Today was undoubtedly the last opportunity to swim in cold water – due to the skiing season getting underway and the man made lakes being due to be emptied for the winter. The temperature registered minus 1.9 degrees centigrade on my Infra Red sensor – but that seems highly unlikely. I’d guess that zero is more like the reality. The ground next to the lake was still white with frost even in late afternoon. I’m now sure that this is my limit because large areas of skin have experience an Ice Burn almost identical to a sun burn in feeling. My nose also ran for about 12 hours after I stopped shivering – so I wouldn’t want to push things further than this. All the same there was no difficulty staying in the water and I could have remained longer. Doing the crawl with the head submerged was challenging and encouraged me to stop at just about the right moment. I need to find out about how to protect the skin now and whether or not it can adapt as well as the nervous system adapting and brown fat being generated. There was no shivering until leaving the water but the force of the shivering to generate body heat shows that brown fat is still in short supply here! 
