How not to write about freezing your foot half off

Aux Champs Elysées Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa: Ébano

How not to write about freezing your foot half off

Dear Reader,

Wim Hof, called The Iceman, runs half-marathons barefoot in Lapland, goes diving in frozen lakes and climbed almost to the top of Mt. Everest in shorts and sandals. How? Focus and determination, or so he writes. He still gets third-degree frostbite.

The second author, Justin Rosales, wants to learn how to control his body temperature. He contacts Wim Hof and starts training. The two authors take turns telling their story up until the day that Justin, too, can run 5 km in the snow.

Justin Rosales starts with chapters about his childhood and about working at a summer camp. He tells at great length how he went to a seminat about Tummo. This Tibetan technique seems to depend on breathing exercises. It's a pity that Justin Rosales doesn't describe what exactly they did in the seminar. It seems that he managed to raise his body temperature at least once. But he didn't try if he could do it again until weeks later. The most remarkable thing from the Tummo seminar chapter is how a twenty-year-old feels afraid to travel alone. Is it just him or is that normal in the USA? He's not even travelling to a different country.

Wim Hof doesn't start with his childhood. In the first chapter, he's climbing a rock spire in the Pyrenees. I the next few chapters he jumps backwars and forwards in time and tells us some adventures from his youth. It sounds like he's bragging. In fact, every single one of his chapters sounds like bragging. Of course, Wim Hof earned his right to brag. But I wonder if he's a nice person to work with. We'd have to ask the filming crews that travelled with him to Finland, Tibet and the Kilimanjaro.

In one occasion, Wim Hof and a camera team travel to Finland where the Iceman is planning to dive 50 m in a frozen lake. But first, they want to do a test dive where the filming crew can experiment with lighting and camera angles, and where Wim Hof can test if he feels capable of attempting the record. He tells us that he was determined to dive the full 50 m already in the test run. He didn't tell his companions. They were expecting him to surface from under the ice at the 25 m hole, but he swam past, confident that he could find the second hole at 50 m. He missed it. The Iceman almost drowned that day. After some agonizing seconds of swimming around blind under the ice sheet, somebody grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him towards the hole. What's the first thing that Wim Hof did after somebody saved his life? Shout at the whole crew for not having a rescue diver ready. How was a rescue diver going to help when nobody knew where Wim even was? He was lucky that somebody had the right idea and ran to the second hole. Could the rescuer reach Wim Hof by sticking his arm in the water or did he have to jump in? The Iceman doesn't tell us. His chapters are about him and him alone. When errors happen, he blames them on other people. When things go well, he takes all the credit. In awkward English he brags about how many languages he speaks. In a chapter title, he drops the term suomalainen sisu, but can't be bothered to explain what it means or even to spell it right.

Several scientists invited the Iceman into their lab for experiments. They asked him to sit in ice water while they measured his pulse, blood pressure and temperature every few minutes. What did the scientists learn about Wim Hof? He doesn't write anything specific. He does use the words vital organs, veins, immune system, muscles and oxygen, but it sounds like he picked them up somewhere and repeats them like magic spells. He also seems to believe that he can completely control his immune system to resist any and every disease, because of a single sentence that a scientist said after a single experiment. A sentence that Wim Hof must have heard wrong or remembered wrong. Or can anybody explain to me what "the inflammatory marked bodies in the nervus vagus" are?

In the end, both Wim Hof and Justin Rosales write a recipe for the reader. Justin's is a step-by-step guide to slowly get used to the cold. Wim barely explains anything. Instead, he writes about focus and determination and visualization and similar. What he writes about the human body proves that it's been a long time since he learned about basic biology in school.

How did Wim Hof become the Iceman? He tells us how he was ice swimming every winter in his home town, and one day invited a local reporter to watch him. The national news picked up the story, then international film crews started making documentaries. But how did Wim Hof start ice swimming? And why? How much trial and error made him the Iceman? He doesn't say.

There's one thing that Wim Hof explains in detail, after hundreds of pages: his breathing technique. It's a controlled sort of hyperventilation. It doesn't bring more oxygen into your muscles like the Iceman seems to believe; our blood works at almost 100 % saturation when we breathe normally. Fast hyperventilation brings down blood CO2, which is what our body measures to decide when it's time to breathe again. Bring down your CO2 and the urge to breathe comes later. Wim Hof's slow hyperventilation exercise brings up your heart rate. Does it also increase his metabolism? That might be what allows him to resist extreme cold. He does seem to burn lots of calories: not a gram of fat on his body.

Can anyone and everyone become an iceman with Wim's or Justin's methods? Or is Ambrose Bierce right in his Devil's Dictionary:

DAWN, n.
The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise
at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty
stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride
to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years;
the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their
habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons
doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.

We'll have to ask some scientists to find out. It seems that Wim Hof's twin brother Andre Hof, with a completely different lifestyle, can resist cold about the same as Wim if he does his breathing exercises, which points towards their genes making them different from most people. It might also mean that the breathing exercises alone make the difference, not the cold exposure training. Heres a link to some scientific thoughts.

In resume: I wish Justin Rosales had written the entire book. He seems to have some scientific curiosity. And his honest admiration and long-winded side stories read better than Wim Hof's bragging.

Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran