Two Mount Desert Island women are competing for the first time in the International Ice Swimming Championships in Trentino, Italy, this week.
Puranjot Kaur, a College of the Atlantic graduate and staffer, is best known for her attempts in 2020 and 2021 to swim all the way around Mount Desert Island. Mariah Reading is a Bangor native and a longtime cold-weather swimmer, park ranger and artist who was the artist in residence at Acadia National Park in 2019.
Kaur and Reading are two of around 40 ice swimmers from the U.S. who will compete in the championships alongside swimmers from more than 40 other countries. Other U.S. competitors include Keaton Jones, a swimmer who competed in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris and set world records at the 2024 ice swimming championships. The competition begins Tuesday and runs through Saturday.
Reading is swimming the 100m backstroke, 50m and 100m breaststroke, 50m and 100m butterfly and 200m individual medley, while Kaur is swimming the 50m, 100m and 250m freestyle, and the 50m and 100m breaststroke.
Reading said that she and Kaur attended the opening ceremonies on Monday, and that the energy and excitement was over the top.
“To be in such a stunning place swimming with similarly weird folks from around the world is an experience I’ll never forget,” Reading said. “I feel so lucky and privileged to be a part of this team and the ice swimming community in general.”
The competition, organized by the International Ice Swimming Association, has been held since 2015 in a different city each year. The races happen in a 50-meter swimming pool with water at a temperature below 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Over the course of five days, hundreds of athletes compete over various distances ranging from 50 to 1000 meters, in all swimming disciplines.
Kaur and Reading are part of an all-women cold water swimming team called Cold Tits, Warm Hearts, a group of around 60 who during the colder months take frigid dips in the waters around MDI. Reading told Down East magazine in 2023 that they are “Hearty broads. So many people come to MDI in the summer, when we’re like, ‘Boo, it’s too balmy. We want snow and to go dipping.’”
Kaur told the Bangor Daily News in 2022 that the cold water swimming community on MDI has been growing and that being a part of the group has been fulfilling both physically and personally.
“It really fills me up personally,” Kaur said. “There’s been more and more interest in cold water swimming in this area. It’s just really fun to see it growing.”
