It’s a Sunday morning, and Michelle and I are wandering through an upscale shopping complex. As far as we can tell, we’re the only people here who possess any body fat whatsoever. Also I am the only male. All the other people here are very fit women in their 20s who are wearing leggings and sports bras and carrying mandatory large-capacity water bottles, without which they could at any moment suddenly dehydrate and shrivel up like spandexed prunes.
The women are going into gleaming fitness studios with names like SolidCore, HardCore, CorePower, MaxCore, MegaCore, EnCore, The CoreStore, Cores ‘n’ More, The Core Corps, The CorePoration, CorePoral Punishment and Don CoreLeone. It goes without saying that all these women have tremendous cores, cores that could stop a freight strain. Whereas Michelle and I aren’t sure we even have cores. We were both born before the human core was discovered by fitness scientists. So we’re feeling wildly out of place in the upscale shopping complex. We feel like a pair of manatees, lumbering around with our flabby coreless bodies and our loose-fitting clothing. We don’t even have water bottles. At any moment we could be arrested by the Hydration Police.
We’re here to do a cold plunge. This is a hugely popular fitness and wellness activity wherein you deliberately, without a legitimate excuse such as that you are a male third-class passenger on the Titanic, immerse your entire body in ice-cold water. The cold plunge is not a new concept: It actually started centuries ago in Scandinavia, where the Vikings, in preparation for pillaging the rest of Europe, would build up their toughness by plunging into the frigid waters of the fjords. Most of them died within minutes, which is why Scandinavia now has universal healthcare. But the cold-plunge tradition somehow survived, and lately it has become a major trend, which is why Michelle and I decided to give it a try.
Actually, that’s a lie. Michelle did not want to do a cold plunge: It was entirely my idea. I thought it might be an interesting Substackable experience, as well as a way for me to get revenge on Michelle for something she did to me in the summer of 1997. This happened in Calistoga, a small touristy city in California’s Napa Valley, where Michelle — in her defense, she had downed almost an entire bottle of wine — insisted that we take mud baths.
The mud bath is a wellness treatment wherein you get completely naked and climb into a tub filled with what appears to be steaming-hot cow poop. The people who run the baths claim this is a special kind of wellness mud that allegedly causes you to sweat out your toxins, but what they DON’T explain is: What happens to the toxins sweated out by all the previous tub occupants? Because as far as I could tell they don’t change the mud between customers.
So basically you pay money to spend 15 minutes, which feels MUCH longer, submerged in this hot stanky toxic bog. Then you get out and hose each other off, which is, trust me, the least romantic thing you will ever do as a couple. Also it’s virtually impossible to get all the mud out of your various nooks and crannies. Especially your crannies. It’s been 29 years now, and I am STILL finding traces of cranny mud.
I have never completely forgiven Michelle for the mud bath, so she felt obligated to humor me about the cold plunge. And thus we find ourselves, on this Sunday morning, wandering through the upscale shopping complex teeming with fit hydrated legging women with cores of steel.
We finally locate our destination, a wellness studio that I have selected via a vetting process that involved nearly 15 seconds of Googling. We are greeted by a very nice young attendant, who gives us a tour of the facilities, which include a variety of modern wellness technologies, such as this therapeutic light box:
The way this therapy works is, you lie down in the box, and they close the lid and turn on these special lights, and you immediately scream to be let out. At least that’s how it would work for me.
The most impressive wellness apparatus that the attendant shows us is the flotation chamber, a.k.a. sensory deprivation tank. This is an enclosed tub shaped like a giant egg, filled with warm water that contains a lot of dissolved Epsom salt, so it buoys you up.
The idea is, you get into the tank and float peacefully and buoyantly around for a while, completely isolated from all outside stimuli, so that you’re totally calm and relaxed when your therapeutic session ends and you raise the lid and find that you have been teleported via Intergalactic DoorDash to the planet Vogodor, where Epsom salt is considered a gourmet seasoning, and you’re just in time for dinner.
No, seriously, that’s not what happens, as far as I know.
In any event, Michelle and I are not here for sensory deprivation: We’re here for what’s called “contrast therapy,” wherein you expose your body to the extreme heat of a sauna, followed immediately by the icy cold of a plunge tub. We’re paying $99 to do this: $69 for me, and, as part of a Special Offer, $30 for an additional person. I signed up for this yesterday, and Michelle agreed to be the additional person, although when I woke up this morning, the first thing she told me was that we might die. Needless to say she learned this by researching cold plunges on the Internet. This is always a bad idea, because according to the Internet, everything can kill you. Try this simple experiment: Go to the AI of your choice and ask it if some seemingly harmless thing can be fatal, stipulating that you want a yes-or-no answer. By way of demonstration, here’s an exchange I just had with ChatGPT:
Yes: A yo-yo can kill you. As can a spatula, presumably. It must be true because it’s on the Internet. Which is where Michelle discovered, while I was sleeping, that a cold plunge can over-stress your heart in a fatal manner. She informed me of this cheerful fact the instant I woke up, before I had coffee (which I’m sure is also potentially fatal). I told her that she was free to back out, but I planned to go through with the cold plunge, for the same reason that those courageous dead Vikings did so long ago, namely, so I could write about it on Substack.
