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.
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! :-)
Already more than a week ago but worth mentioning here I think...
I have good memories of this place because last year I did my first and so far only 8 minute static in competition here. Like all Belgium competitions this one included all three disciplines. Last year I messed up my dynamic and nofins for various reasons. My body was still tired from the static (all three disciplines are done within about three hours) and I was very satisfied with the static result. This made that I had little motivation to endure the mental and physical challenges of long dives. In last years competition there were people with far more constant results who eventually won the competition. Usually I try to focus on the overall result and if the opportunity presents itself I try to grab it regardless of anything I wanted to do afterwards. There are only very few competitions I go to and who wins a competition is quickly forgotten. What counts more (for myself as well) is the place in the international Aida ranking and the best performances in each discipline. However, for me freediving is most of all about getting to know my body and mental side and work from/on/with that.
So my goal was to take first place in the overall competition. There were a couple more candidates for that spot (Sergio, Daan, Igor and some Belgium guys I knew little about) so this would be a challenge.
We started with static and I did a nice 7:08 which was 4 seconds less than Thomas Moureau. To tell the truth I did not like that ;-) . It's great for Thomas and I was hoping he would give the king of belgium (pool) freediving (Jean-Pol Francois) a good scare. JP always had by far the best performances so it is good for him to get some competition. Apparently belgium national records can be set at any training as long as there are judges present. This made the 7:12 from Thomas the best belgium static performance in competition! (not 100% sure I have the facts straight here, but this is what I've been told) Number three in static (Sergio) was about 30 seconds behind us. This translates to 13.2 meters Sergio had to win back in the next two dynamic disciplines.
Dynamic with monofin: my recent longer dives have all been done in perfect circumstances (one of the best 50 meters in the world) while my personal best in a 25 meter pool was about 50 meters less. This pool in Namur was only 1.1 meter deep on the shallow side but I was training that a lot lately and did no longer feel the stress of having to make many turns with my monofin. I was eager to improve my p.b. here. Nothing much to say about the dive itself, it was not very interesting. I could keep motivating myself to continue swimming although I had better days. I surfaced a bit to my own surprice. Still a good distance with 169 meters but soon after I knew I could and should have made the turn to have the 200 in sight for future dives. But I didn't and had to make the best from what I've got. Sergio did a personal best in competition with 175, Igor also did a personal best (I hope he picks up a monofin and starts training with that), Thomas got no points because he forgot to take of his noseclip during the surface protocol and Daan did a nice 157 dive with cursing from beginning to end. Very quick swim - I can tell you that! :-) So one happy Sergio, one slightly irritated me, one steady as ever Igor and one bouncing Daan. Obviously I'm forgetting many performances here. The results can be found at the link at the bottom of this post. One thing I'd like to say is that training partner and friend Danny Martherus made a huge dive of 132 meters (I'm in that video to somewhere) after only training with a monofin a couple of times. Way to go Danny!
Dynamic without fins: people getting tired. Dreaming more about big plates of pasta then about long dives with lactic acid filling up their arms and (most of all) legs. The funny thing is that people that don't train DNF ofter or have personal bests way below their capabilities did very well. I liked what the dutch women did with Judith's easy looking 100m, Natascha's over 50m and Pauline's almost 50 meter dive. To bad Nanja had a mouthdip and therefor a red card but that's just good motivation for her to pick up training more seriously again.
I thought Sergio would swim before me and that I would therefor know what I had to do. I was mistaken and I had to go first knowing that his best in competition was 125 meter. I swam and swam and swam some more until I was getting close to 125 where I knew that every meter would drastically increase my changes. After the 125m turn I did one more stroke and realized I had not been this close to my personal best and national record (153 meters) in about 18 month. I still felt good, made the turn and surfaced at 155 meter. I had a samba/LMC (loss of motor control) for a second which I did not feel coming but managed to hold it together and got a white card. The tiredness of the long day and the fact that the lines between the lanes could not be trusted because they were extremely loose both must have played a role here. I guess about half the red cards in this competition were caused by those lines and because neither of the four floaters we were handed by the safetydivers had enough buoyancy to keep us afloat. They should tape a few together instead of keeping two seperate floats per safety. Anyway - Sergio did his nofins, which was 100 meters, his limit for the day after his 175 dynamic. So I could have swam 62 meters less to still win the competition. But of course I'm stoked that I did more than that.
