Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME. You can run hot afterwards if you like.
Seriously, you[1] are not going to induce hypothermia in five or ten minutes of cold water. That's just silly. Hypothermia is not a significant risk of ten minutes' swimming in a non-heated pool, for example.
(If you're doing the New Year's Day Alcatraz Swim, of course, you may care to make sure you're warmed properly afterwards.)
[1] in the general case
Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME.
The effect is probably mostly Mammalian diving reflex, which is triggered by colder-than-21°C water contacting the face, with other factors (such as showering your whole body) much less relevant.
Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post. Please disregard it.
I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time. I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do. I want to correct this horrible deficiency.
We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others. I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant. I want more than this!
We already talk, we need an action-based meetup. I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup. It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.
I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day. Nonetheless, we should have something happening every day that we're not spending talking. The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become totally awesome.
Is there anyone else that feels the same? If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?