It’s going to be cold.
I remembered that first day. I knew it would be cold. I wanted to psych myself up even more to help me deal with the cold. I knew if I could build my expectation up enough for the cold, it might, just might, not feel quite as bad. So I prepared for the worst.
And… it still felt freezing. The water on my chest made me gasp involuntarily.
That’s not going to work.
Moving past plan A, the “I’ll just get it over with quick by getting the water all over me quick” plan, I transitioned to the more subtle approach, the approach I’d started the day before.
I hosed off my feet first. My feet felt cold but not painfully cold. Then I moved up to my calves. That felt colder. When the water hit my thighs, I felt pretty close to what I felt when it hit my chest a few minutes earlier.
Instead of giving up like the day before, though, I moved back down to my calves for a couple seconds. And then I slowly moved back up again.
I continued like this – a few inches up, one inch down, a few inches up, one inch down – all the way up to my head. It took forever, which probably just made me feel colder overall, but I finished with a fairly decent shower. One real one down.
