Oxygen
Page 12
I knew it wouldn’t be long before Martin, or someone else, did exceed my depth with a valid performance. I wanted to be prepared for that day, with more in the tank so that I could respond in kind and maybe create the kind of storied rivalry with another athlete that had fuelled the careers of great freedivers before me: Umberto Pelizzari and Pipin Ferreras, and before them Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, whose feud in and out of the water was immortalised in the cult film The Big Blue. However, that ambition was only the spike of the marlin: the muscled fish behind it was my desire to go deeper than I or anyone else believed was possible, beyond even the 300-foot (92-metre) goal I had set myself; in short, to redefine our concept of human aquatic capacity. Whether another athlete was alongside me, leapfrogging my records with his, was a less important detail.
And so I threw myself back into training, swimming two pool sessions a day of endless 25- or 50-metre underwater laps, stretching, strengthening and refining my technique, and above all trying to get ‘inside’ the sensation of a breath-hold. ‘Know thy enemy’, the saying goes, but it’s even better to make your enemy your friend. Rather than treating the crescendo of discomfort and agitation that comes during a breath-hold as ‘pain’ or ‘suffering’, was it possible to make peace with that sensation? To experience it without being affected by it? Or, to put it another way, could I stay calm while suffocating?
T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) had a famous party trick where he would pinch a burning match between his fingers to extinguish the flame. When a colleague asked him for the secret, Lawrence smiled and replied, ‘The trick, my dear fellow, is to not mind that it hurts.’ This same concept can be applied to the urge to breathe: acknowledging it, but remaining impassive to it. This is the challenge that I have set myself in my freediving career, and it is a work without end, for there will always be a deeper state of relaxation and equanimity that is accessible. At times, when I sit and do exhale static apneas with little or no preparation, so that the CO2 levels build very quickly into an intense urge to breathe (with no respite in the form of the breathing-reflex contractions), I tell myself that if only I can match the intensity of my body’s primal scream for air with an equal level of mental serenity and composure, then I will break through into a realm where I can continue holding my breath indefinitely. Years, centuries, might pass, and I would remain seated there, empty in mind and suspended in body. Of course it’s a fantastical idea, with zero scientific basis, but it’s possible for me to entertain it just enough to inspire me to go a little longer, to strive for a slightly deeper state of relaxation.
All the while, through all the hours and days I spend in a state of hypercapnia, hypoxia, lactic acidosis and hyperbaria, my body is making responses, adjusting itself to be better equipped to respond to the stimulus. My kidneys secrete a hormone to stimulate the production of more oxygen-carrying haemoglobin (in my red blood cells); my muscle tissues increase their content of myoglobin so as to store more oxygen when my blood supply is cut off by extreme vasoconstriction (narrowing) of my capillaries; my diaphragm and ribcage become more flexible to allow for my collapsing lungs, while the structures inside my lungs develop elasticity to allow for increases in air and blood content. Overhauling so much of the body’s physiology is not a simple process, and this is why we no longer see world records being set or challenged by athletes who have only a handful of years of training and experience behind them.
*
It was possibly the most experienced and successful male freediver of all time who would next attempt to break the record I had set in April. On 21 October 2007, at the ‘Triple Depth’ competition in Dahab’s Blue Hole, the Austrian Herbert Nitsch announced a no-fins dive to 83 metres. This time, there would be tags on the bottom plate. Also, this time I was present as a spectator, watching from the water next to the dive line as Herbert prepared himself in his trademark position: seated, rocking-horse style, on a large blue foam ‘noodle’. He collected a sizeable portion of the Egyptian desert air into his cavernous lungs, then turned and started to swim down with armstrokes that were so relaxed and truncated they almost appeared feeble. Herbert’s lung capacity is an incredible 10 litres, and he can increase this to 15 litres when packing (a technique that uses the mouth like a pump to force extra air in after a full inhale). This gave him the advantage of more oxygen stores, but also meant that he would have to work harder to overcome a greater positive buoyancy on the surface; alternatively, if he chose to offset that buoyancy by wearing lead weights he would pay the price for this by being more negatively buoyant at depth, where his lungs would compress from 15 litres down to less than 2. Herbert’s lung capacity makes him less concerned about dive duration and swimming technique, and more focused on getting through the initial high-buoyancy phase of the dive without using too much energy and creating too much lactic acid, which could lead to muscle failure in the ascent.
