an event in the Czech Republic he would be limited to competing over 250m.

I won’t explain the rules completely here and  now but  it is important to remember that while water above 8c is cold, it is not considered to be winter water, whereas when the water gets down to 4c then it is considered real winter water and thus higher performance levels can be obtained. Once you have obtained the third performance level (III) the next time you can try to achieve the second (II) and so on until you acieve the master performsnce level (M) in winter swimming.The maximum time a swimmer can spend in the water is 22 minutes. Below are some tables that should help you to understand.