It`s just before 7 a.m. and I`m at an outdoor swimming pool in London, where the temperature of the water is only 11 degrees above freezing. Amazingly, there are already eight people swimming.

I had intended to discover, by taking a swim myself, why anyone would want to swim in such cold water. However, in the end, I decided to ask people instead. Peter Smith has been a swimmer here for three years, coming every morning before work. It`s wonderful on a cold winter morning he says. Ì thought it would make me healthier and I haven`t been ill once since I started`.

All the swimmers here say the same thing. They all feel filter. However, not everyone agrees with them. Some doctors say it helps fight illness, while others say it could be dangerous, especially for you heart.

I asked Peter what they did on the days when the pool was frozen. That`s easy he said. There`s a place in the middle where the ice is thin and easy to break. You have to avoid the sides where the ice is thicker. I did try to swim there once just to see what it was like, but found that it was impossible to break through the ice.
I would like to be able to say that I too dived happily into the water and swam a couple of hundred metres. But the truth is, fearing the worst, I walked very carefully into the pool, stood there almost in shock and then got out again after 30 seconds before I became a block of ice.