By contrast, my lung volume is around 9 litres, even with packing, so I spend less energy battling against my positive/negative buoyancy in the dive but have less oxygen at my disposal. The advantage of this configuration is that over time, as I develop better oxygen storage in my blood and muscles (where it is dissolved and thus incompressible), I will start to get the best of both worlds: more fuel (oxygen) and less opposing force (buoyancy). There is an analogous trade-off in the sport of rock-climbing, where muscle makes you stronger (good) but heavier (bad).
The last we saw of Herbert was the flash of two white feet as he kicked out of sight at around 25 metres. There followed two and a half minutes of pregnant silence, as everyone waiting on the surface trod water in a circle around the dive line, scrying the inscrutable blue below us. I was torn in two directions: on the one hand, if I was to break the no-fins world record again in the future it would be a better story if the previous record belonged to someone like Herbert; on the other, I couldn’t deny that I was feeling a kind of cloying hope that the record would remain unbeaten, that even such a great freediver as Herbert Nitsch would have difficulty going deeper.
The safety freedivers descended, and we could see them milling around at a depth of 30 metres for a few seconds before Herbert’s shape appeared between them. He was swimming even more languorously than when he had started his descent, his arms only just clearing his head before he dragged them loosely back towards his sides. It was clear that his muscles were saturated with lactic acid — but his mind was still clear and, as he drifted up, allowing positive buoyancy to take over for the remaining few metres of the ascent, he calmly removed his fluid goggles, which are basically swimming goggles with lenses that permit underwater vision when flooded with water, so that he would be able to see clearly above the surface.
Two breaths after surfacing, and he was flashing an ‘okay’ sign to the judges. They showed their white cards, and the record was official: 83 metres. I joined in the applause and laughs of disbelief from the audience, telling myself that this was further confirmation of the great potential remaining in this discipline. Both Štěpánek and now Nitsch had dived to 83 metres, with comparably little specific training, and what I felt was marginal technique. This could only mean that we weren’t yet close to the human limit.
Herbert would continue to dominate a few weeks later at the AIDA World Championships, held in Sharm El Sheikh. Once again the mysterious physical condition that I have experienced only in that location resurfaced, giving me a blood pressure in the basement and a resting heart rate through the roof. Several other athletes commented that they had exactly the same symptoms, but we never did identify what was behind it or even come up with a realistic hunch. The weather conditions weren’t optimal, either, with large choppy waves and a slight current. From being able to dive in the mid-eighties in the Bahamas I was relegated to the mid-seventies in Egypt, and when I announced what I thought was a conservative 75 metres I still blacked out briefly after surfacing at the end of the dive. Meanwhile, Herbert correctly guessed that an announcement of 77 metres would be enough to win a second gold meda
l to go with the gold in the Constant Weight discipline he had won two days earlier. William Winram, who had also announced 75 metres, completed his dive for the silver medal; and third place went to the youthful Alexey Molchanov with a 65-metre dive, signalling that he was more than just the son of his mother, the great Natalia Molchanova, who was dominant across all the disciplines in both pool and sea.
*
I left Egypt empty-handed, and relieved of the world-record title. But I was in a very different state to how I had left the country almost exactly a year before. The record was still less than the depths I was capable of in training, and I intended to increase that margin.