This is the movie Daan shot of the 155 meter dive. At the end he gets exited because he didn't see the record coming and neither did I to be honest. :-)
The competition results can be downloaded from here.
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]
It's been a while... I was not really in the mood for writing. Was having a rough time with personal stuff but things seem to have settled down enough to aim for some good freedive performances again.
The last couple of weeks I have been freediving outdoor about once or twice a week and mostly on FRC. During one week I also participated in a drywalk experiment of a fellow freediver - I will write some more about that later. But I (and about 10 other freedivers) had to do drywalk practices. As people that know me know, I am more a 'want to' than a 'had to' kind of guy. Never been any good at 'had to' actually. Come to think of it, practicing enjoying 'had to' moments would be a valuable live lesson for me. More on that later too - I fear.
Anyway, for the last month I've been taking garlic pills again to try to lower my heartbeat and iron pills to get as much heamaglobine out of the FRC and empty lungs training as I know how to. Last week I did an 'easy' 3 minutes RV (residual volume, i.e. empty lungs) static in the pool, which surprised me. I have neglected my CO2 tolerance training a bit and I am not as comfortable with CO2 as a few months ago so the no-warmups did not improve. Today, at the 3rd hold, I did a dry 5:07 FRC static. :-) (mental note to myself: 'don't use smileys when blogging!') SpO2% only down to 70%, crazy!
Heartrate at rest was very low, I think as low as 42 BPM so about 10 less than a few months ago. It was in the lower sixties a few years back when I started freediving.
Tonight in the pool I will have a go at a 7+ static with full lungs. Hopefully I remember how to pack.
In 10 days we will have a small non-aida-ranking dynamics competition in Haarlem. I have not been practicing with my monofin very often lately so that will be like training for me.
Sorry for the discursive post. I suppose it shows the mental state I am in at the moment...
Yesterday in the pool I did a frc static of 4:02 with no warmup. This was the first time the no-warmup felt like a success. I had a good fight-phase and my safety told me I had no visible hypoxic signs at all.
On one of the other holds I improved my pool personal best to 4:18 where I found the surfacing a bit so-so but again my buddy told me that after one breath I looked fully recovered. During these other frc holds I noticed that I got progressively more relaxed when the contraction came. During the initial hold they were quite violent.
Nice!
After the 2 hour static of which about 1 hour was spend socializing we went to the other area where we do our dynamic training. Here I did my monofin training with short fins and a couple of 50+ meters no-fins, no-noseclip, no-goggles dynamics. These were just to get a feeling for it. I've done dynamics without a noseclip (but with goggles) in the past and in general liked them. The problem was that I lost some relaxation because water enters my nose and I have the urge for blowing out some bubbles. Swimming without goggles I have done very little, but since I do my TLC statics also without goggles I fear the stinging pool water less now. I was afraid for bad turns but that was no problem. Keeping the correct depth was a bigger problem but maybe with some practice that will improve. There is also the problem that at the end of the swim there is one less sensor to indicate hypoxy but that need not be a problem when I keep listening to my body. The dive reflex kicked in early - contractions start early at about 10-20 meters but this will be later once I relax a bit more.
If all goes well I want see how this goes during a small competition beginning of june.
Here in The Netherlands there are not many lakes over 30 meters deep. The deepest one I know of is 52 meter deep. My max. depth so far is just 43 meters but with the recent successes in the pool I'm sure I will go deeper not to long from now.
