Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [64]
Sporadic incidents had also been occurring along the Bering Sea border—incidents that didn’t make the evening news. The United States and Soviet armed forces were playing war games, finding where they could breach the border as a way of testing their respective security systems and response times. Given the current political situation, the officer doubted that the Soviets would permit anyone to enter their waters.
Even more significantly, Big Diomede Island, in the Soviet Union, the place I wanted to swim to, was a listening post—a military installation equipped with sophisticated devices that monitored our ships’ and submarines’ movements in the Bering Strait and beyond, as well as a state-of-the-art tracking system for spying on our aircraft and missiles. It was unlikely that the Soviets would allow any American to land on their spy island.
Meanwhile, we pondered the logistics anyway. The Bering Strait usually thawed by July. The water temperatures were between thirty and forty degrees, and after the thaw, the only way to reach Little Diomede from Wales was by helicopter. We now had something to go on. But the question was: How could I ever prepare to swim in water that cold?
Anne Loucks, a UCSB swim-team friend of mine who was a physiology student, asked if I would be willing to be a research subject. Annie was doing research on campus at the Institute of Environmental Stress, with Dr. Barbara Drinkwater and Dr. William McCafferty Dr. Drinkwater was one of the most respected research physiologists in the world. She had done pioneering work on women’s physiology. Dr. McCafferty was working on postdoctoral studies on the way surfers acclimate to the cold.
The research team was doing physiological studies on body type and athletic performance, as well as acclimatization to cold. They had just completed a series of tests on Jacqueline Hansen, the women’s world-record holder in the marathon, and they wanted to run some comparison tests on me.
Dr. Drinkwater suspected that because of my background in long-distance cold-water swimming, I might somehow respond differently to the cold than the average person. She explained that when most people enter a cold environment without adequate clothing, they eventually go into hypothermia—their internal, or “core,” temperature drops. Cold water leaches the heat from the body twenty-five to thirty times faster than cold air. People keep their bodies warm through a variety of defense mechanisms. As a first line of defense, the body narrows the blood vessels under the skin, forcing warm blood into the brain and the core of the body to protect the vital organs. Also, the skin temperature drops to reflect the surrounding environment. Second, the body attempts to generate heat by shivering. If the body temperature drops too low, the cold blood becomes acidic from lack of oxygen. This results in arrhythmia; the heart doesn’t beat effectively, and cardiac arrest can occur.
From the onset, Dr. Drinkwater explained that by participating in these studies I could help them better understand how the human body functioned. It could help them figure out basic human responses to the cold, and maybe increase people’s survival rates. It was also basic research and what they discovered might not be directly applicable for years. Dr. Drinkwater also told me that whatever they learned, they would share with me, so that I would be able to better understand what my body was doing on my long swims. I was excited about participating, and a little scared, but I agreed to be part of the study.
The scientists began by running a number of underwater weighing tests to determine my percentage of body fat. Healthy men have a low percentage