'My sauna session by the beach in West Cork left me revitalised and a-glow'

“This is ridiculous,” said my friend as we greeted each other at the start of the year. No “Happy New Year” or “How was your Christmas?”

Standing bare-footed and swim-suited next to our cars in near sub-zero temperatures, the word “ridiculous” was indeed a suitable greeting. “Ludicrous” and “madness” might also have worked.

A bunch of us were assembling at Red Strand to mark the New Year with a sauna session, and on the surface the entire process seems preposterous.

Drive an hour from the city, with the car thermometer alarm pinging every time the temperature goes below 4, strip off the layers of thermals and double socks, and then willingly sit in a wooden wagon in 100 degree heat that might make you feel faint.

The whole thing is counter-intuitive to my definition of fun.

But three minutes of sitting on a wooden bench, cocooned in the bone-warming heat of the sauna with the tang of peppermint in the air and the glorious glistening view of Galley Head through the picture-perfect window, and I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my time.

The rare occasions I step into a sauna, I’m reminded of one of my first exposures to the bathing ritual. As a teenager, I was a member of a youth theatre company in Cork called Boomerang and we were extremely fortunate to have a theatre director who excelled at securing EU funding to participate in youth theatre festivals around Europe.

The Czech Republic, Greece and Finland were the countries I got to travel to as a spotty teenager over the years. It was at the spiritual home of the sauna, or as they say in Finland ‘sow-na’, that I experienced a ceremony far more intense than the warm wooden cupboards of Irish leisure centres I was used to.

At a rustic scouts’ camp in the middle of a forest hours from Helsinki, us pale Irish were ‘welcomed’ by the hosts in the most theatrical-slash- disconcerting way. Along with teenagers from Russia and Italy, we found ourselves expectantly gathered in the camp’s hall. Forty teenagers smiling awkwardly at each other and wondering what lay ahead.

Usually, at these youth events there would be a few ice-breakers and getting-to-know-you exercises, we’d do some drama workshops together, bond and laugh over a bit of cross-cultural improvisation and misunderstanding, do a group performance at the end of the week, and fly home replete with greater love for our fellow Europeans. Not in Finland.

The Finnish hosts decided to welcome us in a decidedly unconventional and frankly not welcoming way.

Without explaining what was going to happen, they led us one by one blindfolded and bare-footed through the forest, feeding us manky salty liquorice-flavoured sweets and giving us the odd jump fright till our nerves were frayed.

Our unknown destination was a sauna, where we were allowed to remove our blindfolds but were then whipped with birch branches before being plunged into a sauna hotter than the sun and then later lobbed off a pier into a frigid lake.

It was all very strange. Our ‘hosts’ certainly dunked us in Finnish culture and pushed us out of our comfort zones.

We were all instant friends afterwards, only because we were glad we hadn’t died from a mix of fear, heat, and teenage mortification.

Because of this early defining Finnish sauna experience, I long believed that the appeal of the sauna and the cold plunge is simply that your body is so relieved you haven’t died from extreme heat or extreme cold, that afterwards you are flooded with feelings of relaxation and wellbeing.

I thought the warm, positive feelings were the aftermath of dodging a near-death experience, but I’ve since learned, the physical effects of sauna bathing are systemic, long-lasting, and longevity boosting.

There is a strong body of scientific research linking sauna bathing with substantial health benefits, particularly cardiovascular health.

The Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Study (KIHD) is a longitudinal study started in the 1980s to investigate risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and related outcomes in more than 2,000 men from Finland. Overall, it has found that frequent sauna use is associated with a reduced risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, and dementia, and those who used saunas multiple times per week had a lower risk of fatal cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality compared to those who used saunas less frequently. The more saunas the better.

Back in the Balmy Barrel on Red Strand, I was wishing for a sauna whisk, those bundles of birch branches used to gently whip the skin while in the sauna (and known as vihta in Finnish), not to clobber my friends with but to bury my face in. The oils and aromas from the birch oils are beneficial for the skin, but also stop your face from going on fire.

After a couple of rounds of heat and cold sea plunges (ittedly, I barely dipped in the sea up to my knees), the whole process was feeling like a perfectly sensible pursuit for people living on the edge of the Atlantic looking for a way to warm the bones and feel alive.

I only learned recently that Ireland did have its own type of sauna culture in the past in the form of sweathouses - stone structures near water bodies that were heated by fires and used to treat aches, colds, and promote general well-being.

Sweathouses were an Irish adaptation of the global tradition stretching from Native American sweat lodges to Turkish hammams.

The growing popularity of mobile and beach saunas on Irish beaches is not ridiculous at all, and as our gang dispersed, glowing, vowing to go again soon, it all made perfect sense.