In the end Michelle agreed to stick with the plan. But we’re both a bit nervous as the attendant completes our tour of the wellness studio and shows us to the private room where we’ll be doing our contrast therapy. It’s a pleasant space containing a small sauna and a cold-plunge tub. Before leaving us, the attendant explains the therapy procedure, then adjusts the sauna temperature, which is usually set at “Poultry,” but since we’re newbies, she dials it all the way down to “Veal.”
I’m exaggerating, but not by much. The sauna is 165 degrees. It is, by far, the hottest environment I have ever experienced outside of the New York City subway system. Michelle handles the sauna easily; she contends that it’s only slightly warmer than the actual Miami temperature in August. But I am dying. I am sweating out toxins that I ingested during the Clinton administration. I barely make it through the recommended ten minutes, then barge out of the sauna and immediately plunge my body into the cold tub, which is — talk about contrast — 48 degrees.
This is the moment of truth — the moment when, as a man, I do not want to appear weak in front of the woman I love even though she once got hammered and made me bathe in hot cow shit. I do not want to whimper like a baby when my body suddenly and violently goes from being way too hot to being way too cold. No, I need to be stoic, strong and, above all, manly, at the crucial moment when the freezing water envelops my nether regions, a moment captured forever in this unretouched photograph:
OK, full disclosure, there might have been some retouching. That’s how I want to look as I plunge into the tub. Here’s how I actually look:
So it is not my manliest moment. In my defense, I am feeling intense pain, coupled with the alarming sensation that some of my key bodily organs are handling the crisis by rapidly transitioning from external to internal, if you catch my drift. Within literally seconds my feet are completely numb. If some kind of tub-dwelling arctic piranhas are down there eating my toes, I have no way to know.
The good news is, the Internet notwithstanding, I am still alive. This is also the bad news, because it means I am continuing to have the cold-tub experience. I experience it for two excruciating minutes, which is the recommended minimum, then struggle my way out of the tub, which is difficult because at this point the piranhas have consumed everything up to my navel.
Michelle goes into the tub next, but she lasts only a minute and 15 seconds. So I could point out here that, of the two of us, I am 45 seconds manlier. But I am above that.
Was the cold plunge worth it? Hard to say. It’s definitely invigorating, but it’s not a totally positive kind of invigorating. It’s more of a thank-God-that’s-over kind of invigorating, similar to how you’d feel if somebody shot an apple off your head, or threw an ax at you and just missed. I will say that from a strictly hygienic standpoint, the cold plunge is better than the mud bath. But I’m pretty sure I’ll never do either of these wellness activities again. I apparently have a low tolerance for wellness.
And now, speaking of invigorating, it’s time to hear from you paying subscribers, without whom I would never have taken this plunge. Today we have three scientific polls. Also at the end we have a bonus music video. But first the polls:
Bonus Music Video
Many commenters to last week’s Substack reacted with varying levels of revulsion to the YouTube video of Liberace and the Young Folk performing “Feelin’ Groovy” on the Red Skelton Hour in 1968. Several commenters recalled another musical performance from roughly that era that achieves a similar level of WTF-ness, namely, the singing duo Gail Farrell and Dick Dale performing “One Toke Over the Line” on the Lawrence Welk Show in 1971. You definitely should NOT watch it. Here it is:
When I was younger I went to a Jewish ritual bath - a mikva - that the famed Rabbi the Baal Shem Tov supposedly used in Europe. To give you the full experience from his lifetime, there is no heating in the mikva, which in the Ukrainian winter, meant the water was frozen. Not metaphorically frozen. Frozen. They had installed some sort of filtration system to make sure it didn't freeze fully but there were small chunks of ice in the water.
I remember dipping my toe in and gasping. My heart almost stopped. My companions, friends far younger and wiser than I, decided not to go in. I felt that I certainly didn't travel to the depth of Ukraine for nothing and decided - using the impeccable logic only a teenager has - that if the water was too cold to wade into, I'd JUMP right in. Which I promptly did.
It was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. My whole body felt like it was attacked by a herd of wooly mammoths. Since by Jewish law for the immersion to be considered valid your head has to go underwater, I ducked underneath all whole flailing gasping and nearly dying like spider that has fallen into a toilet while flushing. One thought flashed in my mind: "so this is why the Baal Shem Tov is dead".
My friends lifted me out and wrapped me in a hot towel and rushed me to the adjoining sauna room. (That this existed should have been a red flag.) And then, while recovering from the massive shock my body's nervous system had just received - shivering shaking, and slurring my words through blue lips, I looked at friends and I told them: "That was awesome! Why don't you guys go in too?"
.
"...they don’t change the mud between customers." An apt description of so much in life today.