Oxygen

by William Trubridge

  All through these hallucinations my arms kept on pulling, doing what they had been programmed to do, and when I arrived on the surface, out of breath but still very much conscious, reality started to superimpose itself on my narcotic revelry. The whiteout had just been the return of light as I climbed into shallower water, where the sun’s rays could still penetrate through the silt, and the angel had of course been Julie. She told me that I had been pulling a little quicker than normal and had given her a strange look, but other than that I had seemed to be doing fine.

  *

  It seemed to me that if I could learn to manage that state of deep inebriation, I would then be capable of attempting the FIM world record. Meanwhile, my CNF training dives were adding to the depths I had reached in 2007, and on 28 March, three days before the inaugural Vertical Blue competition kicked off, I surfaced cleanly from a dive to 90 metres. I was trying to keep my training depths a secret from any competitors, so I didn’t talk about this dive with my safety diver or anyone else at the Blue Hole. Not until I had returned home, eaten a post-training meal and sunk into the couch with some music playing did it start to sink in. It wasn’t just the milestone depth, or the fact that it was a strong and clean dive; the oceanic sense of fulfilment and gratitude that I felt in that moment came down to the fact that I was there, ‘standing in my dream’. Through years of discipline, perseverance, study and daring, I had been able to congeal into reality the vision I’d had of a life in pursuit of the aquatic nature of man. Now, every day and every dive was a venture into unexplored territory that redefined the range and ability of our species underwater.

  Lying there on the couch and contemplating this, something in the music took me over a precipice. The driving guitar in Coldplay’s ‘Politik’ that had been locked into a dichotomy of twin chords suddenly morphed into a piano that broke free to ride up and over a wave of chord changes, cresting and breaking before re-emerging from the trough. In that moment, something took place in the base of my skull that sprayed a wave of sensation up and around the surface of my cranium, as well as downwards along my spine, and from there out along my ribs and into my arms and legs. It’s hard to describe what that sensation was without using ambiguous and oft-abused words like ‘opening’, ‘light’ and ‘energy’. It was as if a covering had been pulled away from my body, and every newly exposed nerve ending was thrilling at being activated for the first time. Somehow the outer halves of my eyeballs were vibrating, and my cheeks had been drawn upwards to couch my eyes in a kind of soft embrace.

  As Chris Martin repeated the closing lines of the song, waves of well-being, immaculate peace and euphoria kept shedding themselves down my spine. Thin seawater tributaries were flowing freely from my eyes, and I was laughing in wonder and gratitude. In all my 27 years, those were the first tears of joy I’d ever shed.

  Since then I have experienced this sensation many times, often accompanied by music, when I am meditating outdoors, or in certain social settings. With the right concentration, position and breathing I can sometimes bring it on voluntarily. That there is some kind of physical event happening in the body is without doubt, but even the most technical description of it to Google results only in page links to ‘kundalini awakening’ and talk of the release of shakti energy that is stored at the base of the spine. It appears to be a phenomena that is unexplained or ignored by Western science. In yoga, the purpose of the physical poses (asanas) and flowing movements (vinyasa) is to purify the nerve channels (nadis) so that energy can travel more freely through the body during pranayama and meditation. Although I do not practise yoga itself diligently or accurately, I often liken a freedive without fins to a form of repetitive vinyasa flow of arm and leg movements, all performed on one long kumbhaka (breath-hold). Is it possible that the hours I’ve spent repeating those kinds of movements, as well as the breathing exercises and pranayama, have had the effect of tonifying major nerve channels in my body in a way that allows them all to be suddenly stimulated by some kind of central circuit-breaker at the apex of my spine?

  Interestingly, yogic texts mention that an awakening of kundalini energy is often achieved by means of kevala kumbhaka, which turns out to be a practice that is almost identical to the seated breath-holds I perform with empty lungs (although they also state that this form of kumbhaka ‘cures all diseases and promotes longevity’, something that is flatly contradicted in my case every time I have a cold or ear infection!). While the language of yogic texts is prone to stray into esoteric and implausible panegyrics, there is a definite similarity between the physical descriptions of yogic states and what I have experienced myself, almost by accident and before having read those descriptions. The bandha locks were the first example of this: during my practice of exhale breath-holds they had evolved intuitively as a concrete way of blocking contractions and thereby not dispersing the dive reflex, whereas in yoga they’ve been practised for thousands of years as a means of retaining energy in a loop between the perineum and the head. Perhaps the most common yogic tool used by freedivers is the nauli kriya, in which the stomach is flexed inwards up under the ribcage while the abdominals contract rhythmically in the opposite direction. Kriya means cleansing, and this is exactly what it achieves: the rhythmic massaging of the digestive system and organs helps to push waste through and eliminate gas from the stomach, allowing more room for the lungs to expand. The nauli kriya also increases the flexibility of the diaphragm itself, which helps to accommodate the collapse of the lungs due to pressure at depth.

