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In which a man who grew up in the sun capital of the world moves to Switzerland and forgets everything he was taught.
In Switzerland you are not allowed to mow your lawn on a Sunday. You may not wash your car either. In parts of the country you are discouraged from putting glass in the recycling before nine, on the grounds that the clinking disturbs the national calm.
After twenty years here I find all of this entirely reasonable, which tells you what two decades in the Alps does to a man. This is a country built by people who read the instructions. There is a form for the form.
So I had always assumed we were careful people.
Then my girlfriend said something over dinner I have been trying to un-hear ever since. She is a plastic surgeon, and much of her week is spent cutting skin cancers off people — faces mostly, plus ears, noses and the triangle at the back of the neck. She has a line she delivers with the patience of someone who has said it four hundred times: the best anti-wrinkle treatment ever invented is a hat.
Free advice, from a woman who could charge for it. And obviously aimed at me.
Which is worse than it sounds, because I did not grow up here. I grew up in Manly, on the northern beaches of Sydney, in the exact years Australia was inventing the modern concept of not dying of the sun.
And we had a local exhibit. Nobody remembers his real name. He was on the beach every day of the summer, flat on a towel, turning over every twenty minutes like a chicken, glossy with what was almost certainly coconut oil. By February his shoulders had a texture. We called him Crispy Bacon. It was not affectionate, and it was not inaccurate.
He was the cautionary tale of my childhood. Slip, Slop, Slap was on the television. I knew all of it before I could drive. Then I moved to Switzerland and filed the subject under Australian Problems, along with funnel-webs and the cricket.
Here is the thing about Switzerland. The most inspected country on earth has one of the worst skin cancer records in Europe: around 22 new melanoma cases per 100,000 people a year, a higher rate than forty other European countries, and the figure has doubled in twenty years. UV intensity also rises 10 to 12 per cent per thousand metres of altitude.
We legislate about lawnmowers. We do not legislate about faces.
None of which applied to me, obviously, because I am not a sunbather. I am an athlete. I go out at six in the morning and do work. Entirely different activity. Practically medicinal.
I also had the water excuse, which every rower has heard and nobody has checked: the water doubles your dose, bounces it all back at you, nothing to be done. Open water reflects less than 10 per cent of the ultraviolet that hits it. About the same as grass. The mirror I had blamed for three decades was never there, which leaves the arithmetic: four hours is four hours, and there is no shade in a single.
Then it got worse, because the epidemiology does not say what I expected. Melanoma, the one that kills people, barely tracks steady day-after-day exposure. What drives it is intermittent, intense exposure — holidays, water sports, sunny weeks taken by pale people — a pattern carrying around a 60 per cent elevated risk.
Read that again with a regatta in mind.
The dangerous part of my rowing life was never the dawn outing in April. It was eight hours in a folding chair at a course with no trees. It was the camp in Seville, racing at midday the colour of a boiled potato. And it was the photographs of me sculling on an Italian lake, no shirt, in a sun visor.
A visor. I would like to enter into evidence that I chose that item deliberately, in a shop, with money, believing it to be the serious option — unencumbered by the frivolous top part of a hat. What it does is protect a strip of forehead and abandon everything else. Caps are barely better: scalp, forehead and nose, almost nothing to the ears or the back of the neck. Which is a surface aimed at the sky, catch to finish, for every stroke you have ever taken.
Which brings me to the rower’s tan. A cyclist finishes the summer in white gloves and white socks, which is ridiculous, but it is a specialist’s ridiculous. The rower’s tan is a singlet. It is the tan of a man who has spent forty years laying paving slabs: brown arms, brown neck, a brown V at the throat, a torso the colour of an office.
Crispy Bacon spent his summers turning himself into a warning. I have spent mine doing the same thing at six in the morning, in technical fabric, and calling it a training block.
The good news is that this is one of the few corners of sports science with a proper randomised trial in it. In Nambour, Queensland, 1,621 adults were assigned either to daily sunscreen or to using it when they felt like it. Ten years on: 11 melanomas in the daily group against 22 in the other. For invasive melanoma, 3 against 11.
The catch is that nobody uses enough. SPF is measured at 2 milligrams per square centimetre of skin; in real life people apply a fifth to a half of that. The rule is seven teaspoons for a whole body.
Seven teaspoons. I have been using roughly one, in the car park, with the engine running.
So I have made my peace with the hat. There is an Australian at every regatta wearing the one with the curtain down the back — cap at the front, flap over the neck and ears, the general impression of a man delivering post across the Simpson Desert. I spent twenty years thinking he looked absurd, which is remarkable given that when I was twelve, half of Manly dressed exactly like that. He was not the eccentric. He was the control group.
Every Australian reading this has been thinking the same thing for eight hundred words. Yes. It is obvious. It was obvious in 1981. I know, because I was there.
The hat arrived on Tuesday. So did a long-sleeved UPF top, which I had resisted on grounds of heat until I found out a cotton T-shirt has an ultraviolet protection factor of about 5, and that wet, stretched fabric protects far less than dry, loose fabric — which describes the soaked technical top I wore all summer and called clothing.
I have not solved the sunscreen problem. It still runs into my eyes on the third kilometre and still makes the handle feel buttered.
What I have accepted is smaller and more annoying than a lesson. I live in a country that will fine me for washing my car on a Sunday and let me sit unprotected on a lake for eight hours in July. All that regulation, and nobody was ever going to inspect my face.
Crispy Bacon, as far as I know, is still out there. He had exactly one advantage over me. He never pretended he was doing something else.
The actual protocol
The actual protocol — quantities, what to put on before you touch the handle so it does not end up in your eyes, reapplication timing for a regatta day, and kit that covers you without cooking you — is a one-page sheet in the Faster Membership library, next to the supplements and lactate protocols. Membership is CHF 129 for the year. A single training plan on its own is CHF 79, which should tell you how the arithmetic works. Most of you intend to be racing in twenty years, and I would rather you did it with a face.
Faster with Bill · whchambers.com
