“I’ve taken the decision I don’t like eggs.”
I had been talking to Sara Barnes, a Lake District-based writer, outdoor enthusiast and passionate cold water swimmer, about what she had learned about life after surviving two near-death experiences on the operating table.
“I’m 64,” she said. “And I suddenly realised I don’t have to eat eggs. I can say no.”
It sounds almost absurdly simple. However, for Sara, it represents something much bigger; the realisation that she is allowed to choose. She’s allowed to say no, she’s allowed to change direction, she’s allowed to stop putting up with things simply because she has always put up with them. For years, Sara had thought of resilience as enduring things; and just getting through them. In a sense, being tough enough to carry on regardless. But during our conversation, we talked about the problem with that version of resilience. Sometimes resilience can be simply becoming very good at tolerating a life you don’t actually want. I asked Sara how she would define the difference between surviving and living. “Survival is putting up with stuff,” she says. “Accepting second best, and toughing it out at whatever cost. Living is different. Living means choice. It means knowing where your boundaries are. It means saying no, deciding what you want to spend your time doing, and, importantly, what you don’t.”
The distinction between surviving and living has become central to her life, and the mantra she lives by, “Older, Bolder, Colder” helps her stay open to what life has to offer.
Sara’s debut book, The Cold Fix, published in 2022, explores the transformative power of cold water swimming and the people she met through it. Cold water swimming looks, from the outside, like an exercise in grit. You voluntarily walk into water that hurts. You shiver, you gasp, you stay for a while, before you finally get out. Yet Sara’s relationship with cold water is about feeling alive. The cold strips things back. It removes distractions. There is no pretending that you’re comfortable, and no hiding behind the roles you play in everyday life. For a few minutes, there is simply the body, the water, the landscape and the people beside you. But her relationship with cold water swimming began, rather than as lifestyle choice, with her struggling to walk.
In 2017, Sara underwent what was described as pioneering bilateral surgery for severe osteoarthritis in both knees. She had resorted to walking bow-legged to counter the considerable daily pain, but the surgery, which, Sara reflects, has not been as successful as she had hoped, left her unable to bear weight for several months. She spent weeks in a wheelchair and then had to learn to walk again.
“I lost my physical self,” she says. “I lost my identity.”
Before the operation, being outdoors had been an enormous part of who she was. She trail ran, she cycled in the Pyrenees, she spent a significant amount of time in the mountains of the Lake District and lived a very active life. Suddenly, the things that had made her feel most like herself were no longer accessible. Sara acknowledges there was immense grief in that.
Later that year, her children took her to a lake. She was still only partially weight-bearing and arrived with a fair amount of apprehension. Despite being a pivotal point in Sara’s story, she doesn’t describe it as being an epiphanic moment, there was nothing particularly mystical about it. She was nervous. Her children were taking too long to get into the water. So, she got in by herself. “I just wanted it to be over and go home for a cup of tea,” she remembers.
Then she floated. The cold water numbed her legs. She looked up at the mountains, and something began to change. She was back outside, back in the landscape she loved, and back in her body, albeit a very different body from the one she had known before.
“It was something I could do.” That realisation became a turning point. Cold water gave Sara a new route back into the outdoors when the old routes were no longer available to her. Swimming did not magically fix her legs, but the water gave her independence, confidence and, eventually, a new identity. As Sara describes it, an idea was born. That idea was initially just swimming more regularly. Then she started swimming in colder and colder water, which Sara recognises was partly driven by her competitive spirit, one shared by many of us in the outdoors.
She found the winter swimming community, and then she discovered something else; people talk differently when they are standing half naked at the edge of a freezing lake. There is nowhere to hide. You get into the water, experience the shock of the cold, and emerge with what Sara describes as an “insane grin”. Whatever you were worrying about when you arrived has, for a moment, been reduced to one very immediate fact; you are cold, you are alive, and you have done something difficult. “That shared grin unites you,” Sara says. Conversations that might never happen elsewhere suddenly happen beside the water. People tell each other things, stories emerge, vulnerabilities are shared, and then everyone gets dressed, gets back into their cars and returns to their lives.
“It’s like it’s left in the water,” she says.
That sense of connection became the inspiration for The Cold Fix. Sara interviewed 16 cold water swimmers from around the world, but she wasn’t interested in writing another book about the science of cold water immersion, or how to become the hardiest person in the water. She wanted to explore how it made people feel. The people she met had very different reasons for swimming. Some were drawn to adventure; some were dealing with trauma; some found body confidence in the water. Others were searching for community, healing, or simply a way to feel something intensely. In her book, Sara categorises the swimmers as different archetypes: panthers, warriors, thinkers, mothers and children. In some ways, she explains, by exploring these different archetypes, she was looking for pieces of herself. The book became part of her own rebuilding process.
