Thursday night was my baptism into THE Ohio State. Tradition has it that the Thursday before the Michigan-Ohio State football game, student go jump into Mirror Lake at midnight, which is located in the center of campus. I do not know why they do it this jump in every year, but it is tradition here and tradition is like crack to a crackhead here, they can not get enough of it. Seeing as I only live once I decided to join in on the festivities and jump in at midnight. Now the week before and even the day before the jump it was highs in the 50's and sunny and at night just maybe a low of 40. Basically not cold at all to jump in, well as luck would have it the night before and all day Thursday was a huge cold front that brought cold rain, sleet, and some snow. I spent all day at work on Thursday trying to bundle myself up and make myself warm enough, where I could not feel the near freezing temperatures of the lake. (side note: As a person from Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, I know a lake when I see one and let me tell you this is no lake it is a pond at best, but don't tell that to the crack heads here because they will get defensive)
After work I got my wardrobe ready and went of to my friends house to get some liquid warmth (wink wink). We were getting anxious to jump in so we decided to go around 11:30pm, now I have never done this before and everyone was telling me stories about how many people do this and how you will get lost from everyone and might not find anyone, well I found a picture from last year to show how many people do this jump.
Well as we walked to the "lake" from my friends house which was about half a mile away we began to realize as the sleet was coming down that the run back from the "lake" was going to be freezing seeing as the temp was hoovering around 32 degrees. As we were getting closer to the "lake" it began to get louder and you saw people who were soaking wet and freezing running back the other way, one guy began tell people, "Don't do it, do not jump in, it is too cold!" This would have scared me a little bit if it was not for the liquid warmth I had been doing for the last 3 hours (wink wink). We finally reached the "lake" and there were thousands of people out there. As we got closer to the edge of the "lake" there was a stampede of people that were rushing into the "lake" and a stampede of people rushing out of the "lake", it was pure choas and I could tell we were going to lose our friends that were going to hold our warm clothes until we came out. We finally stripped out of our warm clothes and I was down only to shorts. Here is the picture before we took the plunge.
(For those who have not seen me in a while, I am the one on the right)
After the picture was taken we took our mad rush to the freezing "lake" and with out hesitation jumped in. The "lake" is only about 3 feet deep and once I was in I began jumping up and down and splashing myself and everyone around me for a good 2 minutes. After the warm adreline rush of jumping in it began to hit me that this water was cold and my feet were the first to tell me (I jumped in bare foot). I was in for about 4 min when I decided it was my time to get out and get warm. I fought the current of people rushing to get into the lake and finally out of the water began looking around for my friends with the warm clothes. I could not find them so I began looking for the people I jumped in with, after looking for a while I finally found Klye (the guy on the left of the photo). We both were freezing and were trying to find the people with our clothes, after about 10 minutes we gave up the search party of trying to find our clothes and made the decision to run back to the house half naked. That was the fastest I have ever run before, espically since I had no shoes on and I was running right through the downtown of campus, along the way people were high fiving me and cheering me on. We finally made it back the house and I quickly dried off and got warm clothes and I now can officially say I jumped in Mirror "Lake".
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