My buddy and I were just gathering momentum in our pool training, when Covid-19, a.k.a. the Corona virus, started to wreak havoc all around the world.
This winter has been all about Dynamic No-Fins (DNF). We were halfway the last lane building up to a full 100 meters – the goal before the winter season would end – when pretty much everything went on lockdown.
A huge bummer, since the water outside hadn’t warmed up enough… yet. But even when spring arrived and the weather got better and better, there was some hesitance to be noticed among our regular freediving colleagues. Which is probably only logical since both diver and buddy need to ventilate near each other when surfacing. And all measures to keep distance are at the expense of safety.
For buddies who are roommates or lovers this is a non-issue. But for all other freedivers it definitely is. Do you dive with different people? How do you decide who you trust with you on the buoy? Health-wise and/or safety wise.
In the end I decided to just trust Peter, who has been my buddy all winter and values his lungs as much as I do 🙂 That makes me believe he pays attention in his contacts with others the way I do. In addition to that, I decided to trust my own body in the worst case scenario: contracting the Corona virus. God forbid and knock on wood!
These considerations gave me the mindset that allowed me to dive regularly these last weeks and I’ve been enjoying it so, so, so much! I truly almost kicked the addiction. Luckily I didn’t. I’m as hooked as I ever was!
I hope you found a way to get back in the water as well. So cheers to that my freediving friends. I’ll be back next week with another post about equalization for freediving. A great teacher has used his Corona time off to give us some great pointers for improving our equalization and I’ll be discussing his videos.
Well, I can frankly say that there has been a dawn of sorts in my progression. And in this year-ending post I would love to tell you about it (read on for some tips that might help you if you’re dealing with head down equalization challenges).
The first proper upside down (or head down) equalizations happened in a pool in (New) Belgrade, Serbia. I grabbed a couple of opportunities to keep up the training while visiting family in November.
Nearby where I stayed was a large facility called “SRC 11 april”. I think it’s been there for quite some time. It stems from communist Yugoslavia, run by Marshal Tito. And you do indeed get that kind of vibe, both walking up to it and inside: sitting up a hill, built in the days of red Yugoslavia it definitely once was an impressive new complex. Probably exemplary of some supposed superiority and one of the many structures that prided – or at least had to pride – every single Yugoslav citizen.
SRC 11 April – JP Sportski Centar Novi Beograd
I don’t know exactly why it’s named “11 April”. I can’t find the explanation on its website, but searching the internet narrowed it down to a most likely option. Even though the facility was opened on the 20th of December 1979, it is probably named after the 11th of April in 1948 when the ground was broken on a huge construction project that would give birth to what is known today as New Belgrade. This is a part of Belgrade on the other side of the Sava river and also the part where this facility stands.
Now it’s in moderate to poor upkeep. It probably looks better than it did in the 90’s and right after, but it doesn’t look like it fares as well under capitalism as it did during the particular times of its origin. Be that as it may, it has a bunch of pools, including two Olympic (50 meter) pools. One inside and one outside!
The Olympic size pool inside
At the pool I did some DNF warm-ups and then started to hang from the side to practice upside down equalizations. I started doing some Frenzel equalizations upright to later push my upper body below the surface and upside down to try it that way. If you read the previous post, you know I was already able to do it this way, but not get a lot further than that, unfortunately.
To help improve my Frenzel equalization technique I did a lot of dry training. It pretty much comes down to practicing your equalizations a couple of times a day, on dry land, wherever, whenever. There are three things that helped and still help me a lot. First is the Step-by-Step Frenzel Technique document by Eric Fattah. Second is a document on Freedive Equalization Training by Oli Christen (let me know if any of the links don’t work). And last but not least, also mentioned in the aforementioned document by Christen: the Otovent. Make sure you take a look at these if you have similar problems.
Starting out with the equalization practice at SRC 11 April I had pretty much the same disappointing sensations I had before, but quite quickly something just clicked! I was able to do an equalization hanging upside down the side of the pool, pretty much at will. This gave me the moxie I needed! I kept repeating the equalization in this position. Come up for air, breathe a bit, push the upper body back down, and repeat…
After a while I started to let myself go of the edge and float to the bottom to equalize. The pool wasn’t too deep at around 2 meters, but perfect to equalize at least once at the bottom. This now also went well and gave me more and more confidence. So I tried it on empty lungs (with a cheek-fill) a couple of times, which I managed off-and-on.
