Dear all Frozen ones:
In the past few months under the cloud of Covid19, we have been rather busy at IISA.

PLEASE Share [ country chair as well... please]

The few issues we have been busy with are the World Champ and the World cup as communicated before.

We also in the advanced stages of our new website. It will look awesome and will make everything much easier for swimmers and members. It will include easy mobile access with the ability to remain logged in (no more - forgot my password). It will also come in many languages including Russian, German, Chinese, and many more...

We also revisited our swimming rules and made several changes to grow the sport and adapt to its rapid growth. All will be incorporated into our new website and will be in effect once the website is ready. [later this year].

I will attempt to publish the changes to our rules every few days:

First changes:

IISA official distance will expand to the following
distances:
1. 1000m free
2. 500m free
3. 250m free
4. 100m free
5. 100 breast
6. 4x250m free country relay

Other distances will be allowed, however, these distances are compulsory in IISA World Champ and World Cup events.

All these distances will be recording results, world records, and world championship.

From the next world champ, all winners overall and in the age group will be awarded a Wolrd Champ title. It will be recorded in our website and swimmers Bio.

The overall winner in the World Champ 1000m will be crowned as:
IISA King of the ICE and IISA Queen of the ICE.
This will apply to national champs as well.
(E.g., IISA GB King/Queen of the ICE)

Disclaimer: these titles do not allow any royalty privileges. and do not come with a horse and carriage 🙂.

Dear Frozen ones,

A special announcement regarding
IISA 2021 World Championship in Katowice
[Please share - country and other sites]

I hope everyone is well and safe.
It has been a while since we communicated. The new world order with the Covid19 has taken precedence. We are certainly not over the crisis and although countries and borders starting to open up, the future is still unclear and not safe.

We have been doing a lot of work in the background, regardless. Board meetings and chats on Zoom. I will send updates on various rules changes, our coming new website, and future events, soon.

IISA World Champ 2021 - Katowice
-----------------------------------
After many discussions and exploration, IISA Board has decided to postpone the 2021 World Champ. We still have no clarity with regards to season 2020/2021 Ice Swimming events. We would leave this to each country to handle according to its national situation and regulations under Covid19.

Katowice and various other options we explored, couldn't commit to any such event in 2021 with the current environment. Therefore, we have decided to postpone the World Champ to January 2022 in Katowice.

The dates are 13-16 January 2022.
All things equal, we will hold the following IISA World Champ in 2023 [already in discussions] and after that in 2025.
We will announce 2021 IISA World Cup Series cities in the next few months.

Until then... be safe, be well, be kind and SEE YOU IN THE ICE

Ram Barkai

Dear all Frozen locked Down ones,
we are posting some articles from Ice Swimmers. Interesting topics and views. If anyone wished to post - please send your doctor me [just to make sure it is constructive].
Please comment and share....
Article about Ice Swimming future by Colin Bushweller

Engage, comment, be constructive....

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Embracing the Roots: Thoughts on How to Make Ice Swimming More Approachable and Accessible

Authored by: Colin Bushweller, USA

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and statements presented in this article are solely of the author, and they do not reflect or represent those of IISA or any of its governing bodies.

Author Bio: Colin Bushweller is an ice swimmer from the USA, where he holds the current one-kilometer country record in twelve minutes and forty-three seconds. Coming into the sport this year, Colin—whose previous swim background was largely middle-distance freestyle—loves the challenge, nuance, and athletic grit that comes with ice swimming. He is excited to see the sport grow in the years to come, and especially in the United States, where he believes there is an untapped pool of raw, excellent talent waiting to join the sport. Outside of swimming, he is a student at the University of Vermont. He studies Russian, political science, and public speaking, and he also conducts independent research focused on the Baltic region’s post-Soviet society.



By chance, I stumbled upon a swimmer, Chun Kong Mak, this past fall while in the Czech Republic, who introduced me to the challenging, unfamiliar world of ice swimming. I had known that this sub-community of the swimming world existed; however, I did not know it had a sizable following and, most interestingly, that it organized and sanctioned competitions with verified world and country records in several distances.

Coming off of a three-year hiatus from the traditional component of the sport, competitive ice swimming—with the unique challenge it added to the conventional side of the sport—represented everything I needed to re-energize my interest and love for swimming. And it did exactly that. Having traveled around and competed in several competitions, I am definitely hooked on it: it’s invigorating, physically and mentally taxing, and it requires an exceptional level of athletic resilience. As such, I am eager to see the sport grow.

To achieve this growth, however, we—in the ice swimming community—must embrace the roots of ice swimming and recognize that, above all, fundamentally, we are swimmers seeking a larger challenge. That is, we must not overly glorify or worship the fact that we compete in colder waters, nor should we hammer on the idea, as many from the Wim Hof following do, that ice swimming is an immune-system-boosting lifestyle that so deeply benefits one’s health. This sort of community-imaging and sport-signaling is ineffective.

Based on conversations I have shared with many conventional swimmers and from my own experience, this imaging alienates the larger swimming world from the ice community and diminishes interest and involvement from potential athletes, because ice swimmers then appear to be more cult-like than they do sport-like. This appearance detracts from the realities of ice swimming, as well, rendering it more a “crazy activity,” rather than a new layer of challenge to conventional swimming. As a result, we lose out on an exceptionally large pool of talent, and this is especially the case in the United States, where ice swimming and the competition circuit are both severely underdeveloped, because such public imaging deters involvement.