Inspired by Eric Fattah's very impressive FRC dives at the Vertical Blue competition in the Bahamas I decided to practice my equalisation skills a bit more by dives on half full lungs the next period. Last year I did 21 meters on FRC and this year, with more ease, I equalled that plus I did 28 meters where I'm not sure if I took the exact same amount of air with me. Anyway, making progress with equalisation and having much more relaxed abdominal muscles and diaphragm.
I have done some FRC statics to get a feeling of where I stand at the moment. These are some stats...
So there you have it, I did an 8 minute static in competition for the first time last sunday. For me it did not totally come as a surprise because I did my first one in training about 6 months ago. But recent training did not go according to plan during the last few weeks before the competition. For this reason I took a week of from pool sessions. I did a little dry CO2 and O2 training but not much.
I was standing on the shoulders of giants because of all the tips and help I got from people around me and on the internet. Even so, for me personally this is a milestone I am very happy with. So I would like to put some more info on this blog that might be useful for other freedivers.
Some people asked what my preperation was and how the static went, so I will write about that here.
good night sleep 9:00: breakfast - two bananas and one bowl of yoghurt with honey 10:00: 2.5h car ride to Belgium, was drinking lots, mostly tea and water. 13:00: settled in the pool, relaxed a bit, chatting with fellow freedivers 13:30: be safety for Erik 13:45: be safety for Daan 14:00: kept drinking spa/water 14:09: start pack stretches 14:19: put my suit with 4kg weights on 14:24: deep breathing about 4 breaths per minute by the side of the pool 14:34: enter water (27C) empty lung (RV) static ~1:30 14:38: another empty lung static ~1:45 (about 50% of max) 14:40: 2x30s statics to find good amount of packs (tried 15 and 19 packs) 14:42: go to competition zone, normal breathing 14:43: 6 deep breaths during one minute (yes I know: hyperventilating) 14:44: tidal breathing, put noseclip on (no mask for me) 14:45: Official top (exhales, inhale, exhale, inhale, pack 15x)
Room for improvement here would be threefold.
1. stop hyperventilating for OT-2 till OT-1 2. don't do the empty static warmups anymore 3. one less exhale before OT
The static went pretty much as usual except that because of the lack of food in my system contractions came a little late at 3:45. My focus, determination and intend were better than in training. The first 30-60 seconds I was forcing myself to not influence my muscles. Trying to relax and see what my body would do, not identifying myself with either my body nor my thoughts. Usually I try to wait for thoughts and emotions to come, when they come mark them as 'thinking' without judgement and wait for the next event. The 'problem' I found with that is that at some point the words thinking, thinking, thinking quickly after each other start becoming heavy, like a hammer on a nail. This adds another layer. I then have to notice my noticing thoughts and let that pass. Maybe this is where true mindfulness starts but lately I found it works better to use some self-hypnoses instead of just the word 'thinking'. So what I did is tell myself in a way similar to talking to a little kid (I don't know the english term for it so that's why I describe it). I say (in dutch) "think slowly... slowly... and quiet...' Of course I say this slowly, firmly, matter-of-factish and as much as possible without stress. After doing this many times I arrived near 7 minutes, at that point deciding to better my n.r. of 7:33 and after that one (15 seconds) tap at a time. 8:01 was just about doable. I've been told that only at 7:30 contractions were visible which I find good because it also means that I was not mentally trying to influence them. At 7:45 I was aware I let out a few little streams of airbubbles. Since I was aware and clear-minded enough I allowed myself to pass 8 minutes.
For the first time in competition I did hook-breathing during recovery and I had the feeling that this did not yet automatically go as good as should be. More max attempts in training are needed for that. So two hook-breaths, two recovery breath, noseclip of, ok-sign, 'I am okay!' and wait for the result. I did not see a white card being shown to me, my safety (Daan, thank you!) told me and he was even happier than I was. My mind was not ready to let the outside world in just yet, that took another 5 minutes. (good times)
On March 29th 2009 a small and friendly competition will be attended by about 8 Dutchmen. I will try to give updates here during the competition.
Some of us feel our bodies fight upcoming cold and other nasty stuff. Let's just hope we win at least that battle!
