The lengthy travel had left me recovering from a cold, so after arriving I was straining to dive with residual congestion in my nose and sinuses. The repercussions of this critical mistake would haunt me for many months to come. A freediver’s airways must be in pristine condition in order to equalise the ears and sinuses during a dive. Any small blockage means a rigid cavity that won’t be in communication with the lungs and can’t be pressurised to match the surrounding water, resulting in barotrauma such as burst eardrums and bleeding sinuses. It’s further testimony to just how clueless I was that I thought I would be able, on my first deep dive with a monofin — not to mention my first ever dive in competition — to reach a depth of 55 metres: 5 metres deeper than I’d ever been with bi-fins. I basically assumed that the monofin worked like a video-game power-up — as soon as I strapped it on, I would get an instant bonus to performance. About 10 minutes before my ‘Official Top’ (the zero time at which a freediver’s performance must begin), I donned the borrowed fin for the first time and realised that I didn’t stand a chance. My attempt to send dolphin-like undulations down my torso and legs into the blade of the fin would have looked like a porpoise beached on hot black sand. The fibreglass plane of the fin buckled and warped as sporadic forces exited into it via my feet. Luckily I had enough sense to return the fin to its owner and slip into some more familiar bi-fins instead, with just minutes to spare.
Down I went. Normally I can equalise without having to squeeze my nose shut, but with the congestion I had to keep my hand on my nose for the entire descent. I strained to force air into my sinuses, which squeaked and whistled each time the air passed through their narrowed channels. Little did I know it, but the negative pressure caused by my incomplete equalisation of my sinuses was causing capillaries in the walls of these cavities to burst, and blood was combining with the congestion to create a kind of jelly doughnut mixture in my nose. Moreover, a leak in my mask was causing it to fill with water, and when I finally and almost miraculously found myself turning at the bottom plate and grabbing the tag (the marker used as evidence of depth), things really started to get messy.
If you exceed your personal-best depth by a significant margin, you can never be at your most relaxed during the ascent, especially when things have been going wrong up to that point. My particular level of relaxation on that day would have fallen somewhere between finding a scorpion living in my wetsuit, and finding out the same thing after having put the wetsuit on. As I powered towards the surface my mask took on more and more water, infuriating me to the point where I wrenched it clean away from my face. Meanwhile, as the air in my sinuses expanded with the drop in pressure it strained against the congealed blood/mucous clot that had formed. I felt a curious movement behind the bridge of my nose before the clot was ejected in a messy burst. Blinded as I was with no mask, I was spared the look of alarm in my safety divers’ faces when they met me at 20 metres. I rocketed past them, oblivious as to my depth, and had erupted halfway out of the water, blood pouring from my face, before I finally stopped finning. To the amazement of the judges, I was still conscious and able to complete the surface protocol. If freediving was judged aesthetically, like high-diving is, then I would have been given a big fat zero; but as it was the judges showed a white card (for a legitimate performance) and I earned 55 points (one for each metre) for my team, as well as the second deepest dive of the competition.
With clean white card performances from my team mates Gianfranco ‘Jimmy’ Montanti and Fabien Pallueau, we were in first position overall. However, I would soon destroy any cause for optimism with an over-reaching performance in the second part of the competition: static apnea. My team mates had impressed upon me the importance of being conservative, as a simple 4:30 (4 minutes 30 seconds) breath-hold would have secured us first place, but my ego wasn’t about to let me settle for such a paltry time when I had a personal best of more than 6 minutes! Sure enough, somewhere just shy of 5:30 I found myself coming out of a major samba (pre-blackout state) amid the realisation that I had just thrown our medal chances out the window.
I later found out that prior to the competition, Umberto Pelizzari had asked his close friend Jimmy Montanti to form a team with me, telling him ‘Occhio, che ci scappa il morto’ (‘Watch out, or this one might “buy the farm”.’). It would have inflamed me to have heard this at the time, but now, looking back on how I was diving at the time, I would definitely side with him and am grateful for his discreet concern. Jimmy was a swim coach and lifelong spearfisher from the Egadi Islands, off the western tip of Sicily. He routinely piloted his RIB (rigid inflatable boat) to a sea mount 50 nautical miles (about 90 kilometres) from land, between Sicily and the coast of Africa. There he would spear giant grouper and amberjack to share with friends at endless summer dinners that spilled over onto the narrow communal streets of Marettimo.
