Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival 2024 race report.
Sometimes you hear about an event, and you think "that sounds amazing, and I want to do that." That was Trista and the Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival.
Sometimes you hear about an event, and you think "that sounds truly miserable and I never want to do that." That's.. most people, probably, when they hear about the Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival.
And then sometimes, one of those people who desperately wants to do it reaches out to you to ask if you're interested, and it's not a bucket list item for you, but it also doesn't repel you, and you know you'll have massive FOMO if you don't join... and that's me and the Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival.
I had to dig back through my chat history to figure out exactly how this whole dumb idea started. I mean, I knew it started with Trista, so I could target my search to just conversations with her. I didn't remember until the searching, though, that she first mentioned the concept of this Vermont ice swim to me on 7/7/2019. So long ago! We were making travel plans for the upcoming Swimrun Tennessee in the same conversation! So five years ago, she planted the seed with "I found our next event", and a link to the Memphremagog Winter Swimming Festival webpage.
We had a brief conversation where I said I doubted my ability to "qualify" and then subsequently survive, but that I was obviously totally in. To "qualify" for the 25m events at Memphremagog, you have to prove you can do a 25m swim in water 41 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. I live in Texas, no water here gets below 50 even in the deadest of winter. I had no experience cold water swimming. I had no experience or even interest in cold plunging. But I had a deep and vested interest in new and stupid experiences with friends.
But then life happened and that conversation got tabled, and it didn't seriously come up again until mid April 2023. At which point Trista said she was absolutely doing it in 2024, and she wanted me to do it with her. Sold.
Clearly it was meant to be, because right around that same time, our friend Carrie interviewed Adina O'Neill for her podcast, I Could Never Do That, and the interview talked a lot about Memphremagog. Knowing someone who knew someone who had just done it for the first time made it seem more real and achievable.
At that point, we had more cold water experience. Trista had been doing cold plunges. We had done several swimruns where the water and/or air was pretty damn cold, including the infamous Swimrun NC 2021 where we had understood the lake water to be in the low 60s, but in reality I believe it was in the upper 40s. Surprise! And so we felt confident we could live through.. well, at least registering for it. And hope we could live through the event itself.
To "qualify", and just do a proof of concept, we did a Rockman training weekend in Colorado, which included 3 swims in Twin Lakes, where the water was in the 40s. It was cold, but we survived and actually felt really good about our ability to swim in just a bathing suit in really cold water.
Trista said "I'm so stupidly excited about this dumb thing that's pushing our dumbthings boundary."
So, what IS this event? In Newport, Vermont, in mid February, they cut a 25m long, 2 lane wide, hole in the ice of the frozen Lake Memphremagog, and then they hold a swim meet there. Ice swimming. A perfectly sane thing to do.
I will say, to our credit, surprisingly, we did actually ease in. We were SO unsure how our bodies and minds would react to this, we started small and smart. "Smart." We signed up for 3 events, one on each day of the meet, and each 25m long. There are 50m, 100m, and 200m options, so we could have been MUCH dumber, but evidently we do have SOME self-preservation skills sometimes.
The first event would be the beloved and infamous Hat Competition on day 1, which I'm fairly sure is the event that sold Trista on the whole concept of this ice swim meet. It's exactly what it says on the tin: you swim 25m wearing a hat, and then they decide who has the best hat.
Day 2 would be a basic 25m freestyle.
Day 3 was relay day. The main relay is 4x50m freestyle, but if you are a first-timer to the event, you can do the Virgin Relay with 3 other first-timers, 4x25m freestyle, which is what we signed up for.
Which meant we had to find two other suckers!
It turns out it's not super easy to find people who want to swim in an icehole in Vermont in February. Who knew?
But we clearly are friends with a lot of people who like dumb ideas, so we very quickly enlisted Meredith to join our weekend and our relay. For our fourth, we went through a couple different people who were maybe interested, but ultimately couldn't make it work, until we found Katie who Trista and Meredith know from Masters, and who is a super speedy marathon swimmer. Perfect!
Matt was planning on going with us, but hadn't really made a decision on whether or not to swim, and then Orcas Island happened. Fortunately his recovery and PT went really well, and he was back to swimming in time to decide that short swims in a hole in the ice in Vermont sounded like a fabulous idea.
And so I made my first visit to the fine state of Vermont!
