SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT 
The main objective of the project is to improve and promote the year-round physical activity through open water swimming (OWS) by sharing of knowledge between the relevant partners from three EU Mediterian countries (Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia).
Through this goal, this project offers future year-round open water swimmers a healthy lifestyle, using a synergistic effect because:
– swimming enables lifelong physical activity (it is known that babies can swim before they could walk and that people even older than 100 are and can be engaged in swimming)
– swimming in the sea has an additional thalasotherapeutic effect on health
– cool/cold water (northern Mediterranean, from October to April and another 2-3 months longer for EU countries with the coast in the Atlantic and Baltic) provides an additional positive health effect on swimmers
– swimming in the Mediterranean, Atlantic or Baltic outside the so-called summer season allows recreational swimmers who do not have the opportunity to use the pool (eg islands, smaller seaside villages …) to swim and recreate, even train throughout the year, or at least to extend the swimming season
– recreational swimming, especially recreational swimming in the so-called cool water, erases all differences in age and sex of swimmers
The entire program is based on activities and competitions aimed mainly at recreational swimming but also to cover the elite swimming sport. Namely, national OWS clubs and national federations are focused on open water swimming during the “OWS season” with seawater (open water) temperatures over 20°C. For the rest of the year (6-8 months), training sessions are exclusively conducted in swimming pools.
To achieve the expected goals, this two-year project is operationalized through approximately 20 online meetings and five transnational meetings related to one OWS demonstration event in the cold sea, two existing ones in the summer season, and two pilot OWS events in the cool/cold sea.