At La Jolla Cove on a Tuesday morning in late May, the churning water is about 62 degrees. The Cove has been the center of San Diego's open water swimming culture for over a century. The La Jolla Cove Swim, one of the oldest open water events in the United States, has been held almost every year since 1916, organized by volunteers and community members and run as a nonprofit, with proceeds going to swimming lessons for underserved youth across the county.

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One with the Ocean - Building Ocean Access

Not everyone who wants to swim in the Pacific has equal access to it, and One with the Ocean has built its entire organization around that fact. The nonprofit started as a group of ocean swimmers doing beach cleanups before their weekly swims, and over time what began as picking up trash evolved into something larger. The demographics of Southern California's coastlines have historically not reflected the diversity of its communities as a whole, and children in San Diego's lower-income neighborhoods tend to score significantly worse on basic swim tests than children in more affluent ones, and for many, the ocean remains entirely unfamiliar.

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One with the Ocean works to change that, building equitable access through education, open water swim events, and ocean experiences aimed at underserved youth across San Diego and Los Angeles. Since 2020, they have introduced over 5,000 young people to the water, many of them getting into the ocean for the first time.

The Body in Cold Water

Cold water's positive effect on the body is something the sports science community has spent the last decade studying. The circulatory response is immediate: blood vessels constrict at the surface, blood pressure shifts, and the heart rate changes, initially reading as stress before recalibrating into steadiness. Research has found that cold water immersion triggers a mobilization of white blood cells, a response that appears to have benefits for immune resilience. Regular cold water swimmers report improvements in sleep, mood, and immune function.

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Swimming's repetitive movement has a demonstrable calming effect on anxiety, and coupled with the necessity of staying present, reading swells, sighting landmarks, adjusting for current, creates a need for focus that pool laps rarely do.

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The Ritual

The social bond that forms in these shared challenging moments is physiological, rooted in the same mechanisms that make shared physical challenge one of the fastest routes to connection, like how you bonded with your teammates on your high school soccer squad. Research on group movement and shared physical challenge consistently finds that they generate faster and deeper interpersonal connection than passive social contact.

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What organizations like One with the Ocean understand is that swimming in our ocean, the cold, the slight apprehension, the community, the refreshing feeling that follows, should not be exclusive. Their work is simple in its logic: the water is there, and it belongs to all of us.

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San Diego is not short on fitness options. Studios, trail systems, gyms, yoga communities, cycling crews: the infrastructure for an active life in this city is extensive. But what the ocean offers that none of these do is scale and perspective. The ocean is 64 million square miles and has been here for 3.5 billion years, and the things you were worried about before you got in tend to feel more in perspective you get out.