Whoever said "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" must have been an ice swimming enthusiast.
Wayne Beaton yells as he jumps into icy water at Mooney's Bay in Ottawa on Jan. 1, 2006. In Canada, the polar bear dip is a New Year's Day tradition, but many Europeans take the plunge on Boxing Day.
(Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)
Across Europe, people celebrated Boxing Day by diving into rivers, lakes and even oceans that challenged the threshold of humans' temperature tolerance.
These hearty human walruses, as they've been called, say the exercise is far from masochistic, but is a traditional solution to holiday excess.
"It's very good for health," said one chattering man, floating in a pool of icy water in Moscow. Around him, men, women and children of all ages dove and dunked into water crusted with a thick layer of ice.
In Britain, hundreds of diehards plunged into the North Sea on Wednesday. Some say a chilly splash in the sea is a great wakeup call from Christmas hangovers.
It is a British Boxing Day tradition similar to the polar bear swim on New Year's Day in Canada.
According to a report by the Suffolk-area newspaper East Anglian Daily Times, many swimmers use the occasion to raise money for charity.
Fred Eastman, 71, who has done the swim for past 52 years, was one of hundreds who took the plunge off the Suffolk coast.
"As I was driving up, I thought to myself, 'This will sort the wheat from the chaff,'" he told the Times.
"But there everybody was. It was freezing because of the wind chill. But I actually swam."
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