Josef Köberl Sets World Record In Ice

Courtesy of WOWSA, Vienna, Austria.

42-year-old ice swimmer Josef Köberl established the Guinness World Record for the “Longest Duration for Full Body Contact With Ice” on Saturday in Austria.

Köberl sat for 2 hours 8 minutes 47 seconds in an ice bath where only his head was exposed while his entire body was enveloped in ice on August 10th in his hometown of Vienna.

He broke the longest time spent in direct, full-body contact with ice by Jin Songhao of China in 1 hour 53 minutes 10 seconds that was set in the CCTV-Guinness World Records Special in Xiamen, Fujian, China on September 4th 2014.

Watch his record-setting exploint here on TVTHEK.

Köberl has plenty of runway to extend his record, if someone tries to or does break his newly set standard. He said that he could have stayed in the water even longer, but it was not necessary.

Icebears Hintertux was voted as the 2018 World Open Water Swimming Offering of the Year in a global online poll.

His WOWSA Award nomination was as follows: “Josef Köberl, president of the Ice Swimming Association Austria, loves the extreme. He loves the cold and pushing himself and sharing his passion with other like-minded athletes. He organizes the Austrian Ice Swimming Championships.”

He created the Icebears Hintertux, a 4-day high-altitude glacier training camp that is held in Hintertuxer Gletscher in Austria. The two workouts daily camp offers both extreme ice swim and pool training sessions. For organizing and teaching interested swimmers how to acclimate and train in high-altitude extreme conditions, for safely organizing glacier swims in a uniquely beautiful ice chamber in 0°C water and 0°C air at 4200 meters altitude, and for meeting the needs of channel swimmers and ice swimmers and pushing their physical and mental boundaries, the Icebears Hintertux camp by Josef Köberl is a worthy nominee for the 2018 World Open Water Swimming Offering of the Year.“

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