Fellow student Daan Verhoeven and I will now be unleashed upon the world (and The Netherlands in particular) to preach about this beautiful underwater experience.
Daan made the following movie when we had a little bit of time to play after an open water training/teaching session.
Three more nights until my first freediving trip to Dahab in Egypt.
The trip is organized by Nanja of dutch freediving school Enker. There will be a group of about 15 dutch freedivers among which four of my teammates of Freediving Utrecht - Danny, Edwin, Erik and me.
On the 18th and 20th I will go sled diving with OnlyOne in Sharm. On the 21st I will attend a mini competition where I get the chance to do one depth discipline for an official Aidaranking. To make the time go a little faster I made this short trailer in iMovie'11. I hope you like it.
During my freedive training between christmas and new years eve 2010 I decided to see how long I could stay under water during one hour. This non-official discipline is called successive apnea and records have been set of around 59:30 and even 59:45.
This movie is speed up 8 times during the breathhold to make it easier to digest. :-)
The rules are: two timekeepers (average time counts). Stopwatch starts with lifting my airways above the surface and stops with me submerging again.
I managed 59:09 (only ;-) ) even thought I did longer breathholds (therefor less times breathing) than the earlier fools. Next time I will need to work on surfacing and inhaling quicker.
Negotiate the things that go on inside my head. Be gentle, nice, understanding, but be the father. Tell it as it is, be firm. Thoughts of quitting, curses that can be felt throughout the body. Flashes of intentions go as they came. Pavlov reaction at times and distances known the relative unknown races my heartrate or so I think my remembrance more distant expectations, hopes, a memory inside... inside... the world still there and well which is enough to know waves of attention glide though my body be water some more and more waiting for a sign, trust, gentle respect for what is, be happy but realistic concentrate, some more and more wait... wait.. yes! surface with this mind and body attention and feelings take some more time to return let go
Virtual ranking for saturdays (oct 2nd 2010) RMC Wiesbaden competition based on personal bests in competition of athletes on the inlist. Data by Apnea.cz, script for producing this output by me...
note: when you see '0:00' or '0 meter' than that just means you haven't got an official ranking in that discipline yet or the script/program contains another bug. You could still win the competition!
Female athletes... 1) 134.5 points (4:45 + 155 meter DYN) Olga Martinez Alvarez (GER) 2) 131.7 points (5:01 + 143 meter DYN) Barbara Jeschke (GER) 3) 111.1 points (4:03 + 125 meter DNF) Dajana Zoretic (CRO) 4) 100.6 points (4:03 + 104 meter DNF) Aleksandra Sulkiewicz (POL) 5) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Zdenka Demlovà (CZE) 6) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Susanna Dietz (GER) 7) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Silvia Vater (GER) 8) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Silvia Schmidt (GER) 9) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Monika Hopf (GER) 10) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Julia Döllmann (GER) 11) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DNF) Agnieszka Sawicz-Orska (POL)
Male athletes... 1) 204.4 points (8:42 + 200 meter DYN) Robert Cetler (POL) 2) 190.5 points (8:35 + 175 meter DNF) Goran Colak (CRO) 3) 173.7 points (8:01 + 155 meter DNF) Eric van Riet Paap (NED) 4) 170.6 points (7:23 + 164 meter DYN) Andrea Richichi (ITA) 5) 166.5 points (6:35 + 175 meter DYN) Sergio Martinez Alvarez (GER) 6) 157.2 points (6:31 + 158 meter DNF) Michal Mrozowski (POL) 7) 146.0 points (5:55 + 150 meter DYN) Jens Berger (GER) 8) 140.1 points (5:28 + 149 meter DYN) Adrian Kwiatkowski (POL) 9) 138.2 points (6:01 + 132 meter DNF) Igor Migunov (RUS) 10) 130.6 points (6:23 + 108 meter DNF) David Cizek (CZE) 11) 124.3 points (5:09 + 125 meter DYN) Cedric Bourgaux (BEL) 12) 118.3 points (5:29 + 105 meter DNF) Danny Martherus (NED) 13) 116.7 points (5:06 + 111 meter DYN) Lukasz Piszczek (POL) 14) 115.6 points (4:03 + 134 meter DNF) David Kent (GBR) 15) 114.2 points (5:16 + 102 meter DYN) Martin Link (GER) 16) 111.4 points (4:47 + 108 meter DYN) Aristidis Efstathiou (GER) 17) 111.1 points (4:23 + 117 meter DNF) Pavel Soukup (CZE) 18) 98.2 points (3:26 + 114 meter DYN) Eric Gerritsma (NED) 19) 94.3 points (4:09 + 89 meter DYN) Erik Skoda (NED) 20) 80.2 points (6:41 + 0 meter DNF) Roman Ondruj (CZE) 21) 72.0 points (3:30 + 60 meter DYN) Thomas Ehresmann (GER) 22) 42.0 points (0:00 + 84 meter DYN) Piotr Debski (POL) 23) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Udo Pörschke (GER) 24) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Stauber Sebastian (GER) 25) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Piotr Grenda (POL) 26) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Miha Karner (SLO) 27) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DYN) Jochen Lummel (GER) 28) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DNF) Frank Wiedemann (GER) 29) 0.0 points (0:00 + 0 meter DNF) Dominik Grimm (GER)
There is nothing like spending a day on something to save five minutes of work! :-)
Thanks to Jorg and Sanne of Shark Freediving for organizing the competition as well as for safetying. And all my warms to everyone that supported me in and outside the pool. You know who you are!