It was ~85 degrees in Austin the day we flew to Vermont. There was snow on the ground when we arrived in Burlington.
Day 1
Day 1, Friday, was the hat competition. Trista and her daughter had this adorable idea involving cloud hats and a rainbow arch of balloons that would connect us as we swam side by side. They crafted the cloud hats, which were in fact adorable, but as we tried to figure out the best way to achieve a rainbow arch of balloons that could travel safely on a plane, Trista discovered that someone had made almost identical hats just last year, and so we pivoted at the last minute.
To gnomes!
Gnomes ended up being our theme for the whole weekend. It started with the suits. I wore a Splish suit with a unicorn and a gnome on the butt for the Colin's Hope 10k many years ago, and that suit was a big hit. We decided for our relay to all buy and wear that suit, and then also buy gnome hoodies, and name our relay team Chillin' With My Gnomies, and it sort of spiraled out of control. In the best way.
Which meant Trista had acquired supplies that allowed us to all dress as gnomes for the hat competition. Katie wasn't flying in until later Friday, so Trista, Meredith, Matt and I all gnomed up and swam together.
There's two lanes in the pool, and so generally two swimmers swimming at any time, and when you register for an event, you can choose the person who swims at the same time as you, if you have such a person. Trista and I were going to do the hat competition together. We also asked if maybe all four of us could swim at the same time for the hat competition, but they said we couldn't. BUT once we got out there, they said that was fine!
We were QUITE a spectacle. Sure, there were some amazing hats out there. Just stellar craftsmanship, so much creativity, some were HUGE and improbable. Ours weren't that. But what we lacked in crafting, we made up for in general popularity! We just looked completely absurd, and we loved it, and others loved it, and we couldn't stop laughing the whole time.
All the weekend festivities were at a local restaurant on the lake, and we showed up Friday morning, at a perfectly reasonable time (yay, short and relatively small event in a really cold place, you don't have to start the event at 6am!), checked in, scoped out the lake, the pool, the warming house, and then sat around taking pictures and chatting with strangers and new friends and generally being very nervous. We really had NO idea how terrible this might or might not be. Could we even swim when it was that cold? Could we do it in full gnome regalia? We were excited to find out!
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They posted a list of rough times for each swimmer/group, and when it got close to our time, we wandered up to the front door and milled around until they called our names. We clumped up together, deciding to leave our bags of warm clothes in the restaurant and retrieve them afterward. We didn't really understand how the warm clothes part was supposed to work, and we ended up altering our plan over the course of the weekend, but for this one, we just left them in the restaurant tucked under a table, with a plan to come collect them after.
We were wearing:
- Unicorn/gnome swim suit (except Matt who was wearing a very cute obnoxious pair of swim shorts he bought at REI in Burlington, after having realized on the plane to Burlington that he was on a plane to a swim meet and the one thing he had forgotten was a swim suit)
- Fur-lined Crocs (for ease and warmth) with Yaktrax (for traction on the ice)
- Swim parka (I ended up buying an OTILLO-branded DryRobe, which was expensive, and also super complicated, because you can't buy the OTILLO one in the US and have it shipped to a US address, so my favorite britfriend Alex let me have it shipped to him, then he shipped it to me, making it even MORE expensive. Also SO WORTH IT. So happy with my purchase)
- Pointy gnome hat
- Gold sunglasses
- Gold chains
- Fake beards
With all that in place, we walked down the sketchy ramp to the frozen lake, met up with our escorts who walked us over to the icehole, we split into two groups, with Matt and me going south and Trista and Meredith going north, and we walked down to the far end of the pool.
It was really surreal walking by a swimming lane cut into a frozen lake, with icy sides, and realizing you're about to take off most of your clothes and get in there.
But fortunately, the volunteers are amazing out there, and they prioritize efficiently getting you to the water, getting you stripped down at the very last minute, safely into the water. When you take off your parka and shoes, they take them from you in a laundry basket, and then while you're swimming, they take that basket down to the other end, and when you get out, they're right there to immediately put your parka and shoes back on, so there's very little time you're just standing around wet and freezing.
So we threw off our warm stuff, before we could even ponder what we were doing, we navigated the 2x4 ladder into the water, we stood on the platform in the water until all four of us were there and ready to go, and then Race Director Phil (in the sombrero) said "Swimmers, swim for your lives!", and four gnomes started swimming across the freezing pool!
