Stone cold sober: Wild swim groups helping alcohol recovery

How do you commune with others when you don’t drink? And are there spaces where you can do that and get some of the feelings of intensity and intimacy that come with drinking with others?

For some the answer was outdoor swimming in a waterfall; for others a Thursday night session of cold water immersion, with “pumping music”; for still others outdoor adventure, with company.

Across Scotland, we found many swimming groups that are part of what might be called sober culture. Some had a hardcore membership of recovering alcoholics and addicts; others just happened to see sobriety as a positive lifestyle choice.

Among those promoting recovery was a group called Max Kolbe, named after  Maximilian Maria Kolbe, the patron saint of, among other things, drug addicts, canonised in 1982 and renowned for volunteering to die in place of another man in the Auschwitz deathcamp.

Max Kolbe is now also the online moniker adopted by Paul Donnelly, a firefighter, who is on his own journey with regard to alcohol and recovery, and the centre of a gathering movement focussed around outdoor activity and especially cold water swimming.

Max Koble group from The Ripple Effect. Image: Anna Deacon

We met Mr Donnelly, and a large group on an expedition to a waterfall in the Pentlands. The atmosphere that Sunday morning was akin to a festival event.

“I think,” he said, “there’s something in the water that can get you to that special state. It’s ultimate participation, that’s what it is. From an individual point of view, you’re no longer spectating or criticising, you’re participating.”

Mr Donnelly noted that Max Kolbe was no longer purely about addiction recovery. “A lot of the members’ own stories are rooted in addiction. But not everybody’s. We find that what people are looking for sometimes is a healthier relationship with alcohol.  No two people are using the group for the same reasons.”

Some of the group’s activities revolve around the methods developed Wim Hof, the cold therapy guru known as the Ice Man. But for Mr Donnelly it’s not entirely about the cold. “You have to be careful about idealising the wrong things. Is it the cold? The cold is the vehicle to take you there.”

There are, he said, other activities he could harness to help people in recovery. “I’m convinced I could take a group of people in recovery from drink and drugs, and I could get them into crochet. We could arrange to do it every week so they could have something to look forward to and have something to practise, that would take them away from their environment that’s causing them problems. That would work.”

On the walk to the waterfall, I talked with a young father who had arrived with partner and baby in a pushchair, and who described how he had been coming since lockdown when he first heard about Max Kolbe - and had now been two years sober.

“You hear a lot of people saying,” he said, “Oh lockdown was so bad for me, but lockdown was the best thing that ever happened to me. I stopped drinking. I stopped smoking cannabis. It totally changed my life. I’ve got the rewards for it now. I’ve got my wee baby boy and family.”

Max Kolbe recovery group in Pentlands waterfall from The Ripple Effect. Image: Anna Deacon

At the waterside there were also others who expressed their appreciation of Max Kolbe as a vehicle for sober social events. Among them was Dana McCulloch, founder of an outdoor adventure group for those who are “sober, sober-curious, or want an alternative way of living without a hangover” and author of the Instagram account DanasLittleAdventures.

“When I stopped drinking,” she said, “I started off doing thirty new things in thirty days to sidetrack my mind. What I quickly realised was it was all outdoors stuff that I was falling in love with. It was all about nature.”

What Ms McCulloch said was echoed by many others involved in coldwater swimming groups. Among them was Tinka Hughes, a student who founded the Edinburgh University Blue Tits outdoor swimming group.

She said: “It’s great to do something outdoors, and without alcohol. Why should university be all about getting drunk and going to the pub, or meeting people through drinks?

“I didn’t enjoy uni sport for that reason; I don’t like getting drunk every Wednesday. I really miss playing sport but actually swimming, with all these people who I don’t know, is basically like being part of a team. Often people who play team sports come and say, ‘It’s so nice being part of a team that isn’t competitive and isn’t about getting drunk or about being competitive to be drunk.”

Edinburgh University Blue Tits, Tinka Hughes third from left. Image: Anna DeaconMax Kolbe is not the only group using cold water to help people in recovery or who are struggling with anxiety and depression. There are many others across Scotland and the UK – including the Polar Bear Club, a group started by recovered alcoholic Kenny Neilson.