The second time I went to SRC 11 April I found out the previous visit was not (on) just a lucky day with once-only successes. I managed again and again, also on empty lungs, and felt increasingly pleased and positively excited to try upside down equalizations in deeper pools.
To finish off this happy session I decided to try to DNF the length of the Olympic pool. Since I had no buddy, I asked the lifeguard to keep an eye on me. I put my neck-weight on and after a two minute breathe-up I went under and swam the length of the pool without pushing myself all too hard. So I did it again and measured the swim time: a decent 58 seconds.
Since the lifeguard wasn’t walking alongside the pool with me, I didn’t fully trust the situation to try an even further push. Nevertheless, I was quite happy with the 50 meters and it was a great conclusion to the day.
Back in the Netherlands I was quick to practice again in the 5 meter deep pool I told you about in my previous post. The first time back started out quite disappointing. I was not immediately able to reach the bottom equalizing head down. F*ck this man…, I thought. Somehow I tensed up. Not being relaxed clearly has a detrimental effect to whatever you’re planning below the surface of any body of water. It’s so incredibly contra-productive. And it’s probably also the most confrontational aspect of freediving…
Didn’t some freediver once say: “The scuba diver dives to look around. The freediver dives to look inside.” This quote was definitely not born out of thin air. To even become more than just a novice at this sport – if you can even call it a sport – it’s paramount to be able to look inside and find out what mental barriers hamper and bother you. Which, if you really examine them, they probably do as much on the surface as they do below it.
So… with hindsight it was no surprise that as soon as I started to focus less on frenetically training the upside down equalizations and more on just having fun, blowing some bubble rings and stuff, I suddenly managed! All the way to the bottom! All I had to do next time was to remember to have fun and not allow my high expectations of myself make me tense up again. Hashtag mental note.
In the meantime I have been back to train a couple of times now, with more and more succes. The dawn has solidified. As this winter crosses the border from 2017 to 2018 I’ll keep practicing and hopefully (finally) shoot a couple of vids to show you.
Guys! Have a great party tonight! Happy new year and hasta luego!
PS If you’re new to this blog, you can start with my first post here.
If you are new to this blog you can start from the first post by clicking here!
The third course day was all about safety and rescue procedures in the pool disciples (static and dynamic apnea). The theory focused on the importance of the buddy system and what happens to the body when you get a loss of motor control or black-out. To get a good understanding of these phenomena we were shown a long video with stuff going wrong.
This is what a loss of motor control (LMC), also called samba, looks like (skip to 2:03 if you’re bored by the swimming):
In the above video there is clearly no adequate safety near the diver, so at the same time it is an example how these attempts shouldn’t be done. If this diver’s LMC would have been stronger he could have hit his head on the edge of the pool and in the process he’d probably lose some of his teeth. Ouch.
You can probably imagine what a black-out looks like. Sometimes a black-out just occurs without a warning, but especially in the pool disciplines they can follow the LMC:
Generally they say a black-out is when you have a short gap in your memory (even if it just looks like a samba). Of course you want to avoid these situations altogether, but you have to know how to rescue your buddy when something like this happens to him or her.
So last Wednesdays course day was all about saving your buddy when they black-out. We practiced something called blow tap talk extensively in the static and dynamic setting. It was great fun and it’s definitely no exaggeration when I say that some of us are quite talented actors. Unfortunately I have no filmed documentation of this statement, but just trust me… 🙂
If you want to get a better picture of how to get someone out of a black-out, another great video by Adam Stern will show you how:
After we practiced the rescue procedures and Nanja was satisfied – also with our execution of the forceful advice to the blacked-out freediver that he is not allowed to freedive anymore for the day -, we did a timed static apnea and some more dynamic apnea’s.
My static attempt was a repeat of my previous personal best of 3:10 minutes. Even though I think I could have held out quite a bit longer if I had known I passed the three minute mark, I’m quite satisfied about this consolidation of my static ability. It was a relaxed and nice breath-hold where the contractions at the end didn’t bother me too much.
The evening ended with some more fine-tuning of the duck-dives and – while we filled in our logbooks – Nanja (our instructor) treated us to some bitterballs and chicken-nuggets because it was exactly two years ago that she did her world record variable weight dive, which is a record until this day!
If you read my previous post you know I was a bit concerned about my ability to equalize the middle ear when we would go deep diving in Dive4Life. As I write and now conclude this post, I already had the deep diving day yesterday and know how I fared. Even though I will have to keep you in just a little bit of suspense (at least until my next post tomorrow), I’ll leave you with a picture of the pool from the edge as a teaser:
a journey from the surface to wherever 