The Absolute Joy of Wild Swimming with Eva Kulovits

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In this episode I speak with photographer, yoga teacher and writer Eva Kulovits on the absolute joys of wild swimming.

We recorded this on the beach in The Hague and then jumped in the sea afterwards!

Eva speaks of the joy of wild swimming, the freedoms it can bestow on your mind and body, connection and community and how you can feel more present and tuned into the world through wild swimming.

Transcription

Karla: Hello and welcome to Conversation Changes, the podcast where we hear from women who are changing the conversation, guests who inspire experts in their field and those who are doing things just a little bit differently. Each week I ask a guest to share the lessons they've learnt, their experiences, challenges and insights.

 We have conversations which I hope sparked thoughts and discussions long after you finish listening. I'm your host Karla Liddle-White and I began to a podcast with an aim to amplify women's voices, challenge perceptions and change the conversation.

This is a little bit different to my usual series episodes in that it's a follow up to the first episode of the season all about wild swimming. This is a conversation all about the joy of wild swimming. I was so taken back by the level of enthusiasm I encountered when I said I was doing a podcast about wild swimming that I put a call out for people to share their swimming experiences with me. And Eva Kulovits reached out to me, who I've known on Instagram for a while now, but I've never actually met her in real life, and she asked if I wanted to come to the beach she swims at and hear her thoughts on wild swimming, but also if I wanted to join her for a wild swim in the sea afterwards. And I obviously said yes to that.

Eva is a yoga teacher, photographer and writer from Vienna, Austria, who now lives in The Hague and she speaks of the joy of wild swimming, the freedom it bestows on the mind and the body, and the feeling of being so alive in the water. As she says, a cold water swim in the morning is just like my first cup of coffee. To set the scene, we recorded this on a windy and cold day on the beach. A long expanse of sand and sea as far as the eye can see.

Here we are on the beach in The Hague and I began by asking Eva how she got into wild swimming.

Eva: When I think back of when I was in my twenties and I had a corporate job and I got a gym membership, I got a really really nice gym like and they kept promising us there would be a pool. There was, there was never a pool. But anyways, apart from the pool situation, I ended up not going to the gym. Why? Because it felt like a caged animal. I love running. I did a lot of running then at that time it was urban running, it was just running out of my house and then going back.

But as soon as you put me on a treadmill I was like what is this? My body had this response of what is this? What are we supposed to do here? It even felt different in my body. The movement felt different. I did not feel as satisfied afterwards and I think it is really this. So, yes, for me to call it wild swimming, that actually captures the essence, because, like you say, I live at the sea. But when I go home to Austria, I seek out all the wild or yes, or outdoors places where I can immerse myself in water, whether it's a river, whether it's sometimes even just a canal to dig in, to put my feet in, right, or a proper lake.

And I think when you start this kind of practice or ritual in one wild place, you suddenly start seeing all the wilderness around you, and that's beautiful and that's very liberating. So I actually love the term wild swimming.

Karla: And how does it make you feel? Because I always find coming out of the sea, having swam, I feel so different being in a pool.

Eva: So I teach yoga. I basically have a job that is very much focused on body awareness, awareness of breath. But at the same time, there is a sense of nowness that I can only find in wild swimming. For example, I'm never as present at any other point in my day, I think, as I am when I'm in the water, because it's wild and you realize, oh, it's not a pool. There is not the edge of the pool, there is not a person.

There might be a lifeguard today, but usually there is not. So you have to watch and listen for cues, whether it's clouds coming in with rain, whether it's current, other people that are out there, animals, wildlife. This is what I feel when I come out of the sea. I have this feeling of really having sharpened my senses. So actually, my preferred time of the day is to go in the morning, first thing in the morning. And it's almost like my first cup of coffee.

And when I don't have a cup of coffee, my children will be able to tell you if I swim in the morning or not. They were like, she's off today. She definitely did not go for a swim. My friend Helen and I, who is half British, half Dutch, we started doing this two years ago, somewhat in the first months of the pandemic, and it just started like we're like, oh, we could actually dip. And then it became a thing.