The Polar Bear Club is not the average outdoor dipping group; they also do controlled cold water immersion in tanks – some of which is fairly extreme. There are members who have broken records for various challenges – durations in ice baths. Neilson himself has even done half an hour fully submerged in an ice tank, breathing through a snorkel.

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Over the summer the group installed its own ice tanks in a property and held regular sessions, including Thursday nights with "music pumping and tanks filled to the brim”.

Neilson, however, was keen to deliver a message of caution around extreme cold therapy. Though he started off by doing his own experiments with cold, he later began to work with Valerjan Romanovski, a Guinness World Record holder for cold endurance.

“Valerjan Romanovski,” Neilson noted, “says there are all these groups in the world, and they are all taking people into water at zero degrees, and there’s hardly any of them who understands what hypothermia is. He told us to stop doing our retreats until we understood it.”

Not only did the Polish expert visit Loch Tay, but the Polar Bears have also been out to Kraków University, in southern Poland, to be tested in his ice tanks there and competed at an international ice dipping championship in Mielno on Poland’s Baltic coast.

Max Kolbe group in Pentlands waterfall from The Ripple Effect. Image: Anna Deacon

Mr Neilson believes it’s not just about the power of the cold – though that “is undeniable” – but about people getting up in the morning, travelling to a new place, shaking the hand of someone new, doing the walk to the site – and then getting in.

“It’s connecting human beings together. That’s what it’s all about. With twelvestep, what it tells you is, when all else fails, go and find somebody who needs a hand. Because, as soon as you go and help somebody else, you’re taking yourself out of yourself and that’s how your spirituality grows.”

“From step one to step twelve it is about helping another human being, so that’s always on my mind. I’m going to help another human being. And what’s my passion? My passion is now the cold water. My passion is now going into nature.”

The idea that cold water might help alcoholic recovery is not new.  AA founder Bill Wilson used hydrotherapy as part of his addiction treatment in the 1930s.

However, cold water therapy, Mr Neilson said,  is not the cure for alcoholism. “Drug addiction and alcoholism are based on a mental obsession. I believe that the only thing in the world that can get people clean and sober is Alcoholics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous or others like it. I don’t think there’s any form of therapy – psychologists or CBT training or whatever - that can do it. I don’t even believe rehab can do it. These places can get you clean, but you can’t get you sober.”

Like Paul Donnelly, Mr Neilson noted that not everyone in the group was on a recovery journey. “Absolutely loads of them are coming because we are living a sober life, and they see us out there enjoying our lives. They get the atmosphere; they get the buzz. They’re not alcoholics, but have had enough of going to pubs and doing the same thing over and over again. They come to us and have a good life.”

Among those not there on her own recovery journey is Fiona Chambers, an astounding ice-dipper who set a record for resets - repeatedly immersing and emerging from a 0° ice tank - of 619 in a row. She had, she observed, seen the impact of alcohol and drugs on people in her own life. "My mum, dad, stepfather and then my partner suffered from these addictions.  My life growing up was a turmoil of neglect, physical, mental and sexual abuse." 

"Some of the people I have mentioned have overcome their addictions and we now have healthy relationships. Others unfortunately this was not the story.  My stepfather I found hanging from a loft. What the club and the ice training have done for me is they have broken down walls I felt I built up over the years. My abilities to trust and my confidence have grown."

"I attended Kenny’s 1st birthday party marking his year of sobriety and this too helped me understand why people choose these paths in life or more truly how they find it extremely difficult to avoid these paths. I find it beneficial in helping people in the club having some experience and understanding about alcoholism and addiction from both points of view." 

Addiction is complex. Our relationship with drink, particularly here in Scotland, is also complicated.  No one, in these groups,  was saying that cold water swimming is the answer to Scotland’s alcoholism problem – the rise this year, for instance, in official figures of alcohol deaths -  but many are saying that this is part of their personal answer, whether to recovery or just living a more sober life.

“What the cold water can do,” said Mr Neilson, “is that it can enhance the sobriety. It will maybe not keep us sober but it is part of my recovery."

The Ripple Effect by Anna Deacon and Vicky Allan is published by Black & White