And it really wasn't that terrible. I mean, it helps that our faces were very warm, because we had beards on. Also it's very hard to swim with a fake beard which is immediately soaking wet. Every few strokes, I'd have to adjust mine so it didn't fall down.
I'd thought we'd have two of us side by side, then the next two side by side behind, but we somehow managed to cram all four of us side by side. Which was fun and also crowded when everyone is doing breaststroke.
Well, almost everyone. Meredith took Phil's words a little too literally, and immediately started doing front crawl, Tarzan-style, full speed. She was pulling ahead of us as we leisurely gnomestroked, until Trista yelled, "Meredith! We're doing breaststroke!" And she fell back a little bit to be with us.
It was .. just so absurd. It went by really quickly, and we were laughing the whole time, and yes, it was cold, but that was just a side note in a ridiculous scenario.
When we got down to the other end, we gathered up for pictures of our whole gnomegang, and then Meredith IMMEDIATELY bolted out of the pool. We suited back up in parkas and Crocs and trudged our way back across the ice and up the ramp, laughing and yelling and videoing and generally feeling somewhat drunk and very happy.
We'd done it! We'd proved we could swim in water that cold, and theoretically, since we were doing breaststroke in gnome costumes, the other swims should go faster and we'd be in there less time. Of course, we'd also have to actually put our FACES in the water next time. Though.. a lot of people didn't. Plenty of people swam Tarzan-style the whole time for every swim they did. However you need to get through it.
We ducked into the restaurant to get our bags, then into the marina building, where they had chairs with buckets of warm water for our feet, and microwave rice bags to hold or put wherever you needed warmth. Once we warmed up enough, we got out of our wet clothes and back into dry, warm clothes, and then we were done swimming for the day!
It was still pretty early in the day, and we had rented snowshoes when we arrived on Thursday, hoping to get some adventuring in between swims. Unfortunately it's been really warm and not all that snowy in Vermont, so there just wasn't a ton of snow to shoe in. I mean, there was a lot of snow around, but it was patchy and short and we didn't know where to go. We thought about driving back into the mountains a bit where there was more snow, BUT.. then we came up with an even better plan.
Trista has been wanting to do a sled dog adventure for a lot of years now, but they also fill up really early, so by the time she tries, there's no availability. Which was true when she reached out to Huskies in the Kingdom in Newport. BUT they said that with so little snow, and it being so (relatively) warm, they might have to cancel the tours for Friday, and if they did, we could come by and pet the dogs. And that's what we ended up doing!
It was amazing and magical and there were 5 month old puppies who needed socialization, and we generously helped with that project.
Day 2
Day 2 was the 25m freestyle event, which all five of us were doing (Katie arrived late Friday night), and then also the 50m freestyle, which only Katie was doing.
On the plus side, we knew we could handle the water temps after day 1! What we didn't know was whether we could handle the air temps.
Sled dog tours were canceled on Friday because it got up into the upper 30s for air temp, and so the snow melted even more.
On Saturday, a front blew in, and the low was around 5, the high maybe 15, with a fierce wind bringing the wind chill down to "oh no help". Walking on the ice to and from the pool in mid 30s and sunny wasn't terrible. With temps as cold as Saturday's, it became a lot more important to keep your body as covered as possible, and maximize efficiency on getting into and out of the pool.
Not gonna lie, we were glad to have a day of extra challenging, because it makes a better story afterward.
And honestly it wasn't bad. Actually, it was a little less scary, because when it's above freezing, the sides of the pool melt, and they caution you not to stand in too big a group poolside. With temps like Saturday's, you feel less like you might just break through the ice into the lake. I mean, accidentally.
Aside from the colder temps and wind, and the lack of gnome accoutrement, it was very similar to the Friday experience. Trista and I had requested to swim together, but nobody else had specified, so everyone else got paired with random strangers, and Trista and I got to go down to the water together again.
Once again, it's such an efficient process, it feels like you walk carefully down the ramp, and then you blink and you're walking back up the ramp.
It was interesting, because you're not allowed to go fully underwater, so no pushing off the "wall" in a streamline. The wall is some 2x4s. You are required to have one hand on the wall until they say go. Then we both just starting swimming with no push.
One thing I hadn't thought about is.. you have to sight. It feels like a pool swim because it's the length of a pool and shaped like a pool, but there's no line, no visibility, and it's super easy to get disoriented, so you have to lift your head completely out of the water to see where you are.
