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Adventure swimmers embrace the cold of Lake Ontario

For some swimmers, Coronation Park's lake access keeps beckoning, right through the winter
November Swimming at Coronation Park
November Swimming at Coronation Park | Members of GLOW: Great Lakes Open Water Adventures warm up after their swim. From left to right: Elodie Brunel, Sharon Purdy and Janice Barker, sporting a special after-swim warmup suit.

It’s a sunny weekday morning at Coronation Park in Oakville, Ontario and the shoreline is busy with the usual morning dog walkers and parents pushing small children in strollers. If anyone is surprised to see the four middle-aged women stripping down to their swimsuits on the beach, they are too polite to gawk. Perhaps because of the unseasonably warm weather, the spectacle seems almost unremarkable, but it is the first week of November after all, and the water temperature is no more than 10C.

This particular morning, the swimmers are in the water for about 20 minutes, doing some freestyle laps, trailing fluorescent blow-up floats behind them. These swimmers are part of a growing trend of adventurers getting into the Great Lakes, all year round. 

Janice Barker, 45, and her friends all have different stories to tell of how they came to enjoy the cold water, flip-turning against the unforgiving wall of potential hypothermia. A few short years ago, Barker says she would scroll past pictures of swimmer friends on social media who were posting photos of themselves in the lake in winter. She, too, thought they were crazy. “I don’t even know how it started,” she says. “I just thought I’m just going to try once every calendar month and see if I can survive. Now I really reap the benefits of it. It’s definitely kind of addictive!”

Open water swimmer in Lake Ontario | Janice Barker swims regularly from Coronation Park beach, even in the winter. | Elodie Brunel
Open water swimmer in Lake Ontario | Janice Barker swims regularly from Coronation Park beach, even in the winter. | Elodie Brunel

Bare legs shivering, Sharon Purdy is beaming as she gets changed on shore after her dip. She joined the cold water crew four years ago and says, “this cold swim relaxes the whole day because it makes you so happy!” 

Roberta Harris, an outdoor education specialist and life coach, drives in from Toronto to swim with this group. She has been swimming in open water for ten years and through the winter for five. She swears the cold water has helped relieve her migraines and plantar fasciitis, in addition to lifting her spirits. “I really believe there are so many benefits to it," she says. "Just getting outside, and the camaraderie is awesome.”

Elodie Brunel, 46, explains “there is a psychological aspect -- the fact that you overcome your fears and you’re doing something makes you uncomfortable. After being able to overcome this, it’s exhilarating.” When Brunel moved to Canada from France two years ago with her husband and three children, she specifically selected Oakville because of its open water swim community. “It is way more exciting and fulfilling than I could have imagined,” she says. “I couldn’t have imagined how magical it would be.”

Endorphins and spectacular scenery aside, getting in and out of the water quickly is critical, especially as the air temperatures plunge. The women all have oversized zippered trench coats called a swim robes that provide some shelter to get changed in when the swim is done. A hot drink at the ready in an insulated cup helps too. Many of the swimmers seem to eschew wetsuits, finding them too cumbersome to peel off after, although neoprene booties and gloves might be worn, when the weather is coldest. But today, as with most days, it’s just an ordinary swimsuit.

The women are all part of GLOW: Great Lakes Open Water Adventures, a collective of some 1,700 “wild swimming and marathon swimming enthusiasts.” They have an active Facebook group, where they organize swim meets, beach cleanups and other activities “in the water, on the water and by the water.” Barker acts as the president and one of the cold water swimmers taking the plunge through the winter months.

As Brunel discovered from her Google searches back in France, Oakville, Ontario is a GTA hub for open water swimmers, with one of the first groups of its kind Lake Ontario Swim Team (LOST) swimming from Lakeside Park at the base of Navy Street. According to their website, that group was founded in 2006 by Rob Kent, a local adventurer, marathon swimmer and Waterloo professor as part of his training to swim across the English Channel. Covid restrictions forced the group to cancel its organized events this year. But in 2019, a typical Saturday morning swim in the summer would see around 40 to 50 swimmers, and sometimes as many as a hundred, according to Brett Titus, a marathon runner and triathlete who also runs Bean There, the Downtown Oakville café where swimmers often converge after their open water meets.

Swimming out of the Coronation Park beach, is Barker’s group GLOW, which she helped start along with long distance adventure swimmer, Madhu Nagaraja, and the rest of a team that formed around him when he was training to cross Lake Ontario in 2012. Later the group helped him attempt the frigid Strait of Magellan in 2015 (when he almost succumbed to hypothermia), and celebrated with him when he succeeded on his second attempt in 2017, becoming the first Canadian to do so.

In addition to helping connect open water swimmers, GLOW members hope to change the negative perceptions people have about the Great Lakes and to raise money through their Great Lakes Trust for conservation and restoration projects. Nagaraja wants people who grew up thinking of Lake Ontario as a toxic cesspool to know that’s no longer true. "If you have the courage to eat in the food court, you can come and swim in the Lake!"

Just being seen on the shore getting into the water can start conversations and help people realize that their lake is clean enough to swim in. "Some people who had that courage to come say hi to us have succumbed to become part of the group," Nagaraja says.

“It’s just so much fun,” he says of outdoor swimming and the community that has sprung up around the activity. “It lets me touch my childhood spirit. It gives me the opportunity to be silly and to be operating at the edge of breaking the barrier. When we were kids, we never thought about those things. I’m 50-years-old. You go to work and there are a lot of rules and rigidness. The only rule out here is to be safe. We laugh at each other when we are cold, and then we have a cup of coffee and go home back to reality.”


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