I met Michael where he was living in Valencia, and we trained for several weeks in a pool there ahead of the course. During this time I made the commitment to quit alcohol, caffeine and all foods with added sugar. These three pillars of modern nutrition definitely add a lot of colour to life, but they can also blur its edges. To become a better freediver, the energetic systems I would need to enhance have biochemical pathways that operate behind the scenes, with subtle and continuous use of adrenal glands, liver, spleen, nervous and cardiovascular systems, and more. Alcohol, caffeine and sugar gatecrash these organs and make a mess all over the walls and carpet for someone else to clean up. As a Kiwi it was a hard thing to give up drinking altogether, but luckily I wasn’t in New Zealand when I did it. Sugar was a struggle too, but I soon found that I appreciated food more for its nutritional content, and relished a bunch of crimson grapes or a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice not just for its sweetness but also for the sensation that goes with absorbing nature’s bounties, unfiltered and unprocessed. Within several weeks I found I had more consistent energy and attention throughout the day. I slept better and was more stable emotionally. Most importantly, I could tolerate greater training loads and recover from them more quickly.
During this time training in Valencia, I also suffered the first blackout of my freediving career. It’s a story worth telling, not just for a laugh but also because it shows how different an experience it is to what one might imagine. We had been doing dynamic apnea (breath-holds where the goal is to swim maximum distance underwater in a pool) after having first exhaled all air from our lungs. On this occasion I was attempting to swim a full lap of the Olympic pool (50 metres) for the first time with empty lungs. It’s not an exercise that I now consider worthwhile, but back then I was a rookie full of ideas. As you would imagine, when there is very little oxygen stored in the lungs your body depletes its stores of oxygen in blood and muscle very rapidly. At 20 to 30 metres into the swim I was feeling this deficit already, but continued swimming. At around 40 metres I clearly remember looking up, seeing the wall not too far away, and thinking, ‘I can make this.’ Then I was sitting on the edge of the pool, looking back at the same wall about 5 metres away, thinking, ‘Not only did I make it to the end, but I turned and came back another 5 metres!’
‘Wow, did I just swim 55 metres on an exhale?!’ I asked Michael, whose hands were grasping me in a strange way under my armpits. Then I realised that there was someone else also holding me — a very flustered Spanish lifeguard. My reality turned upside down. Michael explained: my strokes had got weaker and weaker, ending with my hands stretched out while still doing tiny strokes with my fingers only. He had jumped in at that point, and had pulled me unconscious to the surface. The lifeguard, seeing a limp and ashen-faced swimmer being manoeuvred to the side of the pool, catapulted himself into action. He sprinted around the pool edge, yelling ‘Ayuda! Ayuda!’ before grabbing my arms and yanking me onto the pool deck. If I had come to a few seconds later, then it would have probably been with his lips clamped on mine and stale air being forced into my windpipe. As it was, I was half-seated on the side of the pool, facing back towards the direction I’d been headed, and my brain had seamlessly stitched together the earlier conviction that I would swim the full lap with the fact that I was now evidently 5 metres beyond it.
There is very little warning of a blackout, especially if the initial carbon dioxide levels in the body are low. Neither is there really any memory of the event afterwards. If we don’t dream during a blackout (and some freedivers do actually have short, time-bending dreams, where they manage a full storyline in the 5 to 10 seconds that they’re unconscious) then there is nothing to mark the event — just like if it wasn’t for dreams then we wouldn’t remember anything of sleeping. A blackout experience is very different for safety divers, who go from watching their buddy holding his or her breath to what feels like trying to bring a zombie back to life. Hypoxia (low oxygen) and decreased circulation to the skin suck all the colour out of the freediver’s face, and when unconscious the eyes will naturally roll upwards into the skull. Although medical science confirms that oxygen levels at the time of a blackout are still three times greater than the threshold for brain damage, it is still difficult not to be affected by the sight of someone who looks like they’ve just been dredged up from the bottom of a lake.
