J.B. Lanza has searched hard for the one thing she could be great at. When she started swimming in icy water, she found it.
In Lynn, an ice swimming prodigy emerges
J.B. Lanza has searched hard for the one thing she could be great at. When she started swimming in icy water, she found it.
By Billy Baker Globe Staff,Updated January 17, 2024, 4:08 p.m.
Ice floated on the
surface of the roughly 34 degree water inside the tub that J.B. Lanza
soaked in for over 20 minutes as part of her training to do mile-long
swims in icy water.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
LYNN – J.B.
Lanza placed the meat cleaver on the ground and stepped between the ice
sheets now floating atop the tub alongside her house. She’s got a
system now, and that includes reminding herself when she gets out not to
touch the aluminum siding or she’ll stick to it.
She
takes a seat in the 34-degree water, and if her breathing changes in
any way you can’t see it. She settles in until the top of her bathing
suit straps goes below the water. Her hands go in. The timer is on. And
now she’s ready for the one and only question, which is why?
This
has been the hardest one for the 39-year-old to answer the last couple
years as she has rapidly established herself as a force in the world of
cold-water tolerance. Last winter she swam her first ice mile. That’s a
mile swim in water below 41 degrees, and ice milers describe the experience with variations of the word “traumatic.” To keep from breaking their teeth while shivering, some wear mouth guards.
Ice floated on the surface of the roughly 34 degree water as J.B. Lanza got into a tub to soak for over 20 minutes.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Her
first ice mile took Lanza 36 minutes. She has never been a fast
swimmer. But she was surprisingly OK during her swim. More than OK. By
the next day, she said she wanted to do it again. Like right then. It
was kind of a joke, but kind of not, and if her support crew had been
available again she might have gone for it.
A few weeks later, she did just that, and became only the second documented person to swim an ice mile on back-to-back days.
After 2:00 in the tub:
“That reset people talk about with cold water, I don’t seem to get
that,” Lanza says as she mentions for the first time that her hands are
cold.
“The
only explanation is that I think I’m good at it. I train for it, yes,
but I’ve trained just as hard to run and bike and not gotten any better.
For this, I think I have a natural ability,” she says.
She
is not alone in this thinking. When Lanza, an accounts manager who
works in scientific research and development, started swimming with
South Boston’slegendary L Street Ice Swimmers in 2021, it was
unmistakable. “She doesn’t get cold. I don’t know how else to say it,”
said Polly Madding, who was one of the first to notice. “Looking at how
long she could stay in, and how much she didn’t shiver, I remember
thinking she could do an ice mile with very little training.”
Two thermometers reflected the temperature as J.B. Lanza trained in an ice bath on her porch.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
But
she did train. Her current schedule includes ice baths two to three
times a week, long pool swims, and ocean swims at least once a week.
That includes several 2 kilometer swims (that’s more than a mile)in water approaching “ice” temperatures.
8:00:
“It takes my face 100-plus yards to acclimate,” Lanza says. “That’s the
hardest part. You’re trying to regulate your breathing when your body
thinks you’re trying to panic. After that I’m fine.”
15:00:
“Now I’ve hit it. I’m super warm. This happens around eight minutes in
when I’m swimming.” It’s one of the reasons she likes swimming more.
Sitting, she says, is definitely harder.
17:00:
Her jaw shows the first signs of trembling. Her words pick up the hint
of a slur, akin to someone on their third beer. Maybe fourth.
Let’s talk about the Ice7s, which was why she flew to Africa on Jan. 13.
It
will be her 20th country, Morocco. She got the travel bug from her
parents. In her living room, she has a globe on which they outlined in
yarn the route they took on their first trip around the world. The Ice7s
combine these two stories, an ice mile on each continent.
21:00: “My hands just went from cold to warm again,” she reports.
23:00: “My hands are back to cold. I think I can push this to 25:00.”
Lanza headed back inside after training in an ice bath on her porch.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
In
Morocco, she will make her swim in a mountain lake, but temperatures
have not been great, so she will spend the next week searching the
country for water that is 41 degrees or colder, the cutoff to qualify as
ice water under the rules of the International Ice Swimming Association.She worries she’ll have to go too high in altitude to find it, adding a huge layer to the act of swimming that long.
25:00:
She gets out of the tub, remembers not to touch the aluminum siding,
slides on a robe and slippers — moving slowly as she drags a cover over
the tub. She is in no rush to get anywhere warm. It is not her style to
hop in a hot shower immediately.
In
her living room, as she slowly thawed for about 10 minutes, she felt a
small wave of painful “afterdrop,” when the core temperature drops
suddenly during the warming process. “I can hear it in my voice,” she
said, as a high-frequency shiver ran through her.
But
like everything else when it comes to the cold and J.B. Lanza, it
passed quickly. Eventually, she said goodbye to a reporter to hop in the
shower.
A
few days later, after thinking more about his question of why, she sat
down and wrote out a more thorough answer. Sure, it was still about
being instinctively strong at something others instinctually flee from.
But it was also because when she first started swimming with the L
Street crew, she was blown away by the accomplishments of those around
her, where everywhere she looked there were swimmers who had knocked off
some of the most epic open-water swims around the world, especially
swims in the cold.
“I
was swimming alongside these world-class super humans,” she wrote. “I
could only dream that maybe someday down the line someone would look me
up and have the same reaction.”