And, on a training level, we ought to step into traditional pools more often and attack these workouts with a higher intensity and level of prioritization, because true, raw speed garners attention to the sport and generates a higher quality of interest. Pool workouts structured around the back half (i.e. “build” sets coupled with descending intervals) develop the necessary endurance for success in ice swimming races, especially the one-kilometer, because they teach our bodies how to maximize speed and focus in on those moments when our oxygen levels are lowering but lactate is increasing.

Simply put, faster ice swimmers equate to more recognition; more recognition results in more competitions; more competitions result in the eventual professionalization of the sport. This progression could, if executed properly, see ice swimming appear in the Olympics one day—something that many from the ice community would love to witness. This can only be done, however, if we look at how each and every one of us can impact the sport in a way that both improves its image and athletically legitimizes it toward this direction.

Additionally, our bodies require exposure to cold water, yes, and this is a crucial part of the training, but it takes very little time to get this exposure and have our bodies acclimate to the cold. The human body functions as a programming system; once coded, it is capable of completing a task over and over. Once we get in the ice water the first few times and teach our bodies how to withstand such temperatures, there is not a need to constantly go back into the cold water for maintenance several times a week. I encountered many people this year who operate under that mindset. One ten-minute cold swim per week, I found, was plenty to stay adjusted to the decreasing water temperature, allowing me to swim fast and comfortably in competitions. And with only one cold dip per week, this gives swimmers more time to center focus on speed, technique, and endurance development.

The exaggerated notion that ice swimmers must constantly be in cold waters for training is also what makes the sport inaccessible for many prospective athletes. If we worked on breaking down this myth, then the sport would become significantly more approachable for new participants, and therefore the community itself could grow. Ice swimming is more mental than it is physical—and so we lose out on a critical layer of talent when we hyperbolically publicize or signal that constant cold-water dips are the prime way to succeed in ice swimming. In turn, rather than positioning ice swimming as something that only weathered, seasoned winter swimmers can do, we must move away from this athletic methodology to allow conventional swimmers and non-swimmers alike a path to more easily and confidently approach this sport as a new challenge to try, even if they do not have prior experience in icy waters.

We will grow our community in significant ways if we shifted the sport’s narrative to one that is more physically accessible and appealing to newcomers. After all, the ice is a friend to all who wish to try it out—to those aiming for speed, testing physical limits, or searching for a personal adventure. Though I stress the ability of this narrative shift to bring in elite, experienced swimmers (i.e. “deepening” the sport), it is equally as important to recognize that this exact shift can encourage other non-swimmers to give it a try, for whom speed may not be their main element, but who will nonetheless experience their own physical journeys in their ice swims, which will come with amazing, exceptional personal stories that enrich the ice swimming community, widen the sport, and further develop our own understandings of athletic resilience.

And so, we should mold the framework of our community around the idea that anyone can do this sport. This is accomplished through deconstructing athletic myths and, for lack of a more profound way of saying it, not allowing the community to over exaggerate the necessary training needed to be successful or to excessively hammer on the idea of constant cold-water training. Let’s strive for accessibility—and let’s not strive for self-praise or the worshipping of cold water.

In doing this—while also encouraging family, friends, training partners, and so forth to give it a try—we can build and cultivate the ice swimming community in a manner that internationally legitimizes the sport, renders it approachable for prospective swimmers, and provides it with more platforms on which to compete and evolve. We do this through opting into the conventional swimming world, rather than separating ourselves from it, and also presenting our community as an alternative, nuanced, exciting challenge to those swimmers, such as myself, who felt tired of competitions in the typical swimming setting.

So, let’s move away from the idea that we, as ice swimmers, are inherently “different” athletes, and instead get back to the root of swimming. Let’s more accessibly market the ice community to swimmers of all types, so that, as a sport, we can see meaningful, worthwhile development, increased participation and involvement, and, lastly, a jump in speed in the years to come.

I hope that, whether you agree or disagree, this helps to spark some discourse around the sport’s future, and that we can collectively begin to better understand how to take ice swimming to the next level.

Dear all Frozen ones,
Hope this find you all well, at inside your fridge training...everything else is closed 🙂

Pls share this in your country or with your frozen friends.

IISA new website is in production with many new features and functions to accommodate several new rules and expansion of IISA. You'll have to wait and see...

In the meantime - we are looking for great pictures for the website. If you have any and you wish them to be on our website. Please send 3-4 amazing pictures that captures the essence of Ice Swimming on https://wetransfer.com
to internationaliceswimming@gmail.com.

By send the images you granting us permission to use them on IISA website. If we chose your pics.

Hi Resolution!
Stunning Pics!
Swimming or Ice or ICe Swimming.

See you in the ICE [where virus don't dare to tread! :)]

ICE BREAKING NEWS!!!

IISA 4th Ice Swimming World Championship will be held between 18-22 Feb, 2021 in Katowice Poland.

Save the date, start training. We will publish program soon and per country quota and selection process.

Let’s hope the world will be a calmer and a safer place by then.

Be safe, healthy and we will see you all in the ICE.

Please share – country chairs and anyone.