And in the beginning, I remember, so we would always go in our bathing suits. But when you start doing it regularly, you see all the other regulars and then people have different ways of going for a swim. You have a few ones that go in their full neoprene, and then they really swim up and down. So for them, it's really more of an exercise. For us, it's more I don't want to say recreational, but it's more of this energetic kind of swimming. Just like I'm just doing this for myself, for fun or for maintenance of sanity, I want to say.

So sometimes when you look back here, so we're now at the beach, and there's a few fancy apartments that are close to the beach. Sometimes I see those people coming in their bathing robe with their slippers. They just walk up here, they drop the rope, they're going naked, they swim, and then they go back home. And I was like, that must be a holiday feeling. So I live very close, but I don't live this close.

So we started seeing people, okay. Everybody kind of does their thing. And that's also what I like about Dutch culture, is that if you don't disturb anyone, you can basically do your thing anywhere. So I think at some point, we started going just in our bottoms when we felt like and at some point we were like, we might as well go naked. Especially if you go at 630 in the morning and it's pitch dark. There's no one.

Nobody will say anything. Even though this is officially not the nude beach. There is a nude beach further down. Okay? But once I started taking away layers after layers and then going into the water, I realized how much more intense this feels, how much more wild to not have anything between you and the water moving your body the way it is made. And I I get it. I would I would not dance around the beach naked. I don't I don't lie. I don't do some bathing naked. I don't. Not really.

But swimming naked is something I do for me because and that's also that's also what makes the difference for me between cold shower or going into the sea. I hate cold showers. Like, I can go into four degree cold water here. I'm totally fine. But if you put me under a shower that's 20 degrees, I'm like, this is horrible. But why? Because it's not wild. It's just a stream of water that is dripping out of something, and it does not give you those endorphins. It does not give you that sense of, oh, I have to be aware of my body.

Karla: And it's such empowerment in being naked as well.

Eva: Yes. And just for the sake of nakedness, not caring, then you see all types of people in all shapes, and you kind of forget that they are naked. You also just see a person being super comfortable and appreciating this closeness to nature. So did you grow up sort of in rivers? No, I'm from Vienna, so I grew up in a very, very urban space. And I do have to say so I still don't consider myself a good swimmer.

I never learned proper technique, just, like, basics, but even my children have better swimming techniques than I do. But I think just because of the practice, I've become a strong swimmer. So I think your body, in a natural way, adapts. And, I mean, here we stay close ish I try to never go out too far so that I could not stand somewhere. In winter, we actually swim on the inside towards the harbor because it's out of the winds and there it becomes more of, okay, we're going to do more of a lapse thing, like going back and forth like two or three times, but nothing too crazy.

So no, actually being immersed in water was something that was not common to me. But I always had this, and I think maybe a lot of other people have that as well, this longing for the sea. So I can remember that when I went to Croatia for the first time as a teen, I was like, wow. Not because it was a beautiful or nicey, but just the rawness and the wilderness of the sea, especially in winter. And when we moved here, I think because my children did not really like going into the sea here, I did not hang out so much at the sea. So it was really only because of the pandemic that I started to have a very intimate relationship with the sea and really going every day, first just for walks and then with the swimming.

And from that moment on, even more than before, I've had a regular walking practice for a long time already. But when we started the swimming, you really start noticing the changes in nature throughout the year on really like those small levels, like, oh, when you go for a swim around the same time every day, you notice, of course, the changing lights. But also, oh, there's mist this morning or today.

The temperature feels a little bit colder already, so just these micro changes. And I think my body adapted so well that, for example, all throughout summer, I don't even need an alarm, I just wake up because my body is like, ready, let's go. And then in winter, if I really want to swim in the morning, I have to force myself. Then I also change up my routine and my body temperature has become better. So I always used to have cold hands and feet. So if I would be sitting here like the election has gotten, yeah, absolutely.

Karla: Have you noticed any other benefits?

Eva: My mood. Yeah, definitely brightening my mood. And I guess there's yeah, I think there is a sense of because A, because I'm more present and aware of my body, but also moving. I'm moving my body every day, and I don't go for half an hour every day, but even if you go for seven or ten minutes, but even when you do that every day, it adds up and yeah, I think my body feels more alive. I think feeling more alive is the one thing that I could say that sea swimming or wild swimming has given me. Helen and I were doing it, so my friend and I were doing it together.