Going great here. Most faces look happy. Mine for sure because I did a great 8:01 nr static. I was looking up to dynamic but even though it went okay at first I could not find the motivation to resist the first big urge to service. Because I announced high I got massive penalties and now have to fight for third place. Nanja ranks first right now and she should be able to keep that.
Many personal bests were improved, many happy faces all around for all kind of different reasons. Laura and Pauline did especially well!
I messed up both my dynamic and my no-fins. I should have done better there, but I didn't, and that's okay too! My mental and physical limits were reached that day.
Thank you Daan Verhoeven for being my safety yesterday and it's an honour to be the first one you coached over eight minutes.
I will do another post later with details about the static.
Packing for dynamic is easy, pack 'till I burst and swim. Being 1.5 meter below the surface makes that the air in my lungs compress to a comfortable size. With static this advantage is a lot less. I am a real floater with my big lungs and few muscles. Additionally I can relax quite well and I think this is what cools me down really quick. I have now learned to ignore the 'cold' and I know it slows down my metabolism, which is a good thing. On the other hand my body is trying to stay warm and this costs energy. Therefor having the right suit makes a big difference, at least mentally. In >30C water I now wear a 4mm long john model Elios Suit when the water is cooler I add a 4mm jacket. The suit is not so new anymore so the insulation is less than you might expect. Maybe I will try my very tight Orca suit because that might have less buoyancy.
With full packing I am floating quite a bit as you can see in this movie. Looking at yet another movie of Herbert Nitsch (he packs 25-30x) where he does his 9:04 WR in 2006 you can see clearly that he is wearing a belt around his waist. According to the new AIDA regulations (v12) using weights is allowed (5.1.3) but the attempt should take place at the surface (5.1.2). I interpret this as meaning that some part of the athlete should be floating.
One year ago I tried a weightbelt but quickly abandoned the whole idea because I could not relax my neck the way I wanted to. I revisited the idea because I'm again doing pack stretches and want to get in as many packs as I can relax with. Currently that is about 10 packs and I think by laying deeper I could probably manage close to 20 so that would buy me some extra time. (sidenote: my 8:02 personal best I did with just 6 packs, no suit, warm water, dynamic training as warmup, i.e. not ideal)
So how much weight do I need? I've tried the weights I currently use for dynamic which is 4kg plus 4.6kg neckweight. My legs were still floating so next time I will add at least 2kg around the waist. Using the neckweight helps me relax my neck because my upper body is deeper in the water making the head drop down less. Or I'll try wearing the Orca suit for (no warmup) static.
... a few days further.... Wearing the Orca suit was a good idea. It's warm enough for no-warmup statics and it is just a little bit less floaty. But best of all I could simply close the neckweight instead of letting it balance on my neck. I did a nice and easy 7:09 that way yesterday. Not on the first, but on the second hold. The first one was just under 4 minutes because I overpacked and was not having fun.
We made some pictures with and without packing and with and without weights that I might post soon to show you how much of a difference this all makes to my buoyancy.
Yesterday I did 7:05 on a Crazy table, which is a challenge I set myself over half a year ago.
For an explanation about this type of table you can have a look at this thread on the deeperblue forum. As you can read, Herbert Nitsch takes a sip of air every 15 seconds, I take a sip of air whenever I feel I need one. I'm not sure if this makes any real difference. (note: Herbert seems to do 8 minutes, hmmm - work to be done (by me ;-))
I have not done this training very often, some of my previous results can be seen below... So far I did not enjoy doing this in the pool because of all the head-lifting that is required when breathing in.
What I like about this is that it starts with some 'hardcore' low O2 tolerance training when you repeat the initial holds more often, followed by a very long period of contractions which makes this an excellent mental training. CO2 training is mostly a mental excercise anyway!
Preperation:
3x
5 minutes: ujjayi breathing (2-3 breaths per minute)
The final hold is not done to the max. At some point I can take a little air in. This process is repeated many times until I have full lungs and fully packed. At this point I keep holding my breath as long as I can.