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After the competition in Egypt, I was tormented for the rest of the summer by sinus inflammation that just wouldn’t go away. I was paying the price for having forced the issue during the competition. The passages connecting my sinuses to my nasal cavity were completely closed off, meaning that most of the time I couldn’t even dip my head underwater without a piercing twist of the invisible knife lodged in my brow. I tried antibiotics, nasal sprays, cortisone pills, and cortisone injections into my buttocks (begrudgingly performed by Dwayne, who was visiting from New Zealand). Tiziana even took me to a local Sardinian maga (sorceress), who scrutinised the way oil drops coalesced in a bowl of water and pasta in order to discern whether I had been the subject of a malocchio (evil eye). Nothing worked. The gremlins squatting in my forehead refused to budge. There is no greater torture for a freediver than to be kept out of the water, trapped on the wrong side of that mirrored divide.
However, I was determined not to let adversity triumph over me, and kept myself to a strict dry-training regimen. Resistance training at the gym, lung-stretching exercises, exhale static apneas and pranayama were all regular elements. On the secluded promontory of Punta della Contessa I would practise apnea sprints: a more rigorous version of apnea walking that I had devised and which I performed on an inhale. At the top of a small hill, I would take a full breath in, then run down the hill as ‘deep’ as I dared before turning and running back up to my ‘surface’ starting point, where I could breathe again. The process would be repeated every 2 minutes or so, for as many repetitions as I could muster.
So it went on for most of the summer, with only small periods when my sinuses might allow a brief window of diving before closing up again. It wasn’t until October that my blueless period came to an end. During an Apnea Academy Instructor Course that was held in two parts, split between Pisa and Sharm El Sheikh, the Academy’s ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist, Stephano Correale, prescribed me a cocktail of drugs that evicted those lurking germs once and for all.
Finally freed from the mucosal glue that had kept me stuck to terra firma, I didn’t take long to reinflate my over-reaching hubris. The day after the course finished and I had graduated as an instructor, I decided to put the months of dry training to the test with an attempt at a 45-metre CNF (No Fins) dive. I performed a series of exhale breath-holds to warm up, then relaxed for 10 minutes before starting the attempt. The descent felt dreamy, liquid and peaceful, and despite being deeper than I’d ever gone without fins I stayed relaxed. Nonetheless, a tiny voice told me I had better turn about now. So I did, and with that the tables turned. Breathing reflexes contracted my torso in increasing frequency, and I fought against the impulse to swim more quickly or look towards the surface. Jimmy was safetying me, and when he met me he could see the agitation in my eyes. I made it to the surface, took one breath and blacked out, falling backwards in the water where Jimmy supported me for several seconds until I came round again. The slowly dawning realisation of what had happened, the resultant embarrassment and disillusionment, the mixture of alarm and, maybe — yes — a touch of ridicule on the faces of my course-mates crowding the w
ater around the platform, all left me wanting to sink back under the surface to escape the earthly vices of expectations, judgements and reputation.
Over the following days, as the wound in my pride slowly knitted over, I began to reassess my approach to freediving. The training I was doing occupied long hours, and took me regularly to the precipice of low oxygen saturation, but it didn’t feel like I was training for a sport. I had avoided any and all forms of cardiovascular exercise, on the grounds that I didn’t want to increase my muscular capillarisation and mitochondria content, both of which make the body a more oxygen-greedy machine — great for long-distance running but a liability for freediving. This left me doing very little in the way of physical exertion. To improve performance in any sport, the muscles have to be taught how to complete movements autonomously (muscle memory), and be trained to develop the specific strength required (muscle tone). The process takes literally thousands of hours of repetition, and in the case of freediving this means pool training. We could of course achieve the same results with repetitive shallow freedives, but even these carry a risk of decompression sickness; plus the effect of moving up and down the water column, subjecting the body to oscillating pressures, can be extremely debilitating, requiring much longer recovery periods for an equal distance of swimming. So there was no escaping the fact that I would need to swim laps to develop my technique and power-to-weight ratio.