They also gave us MANY warnings to be careful and avoid touching the lane line. If you hit any body part against anything out there, you're going to end up bleeding. It's really unnerving to watch people swimming, because so many people weave around and get up right next to the lane line. But we survived, and Trista predictably kicked my ass, and then we were done with our day 2 swim!
We were smarter on day 2, and left our bags at the top of the ramp off to the side, so we could just pluck them up on the way to the warming hut.
It was definitely harder to get warm on day 2, with the lower outdoor temps. My fingers were burning as we sat with our feet in the buckets, which definitely hadn't happened on day 1.
We sat around chatting while Katie warmed up enough to then get BACK in the water for her 50, which I think we were honestly all jealous of. It was super fun to get to watch her swim and cheer from the ice.
Then a giant group photo out on the ice, which.. again, glad the temps were so low on Saturday for the group pic, or the ice might not have held us all.
Our airbnb was just down the road, so after the group pic, we went back to the house to shower, warm up, throw suits and Crocs into the dryer (do not recommend the latter), and then re-suit-up for the pajama happy hour and contest!
We were all in for the pajama contest. And, spoiler, we found out at the after party on day 3 that we won the pajama contest! So it was worth the fact that my roller bag was completely full from just my DryRobe and my gnome onesie, and I couldn't really bring much else to Vermont.
Day 3
Last day = relay day!
Well, Trista and I started out with a little run/slide/hike along the trail outside our airbnb, because we might as well take full advantage of this snow and ice and the Yaktrax we brought.
Matt had actually registered for 25m fly on day 3, which is a whole story in itself, but was having some shoulder pain in both shoulders by that point in the weekend, and opted to be smart and just spectate on day 3. Built-in videographer!
I was on the swimteam as a kid, and swam Masters various times and places in the last decade, and yet somehow never realized that "freestyle" means "any stroke".
When that was pointed out to me, I began to firmly champion doing our 4x25m freestyle relay as butterfly instead of front crawl. Obviously the reason I assumed freestyle meant front crawl was because any sane person, if their goal was to go as fast as possible, is probably going to choose front crawl.
But we are not sane people.
And so we decided to do our freestyle relay as 4x25m butterfly.
Because why try to win for time when you can instead try to win for ridiculous.
We weren't sure our bodies would actually DO fly in freezing water, but ultimately we nailed it.
The relay was just as much frantic fun as the other two events we'd done, but with an extra layer of chaos.
We had done a lot of negotiating as to who would go when, for various reasons, and ultimately settled on Trista, Meredith, Amy, Katie. There was a lot riding on Trista, because if she couldn't make her body do fly, our whole fly relay was out the window. But again.. nailed it.
The volunteers held the next swimmers back from disrobing and getting in the water until the swimmer coming in was VERY close, and for good reason, but that meant you had to strip, navigate the ice, navigate the icy 2x4s, get in the water, and figure out which side your swimmer wasn't coming in on, and get to the other side before they got to the wall. And then actually convince yourself to put your face in that water once they touched the wall. And do butterfly. From standing in shallowish water, no push-off. But just like all the other swims, it all happens so fast, you don't even have time to wonder what to do next. It just happens.
Trista handed off to Meredith.
Meredith handed off to me.
I managed to swim 25m of something mostly recognizable as butterfly (ignore the fact that my feet were apart, that's just how my body is built, and I have to REALLY concentrate to bring them closer together, and I absolutely was not at that moment).
I didn't hit the lane line or the ice. I didn't hit Katie.
And then she swam our final 25m to finish out the relay.
We didn't win, obviously, but we absolutely had more ridiculous fun.
Once we were all out, we gathered up for hugs and photos. This was another "warmer" day, so instead of rushing back inside, we posed for many photos.
Including some now-famous gnome-butt photos.
It was such a fun way to end such a fun weekend, and I adored the whole concept. I expected to like it. I didn't expect to love it.
The only thing I didn't love is that we didn't do it ALL. 3x25m was definitely not enough. Was it smart for the first year? Absolutely. But we don't aim for smart. We aim for maximal stupidity.
Which is why we're going back next year to do the 50m.
And the 100m
And the 200m.
And then 4x50 relay. Will we do it fly? Odds seem high, don't they?
I'm also hoping for more snow next year. And maybe actively snowing during the swims.. ?
Come join us in 2025!
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