Dedicated people have been getting up early on Christmas morning and swimming in a freezing cold lake in the centre of London for over 150 years!
The Serpentine Swimming Club held its first Christmas Day race in 1864, an H Coulter won that race and took home a gold medal.
The SSC holds a weekly race throughout the year and its Christmas Day event is a handicap race. Entry criteria include members only and that members must have raced in other races during the year in order to qualify.
On Christmas Day, members race 100 yards for the Peter Pan Cup, a cup donated in 1904 by J M Barrie – the same year that the play Peter Pan first appeared on the London stage.
This race attracts international interest and in 1935 it had to be postponed due to the lake being unusually icy. Undeterred, members of the SSC smashed through the ice and swam non-competitively for their annual ritual.
Nowadays there is mixed membership and women are regularly half the participants, however, they have only had a membership for the last 20 years. Prior to 1930, there were no changing facilities for females and this precluded their participation. The Serpentine Lido is only open for the summer season, but the Swimming Club is open year round so that hardy folks can swim in frigid waters, sometimes as cold as 4C.
Source:
http://serpentineswimmingclub.com/history
https://londonist.com/london/sport/peter-pan-cup
https://www.visitlondon.com/things-to-do/event/10716901-peter-pan-cup
HistorianRuby: An Historian's Miscellany 
As kids we used to go swimming in the Serpentine all the time – but in the summer because we weren’t daft!!
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Haha, I had crazy in my unedited text and my hubby suggested I remove it! I argued that it was humour, but then did as I was told as he doesn’t usually listen to me at all and he had offered me constructive criticism!
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I’d go with crazy but probably best that you listened to your hubby. LOL.
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Sounds fun
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Haha – sounds cold!
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LOL
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Sounds like the polar bear clubs here in the US, except they don’t race, just plunge. I think a brisk swim would be preferable, but I would never do either!
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It’s not for me either!
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i always wanted to do a Polar jump, but lived too far from the water. Then, I had the plunge opportunities so close to me, and somehow, I never went. And now I moved to a warmer place. I take it all as a sign that I should NOT do it.
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The thing is, you have to acclimatise your body to it – so it wouldn’t just be one immersion. It’d be regular immersion over a period of weeks in colder and colder water . . . NO THANKS!
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Some people don’t acclimate/ train. Yes, heart attacks happen. Hypothermia happens. But sometimes it doesn’t. LOL
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You’re still not selling it to me . . .
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I shall now spend all of my Christmas break plotting a sales pitch. (No, not really.)
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I’m sure you’ve better things to do 🙂
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Our karate club does a mid-winter dip during the beach session. I’ve only done it once! Interesting post as usual 🙂
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Very cool (and crazy)! Here in Pittsburgh, we have something similar — the Polar Bear Plunge. Every year in the dead of winter, hundreds of people take a dip in one of the three frigid rivers of the city for charity. No thank you!!
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*Shivers* 🙂
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