Dynamic p.b. in training

Yesterday I added a full 29 meters to my personal best in training. So this is not a national record unless I repeat it in a competition. But still.. I'm very proud and happy I showed (myself) that I could do this.



Distance: 187 meter
Divetime: 3 minutes
Speed: 1.04 m/s

Lost a first record

During the 12th long night of apnea in Berlin 'my' dutch national record in dynamic freediving (158 meter) was broken by Daan Verhoeven with a 169 meter dive. It felt a bit strange but a bit to my surprise I did not feel the immediate desire to get it back within the hour. I mean - I did a good attempt in doing so but I just seemed to not have the drive that Daan showed the last couple of weeks. So congratulations to him and I am very happy that stepping away from competitions for a year followed by hard training rekindled his love for competition.

Daan put a video of his record dive online here.

My dive was a bit more messy than I anticipated and there were a few occasions that I wanted to abort but somehow made the turn at 125 with the 'plan' to come up short after. However, in a split second I realised I promised Kerian Hibbs to do four more kicks when I wanted to surface. So I did and that made a grand total at 141 meter.

You lose some, you win some...

Focus on relaxation

Last wednesday I tried to find a relaxed state of mind by doing the kind of visualization that I talk about in my previous post. I have so far not done a real max dive with my monofin. The reason is that I can seldom find a way to pass the hard middle part of the dive. So I stopped the no-warmup, no-breathup preperation with the goal to do a max dive not too long from today. When that is behind me I will first abandon my (short) breathup again and then the empty lung statics I now do as warmup.

Note that I'm not wearing my new BlueSeventy Nero Comp suit because the water is only 26C which is too cold for me to relax in without some neoprene (Orca Apex2 in this case).

The relaxation worked great and I came up when the dive started to become harder. This gave me confidence on which I want to build in the coming weeks. It must have been one of my most relaxed dives over 100 meter. Here's the video, see for yourself..