Busy week with ups and downs

It has been a busy freediving week.

On tuesday I did a two hour training session in the pool followed by an hour of monofin technique training (small fins surface swimming) and empty lung Frenzel equalisation training in the deep-end of the pool.

The static training was unusual in the sense that I had set myself a minimal time for the evening. One of my fellow freedivers has started an experiment where he measures a freediver's glucose-level before and after a good attempt. I decided that for me a good attempt would be seven minutes or more. My relaxation period before the hold was too long, I let myself get distracted and I was getting a bit to cold. In short - I did not deliver! :-) Oh and was I crumpy afterwards! :-[ In the end I managed to push out a decent 6:30 but when the oximeter was put on my finger it showed a staggering low SpO2% of 60%. A value I associate more with an 8+ static.

Of course this does not matter at all, what does matter is how to approach the next training!

Next training was to be on thursday where Jouke and I had some almost empty lanes to play with and compare our monofins. After an hour we went to the slightly warming pool for our one hour static training. We talked about relaxation methods and the fact that they are much more important now that we are (slowly) converting to no-warmup max attempts. With only 15 minutes on the clock we tried 3 minutes Ujjayi breathing followed by 2 minutes of regular tidal volume breathing. The Ujjayi breathing we would like to be longer (Ulf suggests 10 minutes). We both did very very relaxed holds of unimportant duration. Jouke told me this was the most relaxed he ever was for a hold of this length! This training made me really happy even though the time of the hold was much less than a few days ago.

And than on friday I went to Eindhoven to visit some fellow freedivers. I had a change to play in the 5 meter deep pool. Here I ran into Sanne and Jorg and later also Daan. Daan let me play with his new monofin and I must say I really enjoyed that! We also had the change to swim in the 50 meter pool where I did some crawling on the bottom of the pool. My swim time on max attempts lately are just below 3 minutes and so was my crawling so I decided I want to increase me relaxation under water by increasing the crawl time. Friday I did around 40 meters in 3:35 so 4 minutes bottom time (50 meters) seems quite doable now.