Leaving it all on the shore: Swimmers brave chilly SF Bay and navigate through addiction

By Katie Hulse • Bay City News

September 29, 2026

ED VALADEZ BEGAN DRINKING at age 13, before most kids have lost all their baby teeth. It was the beginning of a lifelong addiction until three years ago when he plunged into the numbing waters of the San Francisco Bay. He has been sober ever since.

“When people immerse themselves in very cold water, that leads to a gradual increase in the production of feel-good neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine,” said Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic.

Sixty-two-year-old Evan Auchard knows the rise and fall and the ebb and flow of endorphins well. As a former long-distance runner, he knows a natural high that overpowers the sensation of addictive substances.

Around the time that his wife and mother of his two children was diagnosed with early-onset dementia, Auchard also experienced a knee injury that halted his running. He needed a new remedy.

He joined the South End Rowing Club in San Francisco and trained to become an open-water swimmer.

For Auchard, the appeal of cold-water swimming is partly biochemical. He points to his own theories on prolonged dopamine response to cold-water immersion, contrasting it with cocaine.

“When one does cocaine, it’s two and a half times the dopamine in one system, and it only lasts for nine minutes,” said Auchard. “But when you swim in cold water, that’s two and a half times dopamine. It lasts for four to six hours, and there’s no drop-off.”

Since 1873, San Franciscans have been swimming into the Bay from the South End Rowing Club. It is a historic athletic organization in the city’s Aquatic Park, just west of Fisherman’s Wharf, and it sits next to the Dolphin Swimming & Boating Club, founded four years later. The social clubs around open-water swimming are a cultural legacy of San Francisco. They are also a nexus for people who find open-water swimming helpful in addiction recovery.

Throwing cold water on addiction

Dr. Sarah Rosenwohl-Mack, assistant professor of family and addiction medicine at UC San Francisco, is an expert in addiction medicine. She said that the correlations between swimming in cold water and the science of addiction recovery are the “least studied.”

“Especially when done in groups,” Rosenwohl-Mack said. “You have the addictive effect of exercise and social connection.”

Valadez’s own childhood involved alcohol and the beginnings of a lifelong addiction. He explains his addiction as something that was consistently present and sometimes even “sustainable,” meaning that just because someone with an alcohol addiction can provide for themselves and show up to work does not mean they are not hurting themselves or others.

In some ways, people going through addiction withdrawal are compelled to relearn themselves and their own discomfort.

“When people first stop using substances, they experience pain, the pain of having to tolerate the messiness of emotions that they’ve been ignoring by using substances … there’s a kind of a flooding, and it has a lot of shame,” said Lembke from the Stanford clinic. “A part of what’s commonly referred to as hormesis is a branch of science, showing that when you expose an organism to mild to moderate doses of a toxic or painful stimulus, you actually make the organism more resilient.”

That is an idea close to Valadez’s heart.

Recovery Dharma is a nontheistic recovery program that relies on Buddhist principles. The organization played a huge role in Valadez’s sobriety. He explained that in Recovery Dharma, you’re just a person who is navigating life and all the suffering that comes with it. When Valadez began open-water swimming in the tributaries around Inverness, he said he became “really fearless.”

He described his journey to sobriety as a mountain of reconciliation with the people in his life whom he hurt. Open-water swimming gave him a piece of his life that felt well within his power. The only pain that could be felt was his own.

“It was nice to be, like, in control of a situation that is challenging to me,” Valadez said. “No pun intended, but literally take the dive, which is very much like addiction recovery, right?”

Discomfort does wonders

Addiction physician Rosenwohl-Mack understands how the simple challenge of cold-water swimming can also simplify the challenges of life.

“I think anyone who’s done cold-water swimming knows that when you jump into the water, it is so cold that you really can’t think of anything else,” she said. “There is something about being, you know, an animal amongst animals.”

Since Valadez is earlier in his sobriety journey, many of the wounds are still very open and fresh. Through his Buddhist practices and swimming, the pain of sobriety has become more manageable.

Valadez said, “Cold water is to me, it always reminds me of that, yes, this is uncomfortable but it’s not going to be my demise.”

Lembke describes people with addictive tendencies as being “strivers.” They take everything in life a little far. They don’t know the line. They don’t know when to stop striving, and nature can push their minds and bodies further. And when undergoing addiction recovery, it helps if the hobby or recreational pastime takes on a striving element. This can be reflected in Auchard’s journey.

“I always swam, but I never swam to be a swimmer. I swam to be a better runner,” said Auchard. “When you have an addict-alcoholic brain, it’s like if something is good, more is better.”

