On a frosty day last July at the 90th parallel, Lewis Gordon Pugh stripped down to his Speedo and dove into the only ocean he had not yet forged: the Arctic. With the water temperature a refreshing 28 degrees — the coldest a human has ever swum — and his life in limbo, he spent the next 18 minutes staving off chunks of ice, hungry polar bears, and terminal hypothermia to become the first human to swim a kilometer at the North Pole.
Hearing the 39-year-old Brit recount his experience over lunch at the somewhat less extreme Hudson Hotel in Manhattan, it's impossible not to shiver. "Eighteen minutes feels like 18 days," he says, sipping a Bloody Mary. "The pain is peripheral to begin with, and then a deep gnawing in your bones. Absolutely throbbing. I can withstand it for such a long time." But his survival was more than a matter of threshold: Even before Pugh gets wet, he has trained his body — as if half-machine, half-merman — to spike to 101 degrees, a phenomenon called "anticipatory thermogenesis," aka gimme fever.
Born near Plymouth, England, Pugh went away to boarding school at age six ("The only time I ever saw my dad cry") and later moved to South Africa, where as a teenager he swam the shark-infested waters off Robben Island. He attended the University of Cape Town, read law at Cambridge, and even worked as a maritime lawyer, but, wanting to make more of a splash, made more than 17 long-distance swims over the past two decades — everywhere from the Thames to the Maldives to Antarctica. He now lives mostly in London, and his expeditions are so hazardous that he prohibits the women in his life — his sister, his mother, and his girlfriend, a South African stylist — from tagging along. "I never want them to see if something were to go wrong," he says.
To ensure that it doesn't, Pugh spends his time chilling in polar lakes, fortifying his six-foot- one, 200-lb frame, and girding his mind. "The amount of time I spend doing mental training versus physical training is 70/30," he says. "The quality of my thoughts is so important during these swims. If you start thinking, 'Shit, I'm cold,' within a second it'll be digging into you." With the help of a mental coach, Pugh clears his head of negativity while plumbing the deeper gray matter. "The mind is like an iceberg," he says, quoting Freud's famous, if perhaps slightly phallic, observation. "10 percent conscious, 90 percent subconscious. If you start working in the subconscious, you can really go. It's what athletes aren't doing." Of course, there's also the science of sound: To fire himself up, Pugh listens to Eminem and P. Diddy. "You can't get in the water with the Supremes."
But if masochists each have distinct reasons for stretching the parameters of pain — firewalkers do it for faith, explorers for ego, rodeo clowns for the girls — Pugh is all about Mother Earth and Mother England. What better way to bring attention to the melting ice caps than to jump into a patch of open water? His eco-nationalism is spurred on by his spotter, JXrgen Amundsen, whose ancestor Roald Amundsen beat Britain's Captain Scott to the South Pole in 1912. "I thought about giving up at the 250-meter mark, the 500, 750, and even the 800 mark," Pugh says of his North Pole dip, "but I thought, 'You can't give up in front of a Norwegian! There's too much polar history between our countries.'"
