‘It’s like sticking your head in the freezer.’ A Minnesota man swims 24 miles on the St. Croix River — with plans to pay it forward.

Seth Baetzold has a passion for long-distance swimming.

The 27-year-old from Maplewood says he’s taken to the water in Lake Minnetonka, Mille Lacs Lake, and even attempted a swim across the English Channel.

Last Saturday, Baetzold was enjoying the chilly rigors of a marathon swim in the St. Croix River.

October in Minnesota can be a tough challenge for long-distance swimmers, he notes.  

“It’s like sticking your head in the freezer. It’s like a brain freeze,” Baetzold said. “I guess something similar is if you were outside in negative ten for maybe an hour or so. Your extremities would be cold, your head would be cold and sore also.”

His latest challenge: Swim the river from Stillwater to Hastings, a distance of about 24 miles.

“Within swimming, a marathon distance is anything more than 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, so Seth did multiples of that,” said Mike Miller, who is part of Baetzold’s support team and who kept an official log of the aquatic journey.

Baetzold had to follow strict rules to meet Marathon Swimmer Foundation standards.

“When you start, you can’t touch the bottom of the river and use it for propulsion, you can’t touch the boat to get propulsion,” he said. “Incidental contact doesn’t matter, but you can’t get out.”

An escort team of four people—three in a boat and one in a kayak—stayed close by, keeping Baetzold safe from other boaters and river users.

He would swim in place every half hour or so for water or liquid protein.

“It’s definitely a day on the water to be starting before sunrise and walking on the beach at Point Douglas Park in Hastings just after 5 p.m.,” Miller said, adding it’s “all in a day’s work.”

Among those cheering Baetzold on is Kathleen Kirchoff, the manager of the North St. Paul Area Food Shelf.

“Aqua-angel,” Kirchoff called Baetzold. “Yeah, that’s him out there in the water and doing it for this. That’s an angel, and he surely is.”

As you can probably tell, Kirchoff is no casual fan.

She learned Baetzold was using his social media to raise awareness about the food shelf, urging his followers to use the swim as an occasion to consider making a donation.

So far, Kirchoff says she’s received about $200 in donations, but is hoping for more.

“I just think it’s wonderful that first of all, thinking of the need that’s out there and to go through that strenuous swimming in cold water, I couldn’t get over that,” Kirchoff exclaims. “And he’s doing that for us, I mean, that’s some kind of dedication.”

It turns out that back in the day, Baetzold was in the Boy Scouts, raising money and collecting items for the very same food bank.

Fast forward to the present day, and he now says he’s been inspired to pay it forward once again.

“We had this scouting for food, had a lot of people that volunteered there, and a lot of people who got food from there,” Baetzold said. “So I thought it was a good cause, something close to home.”

After 11 hours on the river, he finished.

Miller says the water temperature was about 58º when Baetzold started and warmed up to a more comfortable 68º by the end of the swim.

Baetzold’s next challenge will almost certainly be much colder.

He’s planning to attend the Vermont Ice Festival in February, where participants swim in a pool-sized hole in the ice.

Meanwhile, Baetzold says he hopes others will try swimming as a hobby, using the safe technique, of course, and perhaps will be inspired to give back in some way as well.

“Hopefully, I can encourage anyone else to swim, obviously be careful and not do this without lots of experience,” he said. “Maybe someone else will see that and duplicate it, maybe they’ll duplicate my charity.”

You can find more information about the North St. Paul Area Food Shelf here.