By breaking a number of records related to cold exposure: climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts, running a half marathon above the Arctic Circle barefoot, and standing in a container while covered with ice cubes for more than a hundred and twelve minutes. Using "cold, hard nature" as his teacher, he learned to control his breathing, heart rate and blood circulation, and to withstand extreme temperatures.
He was born on 20 April 1959 in Sittard, in the Catholic south of the Netherlands, one of nine children, and he arrived second: his twin brother André came first, and for a moment nobody realized there was another baby.
The family was large and the money was not. He grew up outdoors, restless, reading philosophy and psychology in his teens and looking for something the books could not give him.
One winter Sunday he walked past the canal in Beatrixpark and felt an urge he could not explain. He took his clothes off and went in.
The water closed over him like a door. On the other side of the door was a quiet he had never known, and an aliveness that stayed with him all afternoon. He went back the next day. He has gone back, in one body of cold water or another, almost every day since.
In the early 1980s, in the rose garden of the Vondelpark, he met Marivelle-Maria Rosino Fernández — Olaya — a Basque woman with a laugh he never forgot. They had four children: Enahm, Isabelle, Laura and Michael.
Olaya struggled with schizophrenia and depression. In 1995 she died by suicide in Pamplona, and Wim was left with four children and a grief that had nowhere to go but the cold. "My wife's death inspired this," he has said, "and it is her legacy."
For roughly fifteen years he trained in near-total obscurity: hours sitting in snow, nights sleeping outside without a tent, swims under ice with a rope on his ankle, breathing experiments in his living room while the children slept.
His first student was his son Enahm, dipped into canal water as an infant. His first audience was a Dutch television crew. His first world record came in his forties.
For years, no research institution would take Wim Hof seriously. In 2011, Radboud University Medical Centre finally agreed to test him. They injected him with a bacterial toxin that normally triggers a strong immune response — fever, chills, headache.
He breathed through it, and his response was less than half of what the controls showed. Three years later, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, twelve volunteers he had trained for ten days did the same.
He lives in Stroe, in the wooded middle of the Netherlands, near the Wim Hof Method Center: a breathing and yoga space, a cryo chamber, a sauna, a garden and the greenhouse where he records the podcast with Enahm.
He eats one meal a day. He takes ice baths every day, more than once when he can. He has six children — the four with Olaya and two younger sons — and a company, Innerfire, run by his eldest.
From Sittard to Amsterdam, to a waterfall in Poland, to the death zone on Everest, to the summit of Kilimanjaro, to a desert marathon without water.
Every point is a page in the Records Hall and a journey in the Experience catalog.
Feeling is understanding.Wim Hof