Cold-Blooded Shooter

摘要

I was perusing the delightful stories in this, our october issue, when I came across a paragraph that froze the very blood in my veins:rn"It was the most frightening thing I could imagine," he told me. "You can't see a thing. It's like diving into a dark black nothingness. You get that sense of nothingness, of absolutely nothing underneath you."rnI immediately called in Patrick Cooke, our executive editor, and gave him what-for.rn"See here, Cooke," I said, gesticulating with my letter opener (that usually puts him on the defensive), "this is a luxury lifestyle magazine we're running, not the Navy SEAL training manual. Are you trying to frighten our readers? What were you thinking, man?"rnPatrick disarmed me of my letter opener and calmed me down by explaining that it was another excellent article by regular contributor Todd Pitock, about a fellow named Lewis Gordon Pugh, the world's premier cold-water swimmer. Last July, Mr. Pugh rode an icebreaker to the Geographic North Pole and, wearing nothing more than a Speedo swimsuit, cap and goggles, jumped into a pool through a crack in the Artie ice. The water temperature was 28.7 degrees Fahrenheit. He swam one kilometer in 18 minutes 50 seconds setting the mark for lowest temperature swim on record. You already know what it felt like from having read the above quotation.