  The great French freediving pioneer of the 1960s and ’70s, Jacques Mayol (upon whom the hero of The Big Blue is based), was the first to marry yoga and freediving, and he spent much time studying Eastern disciplines in India and Japan. On one trip, when visiting a yogi who was a retired university professor who had renounced all titles and possessions to become an ascetic, Jacques described his sport and how he applied yoga to it. The yogi listened carefully; soon afterwards, when they were swimming at a local lake, he disappeared under the water. After lying on the shallow bottom for 6 minutes, by which point Jacques was starting to become nervous, he re-emerged, saying ‘You were right, Mr Mayol, this is indeed a shortcut to samadhi!’

  Jacques Mayol was Umberto Pelizzari’s mentor and greatest influence, and in the same way Umberto was my mentor and role model during the first years of my career. This lineage, of which I have strived to make myself worthy, carried with it the inheritance of a bond with Eastern techniques and philosophies. My first exposure to it had in fact begun at an earlier age, when I watched my mother doing yoga on the deck of our boat and tried to mimic her — although the safety harness or my water wings would sometimes get in the way!

  Coincidentally, just before the Vertical Blue competition commenced, Linda sent me an article she had written for a yoga magazine that included the words of Sri Ramakrishna (often called Paramahamsa, or Great Swan):

  Dive deep, O mind,

  Into the ocean of Divine Beauty,

  You will discover a new gem

  Instant after instant.

  *

  Even with only 15 competitors and a communal approach in which both athletes and crew helped to get the event running, there were still a lot of last-minute jobs and stress involved, and this continued into the first couple of days of the competition. As a result, I didn’t act until the third day, with an easy FIM to warm up. William Winram announced a world-record 84 metres CNF on that day; he continued to announce world-record depths in this discipline for the rest of his time on the island, but turned early in the descent on each attempt.

  The following day I announced an 84 CNF as well. It would be my first record attempt with a lanyard and I was nervous, but unlike in Egypt my blood pressure remained normal and I was able to relax completely on my back during the breathe-up in perfect Blue Hole conditions. Twenty seconds from Official Top time I took my last breath and started packing my lungs. Soon after the count reached zero I turned, reached out, and parted the water for my first
stroke. Seven of those later and settling into the freefall, I did a quick inventory of my sensations. There were no major hypocapnic signals that would indicate I had over-breathed, so given my initial blood pressure that meant I was right on track. Veteran freediver Eric Fattah had advised me to congratulate myself after the duck dive, as by then the result was already determined, and the deeper I fell the more I empathised with this. It took me a while to find the Velcro on the bottom plate and attach it to my leg, but I was still calm and relaxed as I started my ascent, 1:35 into the dive. ‘Twenty-eight strokes,’ I told myself (an extra two from how many it would take without a lanyard). After 20 strokes I still felt comfortable, so I started to lengthen the glides and enjoy the rest of the ascent. My safety freediver, Peter Scott, met me at 20 metres and we cruised to the surface together. In training, I had been having difficulty remembering to remove the nose clip during the surface protocol (this is necessary kit when diving with fluid goggles, to prevent water flooding the nose and sinuses). So, as I arrived at the surface this time, I focused all of my attention on doing that one task right before relaxing into recovery breathing (read: panting).

  With that dive in a time of 3:20 I reclaimed the world record from Herbert Nitsch. There is no way that I could have expected it at the time, but that would be the last day in the following nine years (at the time of writing) that the world record would not belong to me.

  Four days later, the women’s record would also be broken by Natalia Avseenko, who overcame a torrent of nerves to swim powerfully to 57 metres and back in 2:34. On the same day I made my first attempt at the Free Immersion record, with the depth set to 107 — one metre more than the record held by Martin Štěpánek. I was the last to dive. Little did I know it, but there would be a surprise waiting for me at depth, and not a pleasant one. In those early days we were using carabiners to drop a single tag down onto the bottom plate before each dive (nowadays, the tags are all attached around the perimeter of the plate before it is set for the first dive). The carabiner that was delivering my tag became stuck on some marker tape just above the plate. When my own lanyard carabiner hit the stuck one, it put tension on the lanyard cable, snapping the wire at the point where it was crimped (as a result, my lanyard designs have improved a lot since then). There was, of course, no tag to be found on the bottom plate, and I spent what seemed like an eternity — but was in fact 5 seconds — rummaging among the used carabiners, trying to find one with a tag on it. When I was satisfied that it wasn’t there and it wasn’t just narcosis playing with my vision, I started my ascent; at which point, my hand hit the mass of blocked carabiners. I felt something (probably my lanyard cable) brush my foot too, and thinking that it might be the missing tag I reached out to try to grab it. However, I was flailing without reference or adequate vision, and losing precious time, so I continued on my way. The rest of the ascent was uneventful, and the narcosis surprisingly tolerable. Initially the judges gave me a yellow card for not bringing a tag; but when the footage from the bottom-plate camera was reviewed and it became clear that it was through no fault of my own, the card was changed to white and I had my first Free Immersion world record.