We don't always go together. We try to go as much as possible, but a lot of times I will go by myself and then a lot of times you see people that come regularly and with a lot of them you don't even have a conversation. You just kind of greet. Sometimes you have a conversation, but the conversation is never about what do you do for a living. The conversations are often around the really, really hard stuff in life.

Like, for example, someone losing a parent or a dog now that I see a dog here. Or mental problems. Really very vulnerable things. And I think it's also because this connectedness to nature, this opening up yourself to something that is out of the box, where people feel maybe a little bit more at ease about talking about these things. Because in a sense, you're still a stranger. If you don't exchange names, if you don't exchange phone numbers, it's just a stranger. And then sometimes people feel more open to talk to a stranger about the crazy stuff in their life than with their neighbor. Maybe for me also, that is something that it has given me to see people just as people, right, as we said before, with the naked.

So when I go with my friend Helen, we are quite comfortable because we go so often together. We're quite comfortable about also not talking. We will have a little bit of chat. Also. It's very early. Usually when we arrive and when there is nothing very urgent, sometimes we just we meet at a corner, we cycle here. We exchange maybe one or two sentences anywhere in the water. And then a lot of times our conversations will be like look at that cloud. Or did you feel that jellyfish shuts in your foot?

What is this thing there on the beach? So again, it's a practice of sharpening our senses, but then together. But sometimes we don't talk at all and we just float around and then at some point we get out again. Whereas when you go by yourself, I think it's even more confrontational. You come here with whatever's going on in your day and you're like, oh, here I am, here I am again. Because also that the thing about coming to more or less the same spot every day.

You see that the sea is still the same. It's the same sea, but it looks different every day. And it's a reflection of you. You are the same, but you're also not the same. And especially here, because we're at the sea, there is a very wide perspective. This is something that helps me so much to get out of my head. I think that's also why I'm creating it. It's so many things that are different from taking a cold shower in my small, little cramped house. But everybody does their thing, right? I mean, there's people who have that same feeling or who get those same endorphins, maybe from something else, maybe from running, right? And I think people find their different things also, like what feels good on a personal level and social context. Like you said, some people prefer doing things in a group and then always in a group.

Whereas I'm like, I'm doing this for myself. Sometimes it's nice to have my friend because then you're like, okay, I know she's waiting in the morning, so I'm going to get up. So as a kickstart, as a motivation, I think it's great to do it in a group or maybe with a friend.

Karla: And also, a lot of people have said about the coldness and they don't get the same benefits when they're in the Mediterranean level of cold.

Eva: Yes. Oh, definitely, yes. That feeling of because I never saw it that way, but the first time someone said to me, you're doing some really brave stuff, it's like, why I just go into the water? But then I realized, oh, it is cold. I was like, oh, okay. And then it's almost like what Glenn Doyle says, we can do the hard stuff. And then when you realize I'm brave enough to go into four degrees cold water in winter when there is actually snow and ice on the beach, I have a beautiful picture of me in February last year when it was snowed over. Do you remember? Snow and ice everywhere.

Because on the other side, there's my two kids with their full snow gear, everything, they're building snowmans, and I'm walking into the sea in my bathing suit. And I remember it was thrilling. It was exhilarating. Yes, I felt completely alive. For me, doing this daily is such a luxury. And I know people now that I've been swimming here for longer, I know people who have been doing this for decades and yeah, I can tell also by the way they are and by the way they see certain things in their life.

It is a reflection. It makes you appreciate the small things. It makes you be more relaxed about certain things that are super annoying to others or might have been annoying to you at some point. All right to get in? Yeah, that's great.

Karla: I loved listening back to that. I now feel a trip to the beach coming on this weekend. Thank you so much to Eva for taking the time to sit with me on the beach and for such a wild swim. It really was a very blustery day with these gray crashing waves all around us. It was so invigorating. So thank you, Eva, and thank you for listening and I will see you next next week. Bye.