FIRST PERSO N BLISS IN A BARREL: MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE WIM HOF METHOD By Alyssa Swanson Hamilton The first time I heard the words “Wim Hof,” it was from my brother, Alex, who praised him to the skies several years ago. Alex is a genetic nutrition expert and a fan of pushing limits. Any time he signs me up for an activity (mountain biking, river rafting) and tells me it’s no big deal, I know my life is in danger. He showed me a 2012 Vice documentary called The Superhuman World of Wim Hof: The Iceman about this Dutch extreme athlete, who created the method after a series of impressive feats including swimming under ice and running a half marathon above the Arctic Circle, barefoot and in shorts. “The cold,” Wim said, “brings us back to our inner nature.” His method, he said, also supercharges the immune system by challenging and retraining the body. The rapid, circular breathing and ice baths briefly caught my attention. My brother began the practices in earnest, while I tried the breathing for a couple of weeks, took one cold shower, and then let it go the way of several other trends I’d embraced and abandoned: Keto, Crossfit, once-a-week cheat days. My brain was full. I’m a divorced parent of two nowteenage boys, I have a full-time job, I write stuff, and I have a meadow garden and an elderly dog. Anything beyond those categories tends to fall by the wayside. Enter the Covid Year. I work in communications at a private school. In March 2020, most of us were sent home to work for several months. I set up my office at the kitchen table, and Zoom became the lifeline-dujour. When working from home and noticing — along with all of the things falling apart in various rooms — my haggard appearance on the Zoom camera, I started to take stock of my life. After a tough divorce, I had grown accustomed to utilizing my body as merely a vehicle to get me from A to B. A vehicle I ran into the ground. I was overweight and inflamed, I was tired all of the time, I was working crazy hours and getting rashes from stress.
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Photos courtesy of Alyssa Swanson Hamilton
Some folks have found they became less healthy during our quarantine year (understandable, for a thousand reasons), but for me it was more of a reverse engineering back to wellness. I chose a primarily Paleo diet and started walking daily. Out of necessity, we ate every meal at home. I started to enjoy cooking healthy meals again. Weirdly, I also started craving the idea of ice baths. I wanted to start the breathing exercises again. Something had broken loose inside me. I wanted a dramatic change. I ordered a used wine barrel on eBay, from a winery in Paso Robles. My parents gave it to me for my birthday. I rolled it into the backyard and added 70 pounds of ice and water from the hose. I held off on eating beforehand as these activities are not recommended when your digestion is engaged. I did my breathing first: three rounds of 30 deep rhythmic inhalations and exhalations, each culminating in a one- to twominute breath hold, followed by a 15-second inhale. This breathing technique, also called controlled hyperventilation or power breathing, increases the amount of oxygen available to the body.
