Queen of the Cold
We all need a Jules King in our lives. A woman whose glass isn’t just full, it overflows with positivity. Determined. Life-affirming. Inspirational. A woman who overcomes so much every day to achieve the most simple things we can sometimes take for granted.
If you’d met Jules before she found the cold, you wouldn’t recognise her. Living with undiagnosed Parkinson's disease for 16 years she was in and out of a wheelchair and had days where she couldn’t move.
After a friend read about the huge dopamine hit the cold delivers with every dip, he challenged Jules to do it every day for two weeks to see how it could help her symptoms. Challenge accepted, but with little hope, she headed off to her hometown beach to begin her journey. In her own words, ‘When I got out, oh my good god, the pain in my legs just disappeared. I know what normal people feel like.’
Today, Jules is an adaptive CrossFit athlete using a combination of training, medication, and her very own Brass Monkey Barrel to combat her Parkinson’s symptoms. The cold dips help control her speech and relieve the “insane” pain in her legs, giving her energy and a smile that lights up the entire CrossFit gym.
The cold is my teacher series follows 12 amazing individuals and groups of fascinating people up and down the UK whose love of cold water has brought them together and inspired these incredible stories.
Continue exploring these fascinating stories below:
The Ice Viking
Fenwick Ridley is a titan. A Team GB Ice swimmer. An entrepreneur. A master of his mind and a lover of the ice. As he describes it, his body is “built for the cold”.
The Dales Dipper
Les Peebles is a wild swimming guide and the proud founder of a 14,000-strong community calledThe Dales Dippers. But that wasn’t always the case. Les used to be a joiner and a painter. He wasn’t particularly depressed or stressed in life but he felt something was missing.
The Bluetits
“It’s much more difficult to do something that scares you when you’re alone. But when you have a community of people around you, it gets a little more comfortable for your brain to do whatever it is.” That’s how Sian Richardson, founder of The Bluetits, describes the wild swimming phenomenon she set up over 10 years ago.