Now have some more fun and let's work on taking another step, someday soon preferably...
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
FreeWC09 aka The 5th Individual (indoor) AIDA World Championship 200. Aarhus (Denmark) (mon) August 17th - (sat) August 22nd.
I arrived in Aarhus a week before the official competition and met and trained with New Zealand kiwis Kerian Hibbs and Darrell Cottle. One of these days Darrell told me about Kerian's monofin technique where he includes an armstroke between each kick&glide. Now - that is interesting, I thought! During training back home I tried that a couple of times and kind of liked it, apart from the fact that people were laughing at me. ;-) But here in Aarhus I played a little more with it, liked it even more (knowing that a 200m+ guy uses it) and decided to use it during my dynamic dive later on. This experimenting worked great for me, it took the tension a bit of and things started to be fun.
The whole experience of such a well organized event is great anway! So many legendary freedivers that I felt really humble. After a while everyone appears to be really nice and I felt myself a bit more nice too. The best thing surely is that my whole perception of what long times or distances are completely gets reset when you are so much part of things. Hearing how and how intense others train gives a great respect for that. It's a bit like new years day where most walk away with good intentions and some might even make changes for the better. Being part of this also gives a greater understanding of the dynamics of a multiday competition. The nerves, expectations, results of teammates, importance of sleep - everything is so much more intense, glowing, even exploding during the finals.
My goals, my perfect competition, would be to get in the b-final with nofins, a-final with static and a dutch national record (>150m) with dynamic. I did not think about the performances I wanted to do in those finals, just getting there was the goal. I achieved two out of three of those goals.
I will write little about my teammates here because they have or will write their own reports. They all did great performances but there was also some foolishness and bad luck going on.
Saturday Arrival of teammates Nanja, Arjen and Erik. Team NL: Erik Skoda, Nanja van den Broek, me, Arjen Costerus. They had a 'long' drive from The Netherlands to Denmark and we were happy to have them over to our rented house to have so good old pasta with salmon.
Sunday Greena aquarium freediving Teammate Erik was having the first day of his course to become an international freedive judge. Nanja, Arjen and I had a two our swim with big fish, small sharks and huge eels. The salt-water aquarium was about 5 meters deep and we had not enough weights with us by a long shot. It was fun, relaxed and good training. Most of the session we were doing empty lung swims. :-) The sharks were not at all as impressive as we hoped. There was also another aquarium there with the bigger sharks. This is what we really came for, but we were not allowed in there! I was glad that the man from the aquarium did not bend for Nanja's charmes!
We spend an hour in another pool in Aarhus to train. But not for me, I needed to rest.
Monday training, fine tuning the weights, etc.
I did a few laps with my monofin, met up with Ulf Dextegen. I also helped Nanja a bit with DNF technique and proper weighting.
Tuesday Parading through the streets of Aarhus
Wednesday DNF qualification heats This was the first time that my family came to watch me. I was a little nervous but most of all I wanted to not have a blackout. Because my family already saw a handful of those the first few minutes they arrived.
My first goal was achieved, 145 meters, on the one hand I was happy and very satisfied with that and on the other hand I knew I could have swum a few more meters. At the end of the video you can hear me say that I held back. It looks a bit arrogant now that I look back at this, a bit to calculated too, maybe. But my first swim at such a major competition was done and I did what I came for - good!
Thursday STA qualification
I couldn't get a smile on my face this day. At the beginning of the video you can see me trying to smile but what came out was something that only The Joker from the latest Batman movie would have been happy with. I think I had put to much pressure on myself for static this time. After 5:35 I aborted the hold, a far cry from the 8:01 I did earlier this year. It just happened and I was pretty upset about it for a while. A bit angry at myself!
DNF finals A few minutes before official top, my good friend Danny Martherus arrived with his two children to watch the dutch team and be part of this adventure. This made me very happy and with them in our extended family the next few days were a lot more fun! Thank you Danny!
