Northern Exposure: A Deep Sea Diver's Story (page 2 of 2)

He left his job at the law firm and angled for sponsorship money. His team of one quickly expanded to include a retired army general as project manager, a swimming coach, a doctor, a photographer, and a mind coach. With guidance from the WWF, Pugh learned the media skills to make his swims environmental statements.

Pugh's vision was to be the first of a new breed of activist. After his successful Thames swim, he turned his attention to polar regions, where the immediate effects of climate change were being tracked. To swim there, he had to prepare. As he puts it, "diving into cold water is one of the most violent things you can do. It's like throwing yourself headfirst off a moving bus. You have to train yourself to handle it." Working with experts at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, Pugh began a punishing training regimen. Camping in the Namibian desert and sprinting up sand hills in blazing heat was the easy part. The real challenge was back in South Africa when he was attached to a harness and told to swim in place for 20 minutes in a portable pool borrowed from a fish factory. Every day more ice was added to make it another degree colder.

"It's easy for humans to adapt to heat, but cold is quite different," explains Tim Noakes, MD, director of the institute. "If you're tough enough, you can make yourself get used to it. And this is what Lewis does-it's amazingly unusual." Noakes was astonished to find that Pugh's core body temperature actually warms up by nearly two degrees as he concentrates before a swim. This defense mechanism, fueled by Pugh's adrenaline, had never before been observed in a human. On the spot, Noakes coined a term for it: anticipatory thermogenesis.

But that was only half the story of Pugh's unusual ability to withstand cold. "There's nothing superior about his physiology," says exercise physiologist Jonathan Dugas, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who helped with Pugh's cold-water training. "The big difference is that he adapts and copes better—and has an iron will. Once he's in the water, he can suppress any urge to get out." Or to breathe in: The man whom friends call "the Polar Bear" has also trained himself to exhale sharply on hitting the water, then to check his next inhalation so he doesn't hyperventilate. "Most people hitting cold water will die of drowning before they die of cold," Noakes explains.

Before big swims, Pugh spends up to four hours a day preparing mentally. His techniques include blocking negative thoughts with powerful music (listening to the theme from Rocky on his iPod has been known to work) and envisioning every aspect of completing his goal. "Think of the mind as an iceberg. The nine tenths of it underwater is the subconscious, and that's what we work on with motivational triggers," says Pugh's mind coach, David Becker.

One of Pugh's first big attempts to put his cold-water skills to the test nearly ended in disaster. On a one-mile swim in Antarctica in December 2005, just yards from the finish, his body began to succumb. His limbs turned leaden, and his team reported that he looked dazed. The temperature inside his thigh muscle, taken by a needle probe, dropped to 87.8 degrees, the lowest ever measured in him. "He might have gone unconscious. He was definitely at the limits of his ability," says Noakes, who monitored Pugh closely from a boat alongside.

Despite what he called the "grueling" Antarctic swim, Pugh scheduled an even more fearsome test for himself at the North Pole. Stepping off the gangway of the Russian icebreaker that had crunched through floating sea ice for five days to take him to the North Pole, Pugh walked across the ice to a pool of open water over one mile long and two and a half miles deep. The sea temperature was 29 degrees, a fraction above the freezing point of salt water. The air was 0 degrees, though a biting windchill made it feel even colder. "I had a real fear that I'd die," he says.

Pugh briskly stripped off his padded clothes. In only his bathing suit and cap, his tingling skin already pink, he strode to the water's edge. The only place I'm getting out is at the end, he told himself. Then he ripped out his earphones and plunged in.

The pain was immediate and excruciating. His entire body felt on fire as he struck out with his usual overarm crawl. The doctor kept pace with him in an inflatable boat. Through iced-up goggles, Pugh could see the armed guards keeping watch for bears. And the flags.

Becker had broken down the huge task into manageable segments, each one marked by a flag planted in the ice that represented a friend, family member, or teammate. Fog started to roll in as Pugh headed for the final marker, the flag of Great Britain. He imagined his late father standing beside it-the man who had done so much to give him a zest for adventure and who'd died of Alzheimer's disease just a few years before. Then Pugh drove himself to the finish. After 18 minutes 50 seconds in the water, his body was not even hypothermic.

That year, 2007, saw the smallest area of ice ever recorded by satellites during an Arctic summer. The extensive areas of open water were what gave Pugh the idea to change gears and take to the kayak. Before he left for Norway last August, Pugh agreed to an interview and asked this reporter to meet him outside London's Tate Modern art museum beside the Thames at 9 o'clock on a Monday morning. At 9:10, there he was: a lone paddler making his way up the river.

Soaked from spray and covered in goose bumps, he refused to go somewhere more comfortable and sat out in the cutting wind wearing nothing more than half a neoprene wet suit. At six-one, Pugh is imposing, his short black hair streaked with gray. He seemed overwhelmingly earnest as he expressed his fears for the Arctic and how saving it means saving humanity itself.

"Even if I don't get anywhere near the Pole, I'll make waves," he predicted. As it turned out, Pugh paddled for four grueling days before hitting impassable ice and returned with an unexpected, and alarming, find: All the ice he encountered was thin, first-year ice that had formed over the previous winter. There was a complete absence of multiyear ice, which reaches a thickness of about ten feet and survives successive summers. "This shows the ice is not only reduced in area but is disastrously thin," he says. In the coming year, Pugh says, he will focus all his attention on lobbying for Arctic protections to be included in the Kyoto Protocol. With talks to renew the international environmental agreement continuing through the spring, there's still plenty of time to warn the assembled world leaders: Polar Bear headed your way.

From Reader's Digest - January 2009

 

• • Animal Stories
• • Action Stories

• Heroes: Subway Rescue
• With seconds separating them from an oncoming train, one man risked everything to save a woman he'd never met.
• 
• Jungle Rescue: Saving the Orangutans
• Willie Smits is on a mission to save the endangered orangutan. It's a straight vine from its survival to ours.
• 
• Shark! How One Surfer Survived an Attack
• When a two-ton predator caught surfer Todd Endris in its jaws, an unlikely group of swimmers came to his rescue.
•