In 2003, a trio of Scandinavian freedivers had smashed the records in pool freediving (dynamic apnea), including a powerful no-fins swim of 166 metres by Stig Severinsen. The following year he visited Santa Teresa with a film crew to shoot an episode in a mini-series about his attempt to break the no-fins depth record, which then stood at 62 metres. Seldom reluctant to talk about himself or his methods, Stig had given me valuable information about how he’d made gains in the pool through intensive training tables that involved countless short underwater swims with gaspingly quick recoveries between them. Among many benefits, these tables adapted the body to extremely high levels of hypercapnia (high CO2 levels in the blood). As the recovery time between laps wasn’t sufficient to off-gas the CO2 created in swimming the lap underwater, the level of CO2 would gradually rise to the point where the urge to breathe was present even at the start of each lap.
When I travelled back to New Zealand at the end of 2004 to spend the summer with my family, it was with a new resolve to start again from ‘first principles’ and build a foundation of strength, technique and CO2 tolerance from which I could launch my forays into depth. It’s the upside-down version of the approach used for centuries in mountaineering, where alpinists develop their skills over years of climbing at lower altitudes, then acclimatise with brief trips to medium altitudes before making the final push for the summit.
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In that humiliating dive at the close of 2004 I had returned from 43 metres without fins to a blackout on the surface. Barely a year later, in the waters of the Bahamas, I would be diving to 76 metres in the same discipline. 2005 was the year that I discovered how to train, and raced up the slope of a steep learning curve to cement myself as a contender for a world record.
It began in New Zealand with daily pool sessions and exhale static apneas — for which I forbade myself any kind of warm-up so that I would have to deal with the full force of an early urge to breathe. Indeed, for all of my maximal apneas, whether in pool or in depth, I eliminated any breath-hold warm-ups altogether, in order to enhance the dive response when it was finally triggered. Just as in other survival reflexes (such as the fight or flight response), the mammalian dive reflex has been demonstrated to be most acute in the first exposure to a breath-hold dive. Thus, it made sense to go into a maximal dive ‘cold’ in order to get the most out of the reflex’s oxygen-conserving effects.
Exhale static apneas are a rare constant in my training regimen, which has evolved greatly over the years. One of the more curious discoveries I’ve made in freediving came from observing the way my body intuitively responded to these breath-holds. I perform them in a seated half-lotus posture, focusing on staying calm and still throughout, which equates to an attempt to avoid the spasms of breathing reflexes. Breathing reflexes are the body’s involuntary attempts to suck air into the lungs by contracting the intercostal muscles, which run between the ribs, to expand the ribcage. As the freediver doesn’t allow air to enter the mouth or nose, the result is that the abdomen is sucked up under the ribcage to compensate for its expansion; this can almost look like an invisible punch to the stomach. It had been necessary to avoid these intercostal contractions during my initial practice of pranayama, a form of yoga that concentrates on slowing the breathing with long inhales and even longer exhales, to the point where each breath can last well over a minute.
When I later began doing exhale static apneas, I tried to conserve the same state of stillness throughout the breath-hold. My mind didn’t know the process by which my body was achieving this, and I never stopped to analyse it at the time. It wasn’t until some years later, when I was reading about bandhas in a yogic text, that I realised I had been employing them unconsciously during exhale breath-holds. Bandha means ‘lock’ in Sanskrit; the three principal locks are jalandhara bandha (a slight drawing of the chin down and backwards to put pressure on the neck), uddiyana bandha (an expansion of the ribcage that also raises the diaphragm) and mula bandha (a contraction of the pelvic floor muscles). In an exhale static apnea, after breathing out almost all of my air (to just above residual volume), there would be a brief relaxed period where I didn’t experience any urge to breathe. Then, as the urge came on, I would observe my body very gradually, by tiny degrees, straightening the spine and engaging the three bandhas. The stronger the urge to breathe, the more I would tense those three points, but also the more the rest of my body (arms, legs, face) would dissolve into greater relaxation. The result was that of a central, vertical line of tension where the bandhas were stacked on top of each other, from my head to the base of my spine, with the rest of my body around it slipping away. My hands rested limply on my knees, but I had no sensation of either body part. The yogic texts talk about experiencing the body as the thin stem of a lotus flower, and this describes the effect perfectly.