I was in the b-final but after just 80 meters I stopped swimming because I wanted to surface. I told myself I would not be happy with that. After a few more meters swimming I made a decision (it did not just happen like with static) to surface because I was not having fun. This actually made me satisfied because I did this for myself.
Friday STA finals Static finals was exciting to watch. Very close silver and bronze medals (within 5 seconds, at around 8:30) for Alexey Molchanova and Ulf Dextegen. The coach of Alexey was making a bit of a mess of things by first going through the competition zones 30 seconde before official top. She swam over the heels of athletes in full concentration :-(. At the end of Alexeys performance she kept her hand to long on his shoulder when he was surfacing. This resulted in a red card. They protested and won that protest because it was not visible on the official camera. Now at this point Ulf or the current no. 4 could/should have protested with their own video material so Alexey got silver. It's a stupid rule, but as long as it is in existance it should be followed obviously. Guy Brew continued for another 15 seconds, surfaced and did a surface protocol that seemed to be in slow motion but was still in zero seconds flat. The funny thing is that these three guys just did a performance under big pressure that I did never even did when fully relaxed but only the surfacing of Guy impresses me. It's not just the excellent times and distances that got recalibrated in my head, it's the different ways to approach freediving that make for a fresh wind in my mind.
DYN qualifications Now this was going to be fun! My heart is with static (and DNF) but my focus for the last couple of months has been with dynamic.
I apologize for the quality of the next movie. Photo camera's should have better lenses and a higher resolution when used for filming. (and they should be waterproof to at least 100 meters but that's another story)
This was the third and last dutch pool record that I did not improve (have/own a record sounds strange, doesn't it?). And I really really wanted it. I've tried in a few smaller competitions before but the fact that I new I could made the pressure to big or not fun anymore. Not this time. The evening before I cleaned the slate with training tables symbolically and I wrote 'swim!' instead. Nothing more, nothing less, the dive was great I was fully concentrated on what I was doing or on my next stroke at the most, I was not tensing up when I reached 150. I had no ambition to swim much further to try for a b-final (surfaced at 158 meters). I was not looking forward nor back at the previous day, I was just doing it. Freediving is nice!
Saturday DYN finals, award ceremony, party time! Sorry wasn't there. You have to find other reports to read about freedivers getting drunk after one beer like a 16 year old. I did hear Arjen over my carstereo on the way back home. He phoned in exciting realtime reports of the finals. I wished I could have recorded it. The life reports during the competition were great but if we ever need someone else to do that job I would gladly nominate Arjen!
Thank you family Thank you teammates Thank you safeties Thank you organization Thank you big old body full of lungs Thank you mind for not going crazy just yet And thank you all for inspiration!
[P.S. for people with a facebook account - more pictures can be seen here]
Before the worldchampionship indoor freediving started my family and I spend our holiday in Germany and Denmark. My daughter and I were snorkeling a lot. One of the hilights surely must have been this nightdive under a full moon.
As I wrote before, my FRC depth-diving is going great lately. My improved equalization and relaxation makes that these dives are very pleasurable for me.
Last saturday I went freediving with some dutch freediver friends, we took the 6 meter small boat called 'de sloper', which rouphly translates to 'the demolisher', to a nearby lake that has the deepest dive spot of this flat country (as far as I know). I had plans, hopes and dreams of grabbing some of the mud 50 meters or so below us and bring it back up. It was a perfect day for some personal bests, the weather was great, the company was good and I felt save with a few fellow freedivers around me that had been way deeper than I ever was. But in this case my planning didn't work out. I had put the pressure on too much and was fighting with things during my dive that I thought I had left behind me some time ago. Looking back I could see my doubts in the fact that I started packing, as if that would be equalization easier. Because of this and the fact that I am already quite buoyant I had to work much harder to get down to the freefall phase. Here I was already stressed while I still had to battle my mask. I was afraid for a mask squeeze, I forgot to flex the muscle behind my ears to open the tubes a little. Argh, very frustrating it was! With mixed feelings I went home, overthinking my 'sins'. Mind you! It was a great day but I had things to learn.
Then came today, diving again to max 25 meters so that calls for frc dives. My head still contained some green slimy stuff that luckely went away somewhat after a few dives. After some regular frc dives I removed my mask and put on my noseclip and goggles. I filled the goggles with lake water and went down just for the experience. I had done this last year as well and then only came as far as 12 meter, just below the thermocline. I don't know what it is yet, perhaps I got used to the temperature better or maybe pulling the wetsuithood-top as far down as possible helped but the 7C at the bottom did not bother me much and the freefall from 5 to 25 meters felt long, dreamy and fantastic. At about 10 meters I took a mouthfill, building up positive pressure with my cheeks so as not to move my tongue around when it is not yet needed (thanks Simo! I loose a lot less mouthfills this way!), put the soft palette so that I can blow/push air against the noseclip, flex that muscle near my ears and then just feel the temperature drop, feel my hand glide over the guide rope and hear the pitch of my lanyard brushing the rope get higher and higher as I pick up speed.
