It’s November 2020, eight months into the pandemic, and three of us are swimming in a line in 55 degree water off the coast of Stonington. I have never in my life swum outside this far into the fall.

We are about half a mile into our swim and we stop to rest for a moment at a floating white buoy. We take in the scene: no boats, nobody back on the beach, nothing but water all the way to the horizon.

It’s exhilarating being out here by ourselves on a perfect autumn afternoon. And it’s no place I ever imagined I’d be.

I have always been a pool swimmer, grinding out workouts, keeping track of yardage, following the black line lap after lap. Last spring, when COVID closed all the public pools, I bought myself an above-ground kiddie pool roughly the size of a parking space, maybe three feet deep, filled it with freezing April hose water, tethered myself to the house with a bungee cord, and swam in place for 10 minute intervals until the chill chased me out.

I started to notice a definite uptick in mood following these cold plunges. Recall this was the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was feeling angsty. Anything that caused the pendulum to swing in the positive direction was absolutely to be embraced.

In May, some of my master’s teammates started swimming in local lakes. The idea of actually moving through the water after a month of stationary swimming was exciting.

We would meet in the evenings after work, keep our six-foot distance, and swim across the lake trailing brightly colored buoys so we could be seen from the fishing boats. Sometimes we brought kickboards and paddles and tried to do a real workout, but mostly we just swam.

We’d pick a landmark either in the water or on the shore, swim to it, and swim back. I grew to love the long rhythm of it, the lack of walls, the meditative rush of water into and out of my ears.

Turning my head to breathe I would see trees and houses and distant hills.

It was a lovely way to swim through the summer, but when fall rolled around, and the pools started to re-open, this group moved back inside. Unbelievably, I was hooked on the open water. When my friend, Rick, told me he planned to swim outside all winter, I was game to give it a try.

Cold water swimming was becoming something of a pandemic fad. It seemed that everybody with a podcast was doing it.

How awful could it be?

Rick and his wife, Laura, like to swim in the Sound, which I had not yet done with any regularity. Jellyfish and sharks were enough of a deterrent, not to mention my total ignorance of local currents and tides. By the time I met up with Rick and Laura to swim, however, it was November and the water off Groton and Stonington was largely free from all marine life.

The salt water took some getting used to, as did the bracing temperatures, which I’m guessing were somewhere in the mid to low 50s. I wore an old sleeveless wetsuit left over from my triathlon days. Rick and Laura were better prepared with thermal neoprene caps, gloves and socks, all of which I eventually acquired at various end-of-season sales, as well as a full thermal wetsuit.

Word got around that the three of us were still swimming outside, and we picked up two more hearty souls: Meaghan, a true northerner with thick Maine blood and a sterling constitution, and Jay, a big dude with a ready smile and a funky two-wetsuit set-up.

Meaghan set a goal to swim every day in December, and we did. We swam through the Nor’easter that hit just before the holidays; we swam early on Christmas morning in a warm windy rain; and on New Year’s Eve we toasted our month-long adventure in the beach parking lot sporting our wetsuits and parkas.

Swimming in 40 degree water is an exercise in accepting the unacceptable. Walking in from the shore covered in neoprene is not terribly shocking. You can sense the cold on your feet and ankles, but it feels far away. Once you’re up to your waist, however, the chill sea water starts seeping in through the wetsuit zipper and settling in the small of your back, and it’s time to get going before you lose your nerve.

You need to swim the first few strokes with your head up, because the reflexive response to all this cold is to gasp and pull in big gulps of air. Full throated whoops help dampen the shock, as does kicking like crazy.

The first few strokes are the most difficult, because your body is not yet on board with your brain. The body resists; you feel weak and exhausted. But after 100 yards or so, the body calms down and recalculates, which gives you the opening you need to put your face in the water and really swim.

Every nerve ending in your naked skin radiates cold fire, but again, you must endure. You breathe every stroke until your face calms down and goes numb, then breathe every three or four. Once you’re at this stage, you have about 20 minutes of good swimming before your body irretrievably rebels.

It is a strange sensation to be immersed in coldness, but not feel the cold. It’s a weird homeostasis in which the heat you are putting out perfectly offsets the cold coming in.

There is something invigorating about that, like you are cheating death. All you hear is the rhythmic watery swoosh of your arms repeatedly breaking the surface. All you can see through your foggy goggles is the light on the water, the faint egg wash of the distant shore, and your friends’ fluorescent swim buoys.

When the water is shallow and the wind calm, you can also see the landscape of cold rocks and sand below you and the occasional kelp field swaying with the currents. The whole experience is otherworldly, a muted bubble with only a few sensations breaking through: filtered light and a womb-like gurgling hush.

But it can’t last forever. The cold always wins. Honestly, the only genuinely unpleasant step in this whole exercise is getting from the water back to the car.

Groping at zippers with frozen, useless fingers, the agony of pulling off the recalcitrant wetsuit while fully exposed to the wind, the rush to get into dry clothes while shivering uncontrollably in the back of the car. All of that I could do without. But that is the price you pay for the full on endorphin rush, and the sipping of hot tea from a thermos in the icy parking lot, laughing your head off at the inexplicable silliness of what you have just so crazily done.

Rick has continued to swim outside daily, and as of this writing has not broken his streak. The rest of us join in when we can.

When the water temperature dropped down to 36 degrees in February, I could no longer put my face in the water so I swam head-up, but now that things are slowly warming, I’m back to my regular stroke.

For once in my life I am looking forward to summer, to shedding the wetsuit, to swimming free.

Pam Dolan lives in Mystic.