Wim Hof

Cold comfort: can the Wim Hof method combat Covid? He thinks so

I say to Wim Hof, tell me, what’s the closest you’ve ever come to death? It’s a tricky question for a full-time “extremophile” – so many choices! – but we’ve been here chatting in his kitchen in the wet north of the Netherlands all morning, and I’ve already counted 12 showstopping occasions that I would not have survived (including 3 by the age of 11 and one before he was born).

There’s the time he stood in a plexiglass box filled with ice for 112 minutes, and the time his cornea froze over while he was swimming under a sheet of ice in a lake near the Arctic Circle and he lost consciousness just as he was hauled out by his ankle by a rescue diver (all of which have contributed to his sobriquet, the Iceman).

He’s dangled by one finger from a rope suspended between two hot air balloons a mile above ground (“With no shirt on”) and been lost in a whiteout running on Everest – “I was past the ‘death zone’, in nothing but my shorts.” I should probably add here that pretty much all Wim Hof’s stories begin with him taking off his clothes and end with him seconds from death.

So he is thinking. What is the closest? When I arrived, I’d been relieved that he was wearing a T-shirt and was not nipples-out as he famously often is. But now he’s lifting the T-shirt – it’s one of those Thai beach ones popular with gap-year travellers and men who can read your aura – and he shows me a massive scar, an indentation the size of a fist, where a hole was cut at the site of his intestines. And then he tells me the closest he’s come to death, and it is the grisliest and possibly the most disgusting story I have ever heard. But before we get to that, let me tell you more about Wim Hof.

read the full article on The Times