The corduroy pattern in the sand isn’t yet interrupted by the foot traffic destined to descend upon Barrie's Centennial Beach on a hot July day as Melanie Van Pypen emerges from the water following her two-hour swing along the buoy line.
The water temperature is 21 Celsius, or nearly 70 Fahrenheit – which is about as warm as the deep bay’s water gets – but for the forest school teacher and Oro-Medonte mother of two, it’s downright balmy.
After several years of distance swimming, Van Pypen discovered she could extend her swimming season if she adapted to cold water. That prompted her to take up ice swimming three years ago, through the help of a Barrie crew who gather for an ice plunge most days in the winter.
Earlier this year, she officially joined an elite group of Canadian ice swimmers by completing an ice mile, a club that boasts 12 members. She is now is preparing to compete in a mile-long ice swim in Italy in January.
Van Pypen has always been a swimmer, competing with the Barrie Trojan Swim Club right through high school and then while at school in Thunder Bay..
During the past decade, she’s been concentrating on open-water swimming, jumping into Lake Simcoe whenever she could.
“The approach I took when I went back was just getting into the water, swimming as often as I could, and trying to just swim whatever distance as long into the season as I could,” explains Van Pypen on the Barrie beach following a recent swim. “Usually the season would start when the ice went out and I could tolerate being in the water and the season would end around November when it started to get too icy.
“In 2020, my husband (Trevor Wentzel) said ‘let’s go and jump in the lake’ and we went into Lake Simcoe and just froze our butts off. That was it for him, he never went back. I was sort of hooked.”
The following winter she found Josef Polcz, Barrie’s ice swimming guru, as well as a community of ice plungers. They're a crew that can regularly be spotted bathing off the shore in the middle of winter at Centennial Park after cutting a hole in its icy surface.
That hole has expanded over the years to allow for an ice-lake version of lane swimming. That also allowed Van Pypen to extend her swimming season right through the winter.
Then, in the spring, during a particularly warm day when the thermometer hit 22 C and the ice had cleared enough, the distance swimmer became an ice swimmer, marking her first kilometre-long swim in 5 C water.
“For me, it’s not about the cold water, it’s about swimming. And once I realized I could swim all through the year, I realized it was going to be really good for me because swimming brings me a lot of calm and a lot of feeling of strength and ability,” she says. “Little did I know I actually like cold-water swimming.”
The cold water isn’t actually a deterrent, Van Pypen adds. But she admits it does take some mental fortitude to jump into the water wearing just a bathing suit, goggles and swim cap when the air temperature drops well below 0 C.
She spent the following winter training, learning to enter the cold water quickly and plunging right in.
This year, on April 20, with Polcz, a Level 1 observer, a witness with the IISA (International Ice Swimming Association) and a clutch of supporters including a videographer and a paramedic, Van Pypen became the 12th Canadian to officially swim the ice mile with the time of 32:38.
Her official IISA certificate recorded the water temperature at Centennial Beach as 4.47 C, the wind chill -2.30 C and concludes with: “You are officially frozen.”
She then quickly made her way to a friend’s sauna nearby.
In January, she and Polcz are heading to the Ice Swimming World Championships in Molveno, Italy as part of a 10-member Canadian contingent. Van Pypen will swim in the 1,000-metre, 500-metre, 100-metre as well as 50-metre freestyle and butterfly events and a relay race in a 50-metre outdoor pool.
Combining that cold-water and long-distance experience, Van Pypen is considering trying a Great Lake crossing one day.
While Polcz is encouraging her to cross Lake Ontario, which has been accomplished by fewer than 70 swimmers, Van Pypen has her mind set on the notoriously cold Lake Superior where the water temperature is usually about 15 C or colder and is a lesser-known feat.
“My plan would be to do from White Fish Point in Michigan to Pancake Bay in Ontario … one day,” she says.
According to Solo Swims of Ontario, that stretch is 28.7 kilometres and has been done twice before. Canadian Marilyn Korzekwa did it in 12 hours and nine minutes on Aug. 19, 2018, and American Elizabeth Fry completed the crossing on Aug. 24, 2022 in nine hours and 32 minutes.