This was my most enjoyable freefall so far - loved it!
To finish our day at the lake we went looking near some manmade objects and spotted two Northern Pikes (actually this Snoek), one was really really fat and big, while the other was hanging at a depth for 2 meters for 15 minutes while we could get very close to it (10cm), close enough that we could basically count it's teeth.
William Trubridge breaks the world record in Unnasisted Freediving with a dive to 88m (288ft) in 3 minutes 30 seconds. The dive was set at the Vertical Blue Invitational Freediving Competition in Dean's Blue Hole, Long Island, Bahamas. For more information visit http://www.verticalblue.net
Freediving was features on dutch television twice recently.
A nice ~45 minutes show with a popular dutch artist can be seen on this site (or here if you only want to see the movie). This was actually the first time on dutch tv that I think they properly explained why people freedive and they gave a good explanation about the risks involved without any of the usual hype-talk.
And then there is the following clip of new kid on the block 101.tv
I've been too busy to post here with doing as little as possible, so now it's time for an update.
I already wrote I went to a Tsa Lung workshop to pick up some relaxation and breathing techniques. Well, I did... and I didn't... I really don't know if I picked up anything useful. It was good to sit there and focus on the teachers sometimes incomprehensible english. I guess I expected more exercises and some more explanation about them. Anyway, it was the beginning of more mental training which is now slowly taking over from my days in the fitness factory.
Some days later Jouke, a training buddy, and I visited a local meditation afternoon crash course that was teached by Annet Polman at YogaMoves. This was one afternoon well spent I would say. Not too heavy material, quite useful, very down to earth (mostly :-)) It felt like a refreshment course which I apparently needed. A funny incident was that there was this beautiful brown eyed girl sitting next to me. During the break she told us that she was in love with the water. This started with her seeing The Big Blue where she also fell in love (big theme with her perhaps?) with the main actor. So I asked her - "the macho or the softy?" - the softy she told us. Mr. macho (soon to be married) Jouke, former european grappling champion was very very quiet after that :-). Thank you, whatever your name is!
Ehhmmm, I think I got distracted there for a minute. Where was I? Right! Mental... I did some more yoga sessions where I could stay in the moment better each time. I've not done any (near) personal bests lately but the fun and excitement is definitely back!
Finding out what my own thing - that what works for me - is, is the hard part. Training is easy... well...
The last couple of months were interesting but not per se the most enjoyable freedive experience for me. The first two years of my freediving I felt very much like a beginner, wherever I went something new and magic was to be learned. I was aware that I wanted this beginner attitude to last forever. But as in any relationship things are always changing, evolving. Some part of my relation with freediving had changed without me noticing.
Looking back at the period after the Dutch Apnea Open competition of last november I see that my attitude of 'have fun, see where it gets me' made way for more ambition. Of course I wanted to go to the world cup and do well, but I didn't notice that the 'let's see where it gets me' vanished. For the first time I also became a copycat. Being a bit jealous :-) of a certain someone's even faster improvements in static than my own (you know who you are!) I tried to mimic his way of doing things. That process is usually called learning but after some time it became clear that my own methods work better for me at this point. Instead of taking out the good bits I kept trying and became frustrated. Now, frustration is an excellent way to kill enthusiasm. So... I became.. even more frustrated. Alternating 4+ with 7+ statics regularly. Motivation was not good enough (I must say I also didn't sleep very well so that was a factor too) for steady progress.
It must not always be nice for fellow freedivers to see me progress fast, sorry 'bout that. (just kidding :-/ )
Yesterday I finally had enough, took out the torpedy shaped fun machine (no not that one! ;-) ). This one that I won during a lottery. And I drove of to Haarlem for some serious fun training. As it turned out it was the first time the underwater scooter took me over 200 meters.
Virtual ranking for saturdays (oct 2nd 2010) RMC Wiesbaden competition based on personal bests in competition of athletes on the inlist. Data by Apnea.cz, script for producing this output by me...
Team NL: Erik Skoda, Nanja van den Broek, me, Arjen Costerus.
I've been too busy to post here with doing as little as possible, so now it's time for an update. 
Finding out what my own thing - that what works for me - is, is the hard part. Training is easy... well...
Mark 'the creative genius' Keijzers has been compiling the rest of the ice freediving video material we have from last week. 
