Have you tried being a beginner recently?

You should

© Simon Griffiths

Think of a field in which you’re an expert. Then ask yourself, is there a subsector of this field in which you have relatively little experience? Found one? Good. Now go and have some fun with it.

Becoming a beginner again can be an enlightening and thought-provoking experience, as I found out with cold water swimming.

For most of my swimming existence, I have done my best to avoid the cold, apart from a couple of winter swimming events that I reluctantly tried for journalistic reasons. And my experience in those had convinced me that cold water was something I should leave to others — those unusual human-seal creatures who could slip into water of any temperature without the slightest shudder or gasp.

I knew plenty about the effects of cold water on your body from reading and writing about it, but I had never gone through the experiential process of acclimatisation to the extreme cold of winter swimming. All those wonderful benefits promised by cold water swimming didn’t swim worth the pain and, as I imagined it, the plain old misery of being chilled to the bone, literally. In practical terms, I was a beginner. And a nervous one, too.

But once I’d committed, I decided I had to approach winter swimming with curiosity and a willingness to put in the time…