My problem now was that I could not afford to keep attempting world records as stand-alone events in the Bahamas. After breaking the world record in 2007, I had been secretly disappointed to wake the following morning and not find at my door a queue of marketing directors from aspiring sponsor companies, waving juicy contracts for me to sign. Even when I solicited sponsorship myself there was a distinctly lacklustre response — it seemed that either the sport was too small or it was deemed too dangerous for most brands to be associated with it. My first sponsor was the wetsuit manufacturer Orca, a New Zealand company with its offices in Auckland, almost next door to where I had flatted during university. They supplied me with wetsuits for my first record attempts and then, in 2008, began to support me financially as well. Also in 2008 I began a contract with Suunto, a Finnish company that makes the most accurate diving and freediving computers, used by AIDA as the official gauges in records and competitions. The marriage of my ‘athlete brand’ with these two sports brands has thus far been a happy union of almost a decade, helped by the fact that both companies really do supply the best-quality products in their sector (and that’s not just because I’m paid to say that (though of course I would say that too (no, but really it’s true (promise!)))).
In 2007 I also began teaching freediving courses myself, in Europe and the Caribbean, under the school name of Vertical Blue. Between the first trickle of sponsorship money, the course fees and some odd translation jobs that I could fit into my spare time, I was able to sustain my training, travel and living expenses. However, even then a record attempt easily ran into five figures, and that was simply untenable as an annual expense. Additionally, there was an undertone of prejudice against record attempts among some in the freediving community. They felt that the opportunity to set a record should only be available during registered competitions — the same as for most other sports. In a competition, the exact time of day when you must start the dive (‘Official Top’ time) is decided by the schedule of the event, and the dive must begin within a 30-second window following that time. This was easy to adapt to; the major difference, that I had until then been exploiting, was that in a competition the use of a lanyard safety system was mandatory. The lanyard is a tether that connects the athlete to the descent line: on the athlete’s end it is attached by means of a wrist strap or belt, while at the other end a large carabiner is clipped on to the descent line. The carabiner falls loosely along the line beside the athlete, but cannot fall further than the plate at the target depth. If the athlete fails to ascend, this can be detected by multiple means (a sonar device on the surface, feeling the rope for the vibration of the ascending carabiner, and failure to rendezvous with the safety freediver at a certain time) and the whole descent line is then hoisted by allowing a heavy counterweight attached to the other end of the rope to drop off the other side of the boat or platform. As it lifts, the bottom plate catches the athlete’s carabiner and drags him or her to the surface with it.
This system is now standard across all competitions and record attempts, but in 2007 there was still the option to instead employ safety scuba divers, stationed every 30 metres along the rope with lift bags ready to clip onto the athlete. The difference for the athlete is one less piece of equipment, and thus one less source of drag during the dive. I had done comparisons between the two systems, and estimated that even with a minimalist lanyard the difference equated to at least 2 per cent. Given that we only needed to exceed a record by about 1 per cent (1 metre), this little handbrake could easily make the difference between success and distress. Moreover, I hated feeling like a dog on a leash during a dive, especially in a sport that was all about freedom. I felt that lanyards were an imperfect solution — added to which, at that time they had never been required to resolve an incident (it is hard to imagine a scenario in which a freediver might black out at depth, where oxygen levels are still high), but had in fact been the cause themselves of numerous incidents when the lanyard’s carabiner became entangled with the bottom plate, abandoned fishing nets and lines, or even with itself.
Ultimately, though, there was no better solution for how to guarantee that a freediver couldn’t drift off into the blue while far down and out of sight of the crew on the surface. Lanyard designs have also become more tangle-proof, and in recent years the counterweight system has indeed been used to save the lives of at least two competing freedivers. However, it’s hard to know whether having the lanyard creates a false sense of security, which, had it been absent, might have meant that these rescued freedivers wouldn’t have over-reached themselves in the first place.
Herbert’s record was the first in CNF to employ a lanyard. Setting aside the safety debate, I felt that it was important for me to replicate this level of difficulty if I was going to exceed the depth. After all, I would be the first person to claim that a dive to 83 metres with a lanyard is more difficult than one to 84 without one.