Remarkably, this process was happening alongside a long-held life ambition. Sara had wanted to be a writer since childhood, but it took decades for that dream to become reality. The Cold Fix was published when she was 60, followed by her novel, The Winter of Our Lives, at 61.
Cold water had not simply helped her get back into the outdoors, it had opened another life. And then came yet another reminder of how fragile life actually is. In 2024, during a routine pre-assessment, doctors discovered a heart murmur. Sara was diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse and heart failure. She had had no symptoms, but was told she might have around 18 months to live. She began writing a letter to her heart every day. “I realised we don’t actually know our own hearts. You know it’s there, you can feel it, and you can hear it, and you just assume it’s working as it should.”
In February 2025, she underwent heart surgery. There were complications; five of them, she says, including pericarditis. Despite this, Sara was told her heart was exceptionally strong, which is attributed largely to her time in the water. Later that year, just as she was preparing to finally have her knee replacement, she had another close call. She was on the operating table. The procedure had not yet begun when she suffered an anaphylactic reaction to the antibiotic. Her blood pressure became unrecordable, and she was given multiple doses of adrenaline.
Once again, she survived. Afterwards, Sara remembers being in the ambulance and feeling hungry, wanting toast and tea. There is something very ordinary yet also very poignant about that memory. After all the drama, the medical terminology and the frightening uncertainty, being alive suddenly became very simple. Food tasted good. Her daughter and partner were there. Sara was still here. She reflects on this as being the defining moment of feeling overwhelming glad to be alive and how special that is.
“I’ve been shown it twice,” Sara says of the fragility of life. The message, she believes, is clear: “Make the most of it.” At 64, Sara has become increasingly aware that time is finite. There is no prize for enduring unnecessary misery simply because you have always endured it before. That doesn’t mean life becomes easy. Her knees still hurt, she still has physical limitations, and she still has to adapt. But adaptation, Sara has learned, is not the same as giving up. She still gets outside and she still swims. Sometimes it hurts, but it feels great.
When people ask whether she should really be doing some of the things she does, her answer is immediate. “Yes, I should.” There is defiance in that answer, but there is also joy. Sara is not trying to return to the person she was before the operations, the heart problems or the years of pain. She is not pretending that her body hasn’t changed.
Instead, she is learning how to live in the body she has now. That, perhaps, is one of the most powerful things about her story. We often talk about ageing as a process of loss; losing strength, mobility, opportunities and, perhaps most painfully, time. Sara acknowledges those losses. She knows that getting older means the body changes and that there are things she may no longer be able to do.
But she also sees ageing as a privilege. “You don’t know how long you’ve got,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I just assumed I would live to old age. I assumed that I would be a granny, a great granny. I have learned that you can’t assume anything.”
Yet that uncertainty has made her more curious, not less. Sara talks about returning to things she loved as a child, keeping her imagination alive and paying attention to what sparks curiosity. She talks about removing the negative things from her life and making space for what matters, because curiosity keeps the world colourful. Without it, she says, life could become black and white.
From talking to Sara, I came to understand that the goal is not to live a life without difficulty, but a life in which difficulty doesn’t become the whole story. When I ask what she would say to someone who feels that their best years are behind them, she doesn’t offer a list of things to do or a prescription for reinvention. Instead, she talks about taking a dip. Not because cold water is a magic cure, but because the experience can make you look inward. “To see inside yourself,” she says, “and that little flame that’s in you, that’s you.” Then she adds: “And you are wonderful, and you are powerful.”
It is a message that feels particularly in tune with the outdoors. The great outdoors of the UK is often associated with pushing yourself further, going higher, bagging more summits. But Sara’s story suggests another kind of adventure. Sometimes it is learning to change direction, accepting that the route you planned is no longer possible, and finding another one, sometimes it is saying no, sometimes it is saying yes. Sometimes it is simply standing at the edge of a cold lake, looking at the mountains, and realising there is still a life ahead of you that you haven’t imagined yet.
Sara doesn’t know exactly what her next medical appointment will bring. She doesn’t pretend to know how long she has. So, she books things, she makes plans, she talks about taking a campervan to Scotland and spending a year travelling, but she also reflects on the fact that she takes great heart in the idea she might be inspiring others. “I want to continue to do that, and not dwell on any of the trauma. I’m still here! I’m doing well. I’m managing. There is one river pool,” she continues, “that as long as I can still get to, I am happy.”
That might be another important takeaway. You don’t always have to conquer the mountain, sometimes you just need to find the next thing that makes you feel alive. For Sara, it turned out to be cold water. For someone else, it might be a move, a bike purchase, a book, a declaration of love, a journey, or something they have been putting off for years. The point is not to live somebody else’s adventure, it is to stop postponing your own.
And, if you discover along the way that you don’t like eggs? Well, you don’t have to eat them.
With special thank to Sara Barnes (Sara Barnes Author | @bumblebarns)
Photo credit Sara Barnes