To date this remains my only blackout in dynamic apnea, a discipline where you are able to surface whenever you choose — meaning that it’s really only stubbornness that will cause you to over-reach. Diving in the ocean is a different scenario: we must determine the difficulty of the performance when setting the depth of the line before the dive, or at the latest halfway through the dive when choosing to turn. At that point you’re committed to the swim, and if you realise you’ve made even a small error in judgement, in most cases there’s nothing you can do about it. So, you keep swimming in the knowledge that should you have a problem your safety diver will be alongside you to assist and bring you to the surface.
After this incident we were banned from practising apnea in the pool where we’d been training. Luckily, our trip to Sardinia for the course with Umberto wasn’t far off. Writing about the trip afterwards, Michael and I renamed ourselves after the clumsy detectives in the Tintin cartoon books: Thompson (Michael) and Thomson (me). ‘The journey from Spain to Sardinia started as optimistically as our fresh mullet haircuts, when our rental car was double-upgraded from a bubble to a little diesel buggy. After refuelling with petrol we ground to a halt close to the French border, where Thompson (with a p) was sent under the car to drain the petrol, and demonstrated his concern for ecology by soaking the petrol up with his hair. An hour later Thompson and Thomson were back on the road, racing into Marseille to catch the ferry. Since they hadn’t reserved beds for the overnight crossing to Corsica, they ended up sleeping on the ship’s bar room couches. The ferry staff had the politeness to leave the air-conditioning set to sub-zero, and Thomson (without a p) had the politeness to rehang their fine curtains after using them for bedding.’
Santa Teresa di Gallura is a sleepy fishing village by winter and a booming holiday resort by summer. It is at the northern-most end of the Italian island of Sardinia, and faces the French island of Corsica across a 12-kilometre-wide strait. After we’d arrived, the next day and the rest of the week were spent under the tutelage of Umberto Pelizzari, who would become my most influential mentor in freediving. He is also a dedicated exhibitionist, as the Japanese student who left her camera unguarded aboard the dive boat found out! The course was intensive, and invaluable for its coverage of both technique and theory. Using the weighted sled, which eliminates energy expense on the descent, I became comfortable at 50 metres. With Umberto diving alongside me, I managed an unassisted (No Fins) dive to about 35 metres.
The end of the course and Michael’s imminent twenty-fourth birthday were two good enough reasons to break our seven-week wagon ride, and get ‘on the rip’ Kiwi-style. Six pints later, and halfpint-without-a-p-Thomson dropped straight out the bottom, leaving Thompson (without his p’s or q’s) abashedly pouring the G&Ts that an Englishman was shouting into a handily located pot plant. After that, Thompson returned to Spain and I was left to fend for myself in Santa Teresa, with rental prices skyrocketing as the Italian summer holiday kicked in. An apartment that costs €300 to rent for a month in the winter can be €1500 per week in the height of summer. I was determined to stay on in Santa Teresa, to continue training and be close to Pelizzari’s school, but I found myself without anywhere affordable to stay. To the left of the village a peninsula adorned with smooth granite boulders extends north into the strait. I left my luggage at the dive school and walked to the end of this promontory, where a slab of rock and two beach towels made my bed for the night. The experience showed me how determined and impassioned I was in the path I was pursuing. Although the night was mostly a succession of uncomfortable and damp awakenings, I remember it fondly; perhaps because it was the moment
when I first placed the realisation of my dreams above creature comforts.
Practising pranayama on a familiar rock above Santa Teresa beach, Sardinia, Italy.
After that night I moved between grubby accommodations, sharing with South American restaurant workers, until the flocks of Italian holiday-makers had returned to Milan and Rome, and prices dropped again. By September, Santa Teresa had quietened back into a tranquil Mediterranean seaside village. I continued my training in the bay, with long dives to the sand bottom at 30 metres, or apnea hiking (breathing once every 10 to 30 steps) along the tracks of Punta Contessa, a seaside nature reserve next to the village.
