Taranaki teen sets new world record
Some of Madeline Hobo’s friends got cars for their 16th birthday – she got an old freezer.
The freezer is for Madeline, from Stratford, to sit in as part of her training for ice swimming, which she took up earlier this year.
At her first competition in July, she broke the Under 18 world record for 500m at the New Zealand Ice Swimming Championships in Alexandra in the South Island.
Her almost instant success in the sport prompted her to set up a Give a Little page to help her get to Italy to swim in the world champs in January.
The New Zealand championships were the first time Madeline had competed in ice swimming.
The water in the pool for her 500m race was 2.1C and the air temperature was -4C.
“You don’t warm up as you swim, you just get colder,” she said.
“But the higher your stroke rate the better you are because you’re trying to mitigate the cold with your body temperature by keeping a high strike rate.
“Also, the faster you swim the faster you can get out.”
“Everything” goes numb, the body goes red and once she got out of the pool walking was really hard, Hobo said.
“I get quite dizzy, especially after the longer races, and then getting changed is also quite hard because the fingers, kind of like the toes, are really cold, numb, sore.”
Madeline wore togs, goggles, a cap and a safety belt, which is used to get a swimmer out of the water if they get into difficulty.
And volunteers were at the side of the pool, wearing wetsuits, ready to assist if needed.
Before she could enter, Madeline, who is in year 12 at New Plymouth Girls’ High School, had to get a full medical exam, including an ECG. That’s valid for 12 months.
At the event she had to get signed off by volunteers in the medical tent where they checked her blood pressure, and she had to warm up in the medical tent after the race.
Warming up has to be done very carefully. No hot showers, no hot drinks. Getting dry and out of your togs is the first priority, she said.
“And then lots of merino as a base layer, then lots of layers and hot water bottles are OK too, but they have to have a cover on them and they have to be over the first layer of clothes – so no direct contact with the skin.”
Madeline spent 40 minutes in the medical tent after her 500m swim and while most people recovered in a chair she climbed into bed.
“I was really worried I had gone over the top and I was going to have some weird bodily reaction but I actually didn’t. I think I was more OK than I thought.”
Only mildly hypothermic, mum Lorna Hobo joked.
Lorna was aware the sport was dangerous, which was why she took about a month to decide to let her daughter take up the sport.
“Her 500m race was really quite terrifying because I knew she would be going to maximum length of time in the water that she could really cope with.”
Lorna went into the changing rooms, because it was too hard for her to watch, she said.
“I came back for the end of the race.
When she came out of the water I was crying because I was worried, and because she was out of the water.
“It was overwhelming emotion.”
As well as the 500m, Madeline also competed in shorter races – 250m freestyle, 200m individual medley, 100m freestyle, and 100m breaststroke.
She didn’t find out she’d broken the 500m world record until about an hour after her race.
“I think the record was 7.49 minutes. My time was seven minutes and 14.5 seconds.
“Now I would like to get under seven at the worlds.”
But during the race, all Madeline was thinking about was finishing.
“I got to the 450 mark and I never thought I would get so close to finishing a race and think of pulling out and couldn’t make the last 50, but I did.”
Madeline started swimming as a sevenyear-old with the club now called the Stratford Flyers.
But by the time she was about 14 she didn’t really enjoy pool swimming any more, so she moved on to open water swimming.
And then she heard about ice swimming and thought she may as well have “a crack at it”.
“So, for my 16th birthday, all my friends were getting cars and I got a freezer.”