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A Chinese man who sleeps daily for 30 minutes in an ice bath won China's ice bath challenge. Cui Deyi, more known as China's "Polar Bear," played Chinese chess while half of his body was submerged in a tub of ice.
He wore nothing, except a pair of black trunks when he competed on Saturday at the Chinese city of Handan. Although Cui was shivering, he won several rounds of the board game against a local player, reports Agence France Presse.
While half-submerged, the man from Huangshan, Anhui Province, says, "I'm using chess to test my ability to withstand cold, and to see if my thoughts and hand reactions are suffering." For practice, besides his half-hour ice bath sleep, Cui swam in rivers and lakes during winter for about a decade.
Swimming is such extremely cold waters would cause normal people to shiver within five minutes, but Cui could last up to half an hour with no problems. Seeing how his body could endure the cold water made Cui turn the hobby into a profession.
Winter swimming is popular in China because of a local belief that doing so help strengthen the body against illness, notes AFP. Several hundreds of Chinese clubs have been created for the hobby. In Handan, Cui did the challenger beside the half-frozen lake named Yiquan.
Cui had previously competed with Jin Songhao in an ice-submersion challenge in 2013. He won the challenge after staying in neck-level tank for 138 minutes. But he lost in an icy water swimming challenge, when the outside temperature was 2 degrees Celsius, against Dutchman Wim Hof who set a world record in 2011 by reaching 7,400 meters on Mount Everest wearing only a pair of shorts. Hof credits meditation and yoga for his endurance to cold.
