Today we talked with Chris Ballard about his new book “The Plunge.”
When writer Chris Ballard receives a cryptic text promising to extend his athletic life, he unexpectedly enters a hidden global subculture of cold water plunging and swimming, a parallel athletic universe populated by record-breaking grandmothers, rogue visionaries chasing Olympic legitimacy, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things together.
Over three years of reporting and through hundreds of interviews, Chris Ballard travels from Italy to Ireland, England to Finland, Vermont to Copenhagen, tracing why humans across cultures and centuries have sought out cold water—and what happens when they do.
The Plunge is a story about endurance and community, about the body under stress, and about why, in a climate-controlled and screen-mediated world, so many people are choosing to do hard things collectively.
Chris Ballard, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for two decades, is the award-winning author of four books, including “One Shot at Forever,” and has contributed to National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine.
Reporting “The Plunge” took him from cold plunges to competing alongside Olympians at the Ice Swimming World Championships.