Auchard loved long-distance running because it was inescapable. He used to get dropped off in Lafayette and run to Berkeley.

“I would start walking with the understanding that this was a really stupid idea,” he said. “And then about half a mile into the walk, I realized, well if I don’t get running it’s gonna take a while. And then by about 3 miles, or by the time I reached Fish Ranch Road, I was like, oh my God, this was a brilliant idea.”

The best part about it is that it creates pain that is tolerable in a controlled environment. Auchard mused about how he would make it to Grizzly Peak in Berkeley and look at the view. It is the same peak where his father proposed to his mother.

After his knee injury, he took to swimming laps in a pool. He took to the redundancy, the dizzying retracing, swimming in the same lane like a sidewalk that never ends. He expressed that it was never ideal, but it did make him feel better.

In a swimming pool, the ledge is far too near. And one day, when Auchard was swimming laps, his friend told him that he was going to swim to Alcatraz.

This friend has a history of addiction, lost part of his leg in an alcohol-related accident, is an open-water swimmer and is a phenomenal confidant. Auchard thought he was crazy.

“And before I could come up with a smart-ass response, he knocked on his fake leg and said, ‘If I can do it, you can do it,’” Auchard said.

In the middle of the Bay, the pool ledge is pretty far away. Auchard talked about how, even when swimming for practice or for what he has been working toward, there is no way of not wanting to swim back in while passing the mouth of Aquatic Park toward the South End Rowing Club. But not turning in is where the good stuff is. Not turning in is saying yes to staying sober, saying yes to the pain.

Breaking barriers

Auchard walked around the South End Rowing Club and greeted his buddies. It seemed to be his exact element. He was totally comfortable.

“In the five years that I’ve been doing this, my friends at the South End and particularly my friends who are in recovery … it’s like they’ve been my friends all their life,” Auchard said.

And as he got suited up to do his daily swim, he still felt the jitters.

Judy Irving, who has been swimming in San Francisco Bay for 42 years, said the South End club has always been predominantly men who used swimming as a stress release.

Irving is also a filmmaker and creator of the film “Cold Refuge.” The film centers on how Bay Area open-water swimming changes people’s approach to serious life events and barriers to success.

Irving said, “And a lot of the men had started swimming because they had alcohol problems … doing something for yourself would help you withstand the pressures that you would feel from other parts of your life.”

Additionally, Rosenwohl-Mack grew up swimming all over the Bay Area and is no stranger to the magic of it all. Open-water swimming in the Bay Area is more than a hobby. It is a tool. The truth of the matter is that open-water swimming is painful. It is freezing, dangerous and unpredictable. Some swims are so arduous that escort kayakers follow the swimmers for safety. Especially in the Bay Area, with its many shipping routes and marine life, it is a genuinely perilous and risky pastime.

Tolerable discomfort is essentially what needs to be mastered to manage the pain of withdrawal and sobriety. The pain of the water can make all the real-life pain more doable. It puts it in perspective.

Auchard agrees. When it comes to mental toughness, he said, it would be easy to say you don’t feel like exercising in a pool.

“You’re always by the edge of the pool,” he said, comparing it to open-water swimming. “You would be 20 laps from the edge in the Bay. You can’t give up.”

Close to home

Rosenwohl-Mack describes the medical version of this as “distress tolerance.” “Choosing to embrace, choosing to welcome specific types of physical discomfort, and building your ability to tolerate that discomfort,” she said.

Valadez knows distress tolerance and the maintenance of pain as well. He said, “The thing that we are doing in this practice is learning to sit with discomfort.”

“I’ve cried so much in those last two years, definitely more than I have probably in my entire life, as an immigrant man of color,” Valadez said. “I was not taught to share any kind of discomfort or accept it. You know, you have to rise above. You have to be the best, right? Because life is already hard enough.”

It is unique that, in the Bay Area, people are offered this liminal space to feel pain and work on themselves. It truly is an enclosed world where you can step outside of society, outside of failure, outside of your health, and demand something extraordinary from your body and nature.

Auchard told a story about the time he flew to England with a swimming group to do a big swim in the English Channel. He invested time and money with the expectation that it would be a revolutionary swim, a monstrous challenge. But he returned with an understanding of just how distinctive and remarkable swimming in the Bay is.

“So, it took me going to England to realize, I don’t really need to leave the state of California,” Auchard said. “And it made me realize, I do not need to leave the San Francisco Bay to be ultra challenged. We literally have it all here.”