LYNN
— Neighbors glanced as JB Lanza — the ninth Massachusetts resident,
53rd American and 475th person to swim a mile in ice-cold water — sat in
an ice-water tub on her front porch and discussed her highly unique,
and extremely cool, sport of choice.
On Dec. 3, Lanza, who works
as an organic chemist in Boston, drove out to Ohio Street Beach in
Chicago, Illinois to swim a mile in 3.19 degree Celsius (about 38 degree
Fahrenheit) water. Lanza has always been a swimmer. In 2019, she
planned to take on a triathlon. It was after finding an open-water
swimmers group on Facebook that Lanza discovered the L Street Ice
Swimmers, a subset of year-round, hardcore swimmers, many of whom are
from New England.
“They are amazing swimmers, and they swim all
year round in just a bathing suit. Some people will wear neoprene gloves
or booties — especially if it’s really low tide and you’re walking in,
the shells sometimes will cut your feet, and if they get numb, you can’t
feel that you’ve been cut,” Lanza said.
In October 2019, Lanza
took her first cold water swim with the L Street Ice Swimmers at Nahant
Beach. At first, she seriously regretted the decision, but by the end of
the swim, she said that the experience had become much more bearable.
“October
the first year, I remember going to Nahant Beach, still in a wetsuit,
and my face was just bitter cold and I was like, ‘This is going to be my
last swim,’ and then within three or four minutes, my face wasn’t cold
anymore,” Lanza said.
Within a year, Lanza, who initially thought
it was crazy to swim in ice-cold water without a wetsuit, became one of the
pack. She said that by ‘swimming down the season,’ from early fall into
the winter, she acclimates her body to withstand extremely cold
temperatures.
Competing in an International Ice Swimming
Association (IISA) ice mile requires an observer — for safety and
statistical reasons — along with a 1 kilometer qualifier swim, and an
EKG test. Lanza said that by early last summer, she had decided she
wanted to swim an ice mile this winter.
“At the beginning of the
summer, I kept asking, ‘Is anyone in our area a certified observer?’ [I
was] trying to find out, and no one was, unfortunately, so I started
doing a little more research and then decided this summer that I was
going to do one this winter. The question was: Was I going to do it at
the beginning of the winter or the end of the winter season?”
From
the late fall until her Dec. 3 plunge, Lanza trained extensively,
swimming with U.S. Masters, an adult competitive swimming training
organization. In November, Lanza caught COVID-19 at a swimming event.
She was halfway through the fall season but couldn’t leave her house for
four days — yet still had to acclimate her body to cold water. She sat
in her ice-water tub for her initial quarantine period, and then another
week late in November after a COVID resurgence. Frozen with ice cubes,
and, some days, dry ice from her chemistry job, she sat in her ice tub
every day for about two weeks prior to her Chicago trip.
“I moved
it out here and overnight and it would frost, and then I’d add ice
cubes, or I’d freeze some old Greek yogurt cups — like the big Greek
yogurt containers. Sometimes I might snag some dry ice from work on some
of the warmer nights,” Lanza said.
While some might find it
intriguing to swim with little-to-no protection in bone-chilling
temperatures in the middle of winter, Lanza warned that there are
serious risks associated with the sport.
“Either you’ll have some
type of physical impairment sometime afterwards where, you know, your
hands are nearly frostbitten, or your toes, where you have trouble
walking because your feet are bending. There’s also mental impairment,
because sometimes your brain will just kind of start to go, and things
will go fuzzy. That’s usually what people are more worried about,” she
said.
One Christmas morning, Lanza, who had spent the night prior
at her sister’s warm home, went for an ice swim, and, on her way back to
a friend’s house, experienced some frightening symptoms.
“It was
this really weird tunnel vision,” Lanza said. “ I got in the car because
we were driving them to our friend’s house who lives down the street
from one of the places we were swimming … all of a sudden in the car I
started shaking, and then don’t remember driving all the way to the
friend’s house, which is maybe quarter of a mile from there. I remember
parking and seeing someone else get out of a car in front and walking up
the stairs to the house that I parked in front of and I just followed
them.”
Lanza said that although the experience was frightening,
she believes it was brought on by a lack of sleep and the fact that she
had slept in a warm environment the night before. She said that she now
avoids alternating temperatures and has not experienced similar symptoms
since.
Ice swimming, Lanza said, is not a sport that someone can
simply plunge into — it requires at least a full season of acclimation
and gradual training to ensure the swimmer’s safety.
Lanza’s next
feat will be to become the third American and fourth person to complete
an “Ice Sevens” challenge, in which a swimmer swims one ice mile on each
continent with at least one of the mile-long swims in water that is
less than zero degrees Celsius. In January, if the water’s cold enough,
Lanza plans to head to England to make her first European ice mile swim.
“So
I’m hoping to go to England in January to do my second ice mile to get
my European one out of the way,” Lanza said. “ It’s a really cool sport.
I think as long as you make sure that you know what you’re doing, and
you’re talking to someone who knows what they’re doing to mentor you,
it’s a great time.”
Anthony Cammalleri is the Daily Item's Swampscott and Nahant News
Reporter. He wrote for Performer Magazine from 2016 until 2018 and has
been published in the Boston Globe, and Westford Community Access
Television News.
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