As she dips her toe in the outdoor pool at Tooting Bec Lido in South London, Nancy Douglas is a little concerned about the temperature. “We’re hoping it’s going to get colder,” she says, “down to about 3C. Right now, after the mild winter we’ve had, it’s 7C.”

Douglas hasn’t lost her mind – though there are admittedly few other swimmers in the water this crisp January morning – but, as vice-captain of the South London Swimming Club, she will this week be hosting the 2008 World Winter Swimming Championships. This is the first time the event has taken place outside Finland and, she says, she’s keen to “make it a challenge”.

The championships, which take place every other year, began in 2000 as a way of promoting Finnish ice swimming and were an immediate hit, with more than 1,000 pink-skinned competitors – mostly Finns – braving the near-freezing temperatures. The move to the UK has led to a fall in the number of entries but an increase in the event’s international appeal, with more than 600 competitors from 21 countries expected to descend on Tooting over the weekend.

Despite their size, the games have managed to retain their sense of eccentricity. Forget hard-fought lengths timed to the millisecond. The main event will be a single (30m) width of Tooting Bec’s pool, swum as a “head-up” breaststroke.

Entering for the first time this year is Kate Rew, a London-based writer who founded the UK’s Outdoor Swimming Society. “I’m a bit of a softy really,” she says. “I’m always feeling the cold. But it’s a case of mind over matter and, once you are in, there is this amazing rush as your body’s heating starts kicking in. As far as the race goes, I have no idea what my time is. It’s a just a case of entering the water without screaming.”

While Rew, at 38, is a relative newcomer to the joys of “wild swimming”, as she likes to call it, Douglas started her cold-water career at the age of 12, when she jumped into the water at Liverpool Docks on Boxing Day (“It was intensely terrifying,” she says). And now, aged 27, she can barely keep on dry land.

“I love it. If there’s water I’ll generally be swimming in it.” As well as the head-up breaststroke (in which, one suspects, she will clock up a faster time than Rew), Douglas is entering the front crawl race (60m), a 4 x 30m relay and an invitation-only endurance swim, and will most likely be part of a synchronised swimming display on Sunday afternoon (“Crazy costumes and hilarious hats” strictly encouraged, say the rules).

But for most people it is the simple pleasure of swimming out of doors that attracts them. “There’s a sense of freedom, a little escape from the urban life,” says Martin Scott, a retired computer consultant, who swims three times a week in Highgate Ponds in North London – and who, at 66, is far from the oldest entrant this year. “It’s refreshing, it’s a social leveller and you get a great sense of exhilaration afterwards,” he says.

Douglas agrees, though she is still a little anxious about Britain’s balmy winter. “Last time we swam in Finland at 0.4C,” she says. “It was so cold they had to keep pumping air into the water to stop it freezing. Now that was amazing.”

World Winter Swimming Championships, February 9-10, Tooting Bec Lido, London SW16; 07985 141532;
www.slsc.org.uk/wwsc2008; www.outdoorswimmingsociety.com

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