The natural solution to both my budgetary limitations and the onus of diving clipped to the line was to host a competition in the Bahamas. That way I would only have to pay a share of the expenses, while still enjoying the perfect conditions of Dean’s Blue Hole. At the end of 2007, I wrote to all my acquaintances among freediving athletes, inviting them to come to Long Island in April 2008 for an 11-day period of officially judged diving. It would be a competition under AIDA regulations, but rather than competing against each other the idea was for us to have a chance to attempt personal goals, whether those happened to be world- or national-record attempts or just personal-best dives. All expenses were to be divided equally between the competitors, and to keep these low we would take turns to be each other’s safety divers. To keep it manageable I limited the number of entrants to 15, and quickly had that many takers — including many of the top-ranked divers in the world, such as ex-CWT world-record holders Eric Fattah and Guillaume Néry, Japanese champion Ryuzo Shinomiya, pool world-record holder and fellow Kiwi Dave Mullins, and the Russian Natalia Avseenko, who everyone was billing to take down the women’s no-fins world record. William Winram would be there too, with a similar goal to me: something deeper than 83 metres without fins.
However, for the first time I was seriously training in more than just CNF. I didn’t know how close I could get to the world record in Free Immersion (FIM), which stood at 106 metres, but I was curious to find out. I had made a key change to one piece of my equipment, swapping out a low-volume mask for fluid goggles. This eliminated the necessity to equalise the mask’s airspace, which, although it is a small volume, still needs to be refilled eight times on the way to 80 metres.
In FIM, freedivers use the rope to pull themselves down and up during the dive. It is a very slow and relaxed, almost meditative form of diving, and since it uses exclusively upper-body strength it is a good complement to CNF. However, of the three depth disciplines it is easily the least technical and the least noteworthy, and I have sometimes questioned its inclusion in competition. After all, pulling on a rope is not something that normally comes to mind when we think of diving, to say nothing of ‘free’ diving! Nonetheless, I still enjoyed the sensation, and in my first training dives I revelled in how much easier it was to use a rigid point of contact to propel my body, with long, smooth pulls along the rope.
It only took me a few dives before I was hitting three-digit depths, and there was where th
e fun started. The extra ambient pressure and duration of an FIM dive took me to a level of narcosis that I had never before experienced. In scuba diving, narcosis is often called the martini effect because every additional atmosphere of pressure (added with each 10-metre increment in depth) has an effect equivalent to drinking one martini. Luckily it’s not quite that bad in freediving, or with 10 martinis under my belt at 100 metres I would probably have had difficulty working out which way was up, or even remembering that that was where I needed to return to. The general sensation is of becoming more detached from your body, coupled with affected vision that can turn into hallucination. On one dive, I was watching my hand come up past my face, grab the line and then pull downwards, crossing with the other hand that was returning upwards to take its turn. I felt as if I should probably close my eyes to relax more, so I did; but I carried on seeing exactly the same thing: left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand . . . I squeezed my eyes tightly closed so that I could feel my eyelids pressing against each other — yep, they’re definitely closed — but it made no difference to what I saw.
On the worst occasion, I was diving with Guillaume Néry and his partner Julie Gautier, who was safetying me. It was an overcast day, and a strong easterly wind had whipped the ocean into a frantic swell that threw itself against the barrier reef, trying to break into the sanctuary of our lagoon. In the protected corner where the Blue Hole is, the water was barely ruffled, but the churning of sand out on the reef meant that visibility had been reduced to only a few metres. At depth the darkness was complete, and this can amplify the symptoms of narcosis. When I turned at a depth of 105 metres I knew straight away that I was in for a ride. For the first time, I wondered whether it might be possible to black out from acute narcosis, and this thought alarmed me. I began pulling harder with my arms, while trying to keep the rest of my body relaxed. At these depths, if you panic and try to get to the surface as quickly as possible then you will use up your oxygen long before you even reach your safety diver. And speaking of which, where was she? The comfort of meeting one’s safety diver can be enough to induce a second wind on difficult ascents, and at that point that was exactly what I needed. With almost masochistic mirth, I noticed that my vision was now starting to go white, just as it does in the accounts of those who return from a near-death experience. And as if on cue, there was an angel descending into my field of vision, ready to escort me towards the light . . .