Putting the "Brrr" Back in Dumb

Last summer, at the end of August, I plunged myself into Lake Superior for about ten seconds. I thought that was a medium-good display of sisu. It wasn't, compared to the World Winter Swimming Championships in Finland. One key fact: it's outdoors.

It took chainsaws and cranes to cut through and remove the three-foot-thick ice on Finland’s frozen Oulu River in order to create an eight-lane, 82-foot-long swimming pool for Sunday’s World Winter Swimming Championships in Finland. Then race coordinators had to heat up the 32-degree Fahrenheit water just enough before the events so that the river didn’t freeze over during competition.