I was learning Italian as quickly as I could, since I had noticed an opportunity: Pelizzari’s freediving manual hadn’t been translated into English, and there were no good English books on freediving. Uncommonly for languages, Italian actually follows the rules it lays down, with very few exceptions, making it mathematical and easy to learn. Within four months I was reading Paulo Coelho in Italian. Although my spoken Italian was still very poor, written translation mostly requires comprehension of the source language and a good command of the language you’re translating into, so I knew I could handle a technical text on a familiar subject. Nonetheless, when I called Umberto (who had returned to Milan for the winter) to propose myself as his translator, I was nervous that my stammered Italian and thick accent would make my offer laughable. To my surprise he accepted, and this expression of faith in my abilities was one of the greatest gifts that he gave me. Suddenly I had my first job in almost a year — and not a moment too soon, as I had reached the point of paying attention to what came after the decimal point on bank transactions.
As the incessant nor-westerly winds settled in for the winter, I settled into a rhythm of working long hours on my laptop interspersed with sessions of yoga, apnea hiking and breath-hold training, with perhaps a cold-water dive if the wind relented. Small poetic encounters defined my experience of living for the first time mostly alone in a foreign country. A nun, somewhere inside a pyramid of white with a skylight for her chocolate African face, passes a weather-beaten Sardinian with a white captain’s hat and a stick. The two stop and say a few words to each other before the nun signs the cross over the sea-dog and they continue on their separate ways. A group of schoolboys pile into the library where I am vacillating over an Italian–English dictionary the size of a double bed. Three advance to my table clutching a picture-book biography of Pelizzari, which they pore over, whispering excitedly. When I tell them I’m writing an English version of his freediving manual, they look at me as if I am a messenger from Neptune.
An overzealous (but rather good) fireworks display is released from the village castle, but it’s still too dry and windy, and when the brush catches fire, half the surrounding hillside is burnt to a crisp. The 130-kilogram owner of the frutteria bags my mushrooms, grapes and panini before chucking in a box of peanuts as a regalo (gift) — he remembers I don’t eat sweet food. As I am getting out of my wetsuit, a fisherman asks me whether I saw any fish in the bay. I reply that where he’s sitting, he has more chance of catching Osama bin Laden. He smiles and doesn’t look at all bothered. I find a fragment of pottery, including a handle of what might have been an urn, lying on the sandy seabed outside the bay. I have no idea how old it is, so it holds its worth a secret, sitting on my mantelpiece. In the midst of so much water, a seahorse floats alone close to the surface, its journey mostly determined by the currents and the waves. I stop and float a while next to the tiny Hippocampus, watching it and wondering if it sees me in the same way I see it, as company.
One of my only acquaintances was my landlord, Tiziana, a slim and elegant Sardinian property manager in her early thirties, with a candid but fun-loving personality, whom I would see once a month when paying the rent. Just before I was due to leave for New Zealand she surprised me by inviting me out for pizza, and although little happened that night, a romance bloomed. It endured several months by e-mail until I returned to Santa Teresa in 2004 and eventually moved in with her. This was my first long-term relationship, and although over the next four years our differences gradually became inescapable until we eventually parted in 2008, it helped me to shed a lot of the crude and selfish ways left over from my youth.
*
Towards the end of 2003, on a windy late-afternoon walk, I found myself on a granite buttress of rock looking west across the Mediterranean Sea that was alive with white-caps. The wind was a nor-wester, of the type that in Italian is given the name tramontana. I would later give this name to my house in the Bahamas, as it was the tramontana that drove me from the Mediterranean to look for calmer waters, to ultimately arrive on Long Island, home of Dean’s Blue Hole. Although it confounded my training in the sea, that Italian wind was invigorating, as if it contained an abundance of what in yoga is called prana, or life-force energy. It filled my nose, mouth, ears and eyes, and the gusts buffeted my body as I stood and contemplated what lay ahead for me. I now knew that freediving was my passion and my path. I relished the idea of dedicating myself to it, of giving over every aspect of myself in the quest to redefine human aquatic limits.