Later I would discover that these three bandhas could be substituted with a single one that takes place in the mouth. This particular bandha, which I call the tongue lock, is only mentioned in one or two of the most obscure yogic texts I have come across. Again, I discovered by accident that I had been performing it unconsciously during deep CNF dives, and I attribute much of the calmness I am able to maintain in the ascent from maximal dives to this one small technique.
Returning to exhale static apneas, when I used the three bandhas (together called the great lock) — and especially when I combined them with the tongue lock — this resulted in a rapid and dramatic bradycardia (slowing of the heart rate), to as low as 25 to 35 beats per minute (the average resting heart rate of an elite athlete is 50 beats per minute). My explanation for this is that the body is no longer being tricked into thinking that the breath-hold is over by the breathing reflexes themselves. In a breathing reflex, or ‘contraction’, stretch receptors in the intercostal muscles detect that there has been an expansion of the ribcage, and they figure that this must mean that air has come into it. ‘Don’t worry!’ they tell the brain, ‘We just took a hit of air — fresh oxygen should be on its way up to you any time now!’ This is why there is a temporary feeling of relief after each contraction, followed by a rapid decline back to the sense of suffocation as the brain realises that it’s been duped. The mini-hiatus is a nice thing to have during a hard breath-hold, but it’s also responsible for sending mixed signals to the part of the brain that governs the dive reflex. If the breath-hold is finished, then there’s no point in carrying on with bradycardia, peripheral vasoconstriction, splenic contraction and everything else involved in conserving oxygen. So the dive reflex occurs by fits and starts, as the body responds to the conflicting messages fr
om contractions. In contrast, when doing exhale static apneas without contractions, there is no respite to the gradual intensification of the urge to breathe, but neither is there any interruption to the body’s response to this urge, and oxygen is conserved.
These are some of the methods and ideas that began to form during that pivotal year of 2005. I performed the techniques mostly unconsciously at first, as by-products of commands I gave myself (like ‘sit still!’ and ‘look for the hard part and focus on that’); then, as I became aware of what I was doing, I was able to analyse and have an active role in developing them.
I say that 2005 was a pivotal year because it was one in which I saw a rapid spike in results; 2008, 2010 and 2016 were similar periods of improvement. However, I do feel a pang of injustice in favouring these particular years over others. It’s easy to train and motivate yourself when you’re on a roll, but a lot harder to persevere when it seems like you’ve hit a ceiling or an insurmountable road-block. Years like 2004, 2006, 2012 and 2014, although they involved mostly setbacks and disappointments, were probably in truth the most pivotal years for me: those years when my mettle and self-discipline were truly challenged, when I made it through the winds of adversity without losing headway and could then sail on upwind with the more favourable breezes of easier years.
In April 2005 I travelled back to Utila, Honduras, where I had planned another phase of depth training. I had come to the island in 2003 as a complete beginner, so when I returned as a freediving instructor capable of diving well past the recreational scuba limit, abstemious and with a strict diet, I found myself on the outside of the social bubble of backpacking ‘dive bums’. Not that I wasn’t still a bum myself, of course! I would sleep in airports rather than pay for hotels during long lay-overs, lived during the summers in the house of my Italian girlfriend and teetered at the limit of my credit card. However, somewhere along the line I had had my last night of furious drinking and deranged dancing at some bawdy nightclub followed by passing out in a corner of the car park.
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