There was a layer of ice across it, and driven by 'what if?', he just stripped off and stepped in. Wim first felt compelled to step into icy water when he was 17, and walking across a park in his native Amsterdam. For one hour! Twelve years ago I was making seven Euros an hour. 'But just today a big company asked me to fly to England to give a one-hour talk, and they said they will pay me 50,000 Euros for it. 'I was this crazy person who did crazy things,' he beams.
A world which was once deemed perfectly nuts, he admits. Tomorrow, the Wim Hof Method arrives in the UK with a prime-time BBC show, Freeze The Fear With Wim Hof, where he plunges celebrities including Alfie Boe, Gabby Logan and Tamzin Outhwaite into his world. Joseph Fiennes is possibly sitting in an ice-bath at this very moment, in training to play him in a forthcoming biopic. With millions of devoted followers, he is something of a god in Hollywood, where his fans include Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon. He is also into breathing techniques, yoga, extreme balancing and motivational speaking, and has wrapped this all up into the highly marketable Wim Hof Method. Hof is an extreme endurance enthusiast whose antics emerging himself in ice have won him 26 Guinness World Records. Bear Grylls looks like a staid marketing executive compared with this guy.
Where to look?!Īfterwards, he beams into the camera, all beard and beany hat ('my wife loves me in my beany hat'). He performs the splits on our Zoom call to illustrate how much verve you end up with, in your 60s, if you follow his methods. His wish is to live, 'to really live', he tells me.
The 62-year-old grandfather, who goes by the nickname The Iceman, says the opposite is true. How else to explain his history of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in just shorts and sandals, running a half-marathon above the Arctic Circle barefoot, or going swimming in water so cold his corneas froze? Wim Hof sounds like a man with a death wish.
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