At night I dreamt of a man who went through life breathing only when necessary, like a dolphin, and who had removed the hair and ears from his body in order to be able to glide naked to unfathomable depths: 100 metres and beyond. At that time the world record in unassisted freediving was 60 metres, a depth that had blown my mind the year before when I’d seen the video of Finnish freediver Topi Lintukangas powering himself down and up with just his hands and feet. Lintukangas had been a professional triathlete who had crossed over to freediving, and reached this depth after only a few years of training. I believed that if someone trained relentlessly, for a longer duration, then depths beyond 60 metres must be achievable. I was 23 years old on that autumn day in Sardinia. As the wind bled salty streams from my eyes, I set myself the goal of reaching a depth of 76 metres, or 250 feet, by the time I was 25. It was an audacious goal — the world record with a monofin was only 10 metres deeper. If I had announced this goal, people would have said that I was presumptuous and deluded; after all, I was a nobody in the sport, a 40-metre diver who had never even competed. So I resolved to tell no one, to keep my dream a secret until it had become reality.
If ever in my career there was a moment of crossing a line into total dedication, then this was it. It was both a liberating and a precarious moment. When we admit to ourselves that we are fully committed to something, the shore we set out from slips over the horizon behind us. We finally cast off many of the doubts that were holding us back from making that commitment, but their place is suddenly filled with a keen awareness of the vast tracts of open ocean that separate us from the point of arrival.
I turned from that view, and made my way back to my rented apartment in Santa Teresa, thrumming with determination and anticipation of the year ahead. Despite my hopes, in 2004 my body would become practically allergic to the depths, and every ounce of my nascent commitment would be put to the test.
CHAPTER 4
SETBACKS
Cold nor-westerlies and lingering colds
In sports, words are words, explanations are explanations, goals are goals, but only performance is reality.
Harold Geneen (paraphrased from quote on business)
AT THE START OF 2004, I thought I already knew all about freediving. By the end of that year, however, I had realised that I knew as much about the sport as a seagull flying across a pitch knows about the game of cricket. Sometimes it takes a while to graduate to the level of complete beginner.
Having exhausted my travelling funds, I returned to New Zealand for the first time in two years, to await the proceeds of the translation job I had just finished. During this time my training centred on a theory, proposed by Australian diver Sebastien Murat, that it is more efficient to dive after having exhaled about half the air in the lungs, a technique used by some of the deepest-diving aquatic mammals such as sper
m whales and elephant seals. The difference between them and us, as I would later discover through conducting my own research into the topic, is that these species have been forced into exhale-diving as a way of saving energy in the long run. Living in cold climates, their bodies are already buoyant with insulating blubber, and if they filled their lungs with air as well then the descent would become too strenuous and the overall energy required for a dive to a given depth would skyrocket. To compensate, oxygen storage systems have evolved in these mammals’ blood and muscles: tissues that are incompressible and therefore don’t contribute to buoyancy. An elephant seal stores 96 per cent of its oxygen in its red blood cells and in myoglobin organelles embedded in muscle tissue — and only 4 per cent in its lungs. By comparison, we humans typically store 28 per cent of our oxygen in myoglobin and haemoglobin combined; although that can increase with training, we will always still be reliant on oxygen stored in our lungs. Furthermore, a fit freediver has very little body fat, and can actually make a dive more energy-expensive by exhaling! Our physiologies are much more similar to those of warm-water aquatic mammals like dolphins, which inhale before diving.
However, I was then oblivious to these differences as I trekked backwards and forwards across my parents’ garden while holding my breath with half-empty lungs. This exercise, known as apnea walking, is popular among those who don’t have access to depth or a pool. It is also fairly easy to push any given repetition to the point of wetting yourself, passing out, or both (which makes a private garden a better setting for it than a public courtyard).
*
As the New Zealand summer started to give way to frosts and cold southerlies, I packed my dive gear into a giant canvas carry-all and boarded a flight back towards Europe. I would stop first in Sharm El Sheikh, in Egypt, where an Italian training camp and competition was being organised by the Apnea Academy. Around 200 freedivers, from newbies to seasoned champions like Umberto, were all eating, diving and lounging on the coast of the Red Sea, in a massive all-inclusive resort called Coral Bay, so large it had minibuses to shuttle guests from the restaurant to their rooms.
Oxygen Page 6