5/5/2008 (dry) 4:00
9/5/2008 (dry) 5:52 (no looking at the clock), contractions starting at 1:00
challenge myself to do over 7 minutes!
15/5/2008 (warm pool water) 5:05
3/2/2009 (dry)
exhale hold #1 - 1:44,
exhale hold #2 - 2:22
hold #3 - 7:05 new personal best! (contractions starting at 1:30)
30 minutes CO2 training (drywalk with pyramidical recovery) using my iPhone program 'Single Breath'. 33x 48 second holds with, 6x12 seconds, 7x8 seconds, 7x4 seconds, 7x8 seconds, 6x12 seconds recovery.
Monday (diverse)
30 minutes O2 training
40 minutes cardio fitness
20 minutes weight (in apnea)
Tuesday (good lesson, hard training)
1 hour ice skating
2 hours pool static (too little sleep and too much muscle pain)
1 hour monofin training (could hardly do 50 meters :-) )
60 meter bottom (pool) crawling in 4:13. Yeah, crossed the 4 minutes with ease. Interesting - I didn't know it could be this easy. Took more CO2 with me than usual. Great confidence-builder for when I start taking this much CO2 with me on my monofin dynamics.
monofin technique training (no fins, long fins, ultra soft oldskool monofin)
18 minutes one-breath CO2 table (pool) this was supposed to be 30 minutes but time did not permit. I have not done this CO2 table since Dutch Apnea Open so I started a little easier than I used to. (2x1:52, 3x2:03, 3x2:15, 1x2:03). Next time I would like to do 2x2:00, 3x2:10, 3x2:20, 3x2:10, 2x2:00.
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.
The last couple of weeks I had little change to train dynamic. So last thursday I went for the final two hour static training session of the year. Of the usual crowd only Jouke was there but Mark and Nanja came over from Haarlem to Zeist to train with us. Since it's chrismas holidays the hot-pool (31-33C) was available for us which is in great contrast with the -8C outside.
After the last competition of four weeks ago I stopped going for max attempts. What I did instead is trying to avoid any form of hyperventilating to make the training extra hard and to avoid constantly having my current best times in mind. I do slow tidal volume breathing for a few minutes and then 80% inhale, exhale close to residual volume and full inhale with packing. At first this gave me contractions at about 2'30'' and now just after 3'00''. My goal here is to improve my first and second attempt this way. The last few weeks my bests were just over 5'00'' on the 1st attempt and just over 6'00'' on the 2nd. These holds are not hard, just long - exactly what I want to be training for. Doing dry empty lung static with my oximeter made it very clear that SpO2% on the first atempt with this breathing was much much better then the holds with hyperventilating! So I just need to get used to some discomfort now!
I continued with a few empty lung statics. Some time ago I managed 3'35'' but lately 2'20'' seemed to be the best I could do. (not bad at all but a whole lot less then before) On monday I managed 2'35'' (dry training) after one month of hard cardio training so I was quite happy with that! Today went even better and with the 2'51'' I hope to reach the 3 minutes mark soon again. I'm still unsure about the result of cardio training for my freediving performances, but now is the best time for it. At least it will prepare me for fitness in apnea that I have planned in a few weeks.
BTW pool temperatures over 30C are not my cup a tea. it took me a good 30 minutes to have the suit configuration that kept me warm enough but not too warm.
Ten minutes before closing time I noticed I was not happy with the 'max' holds so I did a kind of end-of-year present static with hyperventilation (deep breathing from 2 minutes to 1 minute before official top). The hold itself I wanted to abort a few times so clearly not a top time (for me). Still did 7'12'' with an easy surface protocol. One year ago a training with a 6+ hold felt like a good training but this has changed...
During the Freediving competition in Wiesbaden of oct 25th 2008 I improved the Dutch national record in the discipline of static apnea. The record is now 7:33, a good improvement over last years 7:07 that I did during RMC 2007.