  I wasn’t happy with the ambiguity, though, especially after ‘Tag-gate’ in 2007, and so on the last day of the event I announced 108 metres. This time, the tag was right where it should have been and the judges’ card didn’t have any grey edges.

  The dive was made more difficult because on the day before, the penultimate day of the event, I had attempted to shift the CNF record by a 2-metre jump to 86, and for entirely different reasons this had been a demanding task as well. I had started the day in a foul mood, and everything seemed to conspire to keep me in it (although it’s probably more accurate to say that my foulness inspired reciprocation from others, as well as from what is referred to these days as ‘the universe’). I had to find someone to fill a vacancy among the safety freedivers; then was left temporarily without transport to the Blue Hole (my ute was being used as the emergency vehicle). While I was breathing up, I noticed that the Velcro patch on my leg for the tag was coming unstuck, so I borrowed a knife to cut half of it off. The bad run continued right up to the last moment, when I missed the timekeeper’s minute call and performed a terrible duck-dive . . .

  These are all the sorts of reasons that we can sometimes give ourselves for aborting a dive: the lazy/scared monologist in our minds will be mounting his pulpit, ready to spout excuses. At this point, training and a long background of deep dives provides the possibility of turning off the conscious mind and operating completely on autopilot, confident in the actions and contingent decisions programmed into our subconscious. If that analytical mind cannot be shut down, then neither will it be possible to turn off the pestering, pessimistic voice that shadows it — he will follow you all the way down, harping on at you like some cheerless parent-in-law until you either turn early or doom the dive through agitation and increased oxygen consumption. You do, however, need to be able to distinguish between trivial detail (a cut finger that the salt water is making sting) and conditions that actually have an impact on performance (a wry neck preventing you from generating as much power in the armstroke).

  As I settled into the freefall on my way to 86 metres, I felt the bad energy that had surrounded my preparation slip away — it was superficial, and therefore stayed on the surface. Beneath everything else, I knew that little had happened that could affect my physiological state. When I turned at the bottom I concentrated, as always, on counting my ascent strokes. Thoughts, both negative — ‘you’re not going to make it!’ — and positive — ‘if you make it you’ll have a new world record!’ — tried to clamber into my consciousness like attention-seeking toddlers, but I used a trick of affecting boredom with them before they even began. ‘Whatever you have to say, it’s irrelevant now — the dive has already been decided long ago,’ I told them, and myself.

  I had perhaps never been so happy at the conclusion of a record attempt, precisely because I’d had to overcome an adversary (the most guileful kind — the internal adversary) in order to achieve it. It’s hard to overestimate the effect that this kind of success can have: confidence blooms, and competition dives start to feel like just ordinary training. The reverse is also true, of course: every time we succumb to that despairing voice, we fuel our own fussiness and superstition. It’s still necessary to distinguish between instinct and anxiety, which unfortunately communicate to us via the same channel, the gastro-intestinal tract; but each time we get it right, we bury the sluggard a little deeper, until his complaining voice is a muffled whisper and all that remains is undisturbed confidence and unclouded intuition.

  After finishing the event with four world records, three of them set in the space of just four days, I was told by the head judge, Grant Graves, that this was my ‘coming out’ as a freediver. I had completely left behind the setbacks and failures of 2006, and in the process had staked out my territory among the sport’s elite by claiming two of the three competitive depth records.

  *

  Before the Vertical Blue competition I had parted ways with Tiziana, so I wouldn’t be returning to Sardinia that summer. However my e-mail inbox filled with invitations to teach courses on no-fins freediving in venues across Europe. The discipline was obviously gaining in popularity, and it seemed that in my case the freediving community had conflated success with expertise. I didn’t want to disappoint though, so I mapped out an itinerary that connected dots in Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy.

  A lot about the way I freedived was intuitive: habits and patterns that led to easier or deeper dives, and thus became permanent. Teaching my method often required examination of what I was doing and attempts to work out the reasons (if any) for it. This is how I came across the peculiar position of my tongue during exhale breath-holds and deep dives that allows me to stay more calm during the urge to breathe. In other cases, there was a more theoretical or analytical basis to what I was doing. For instance, the kick I
use when diving without fins often resembles one of the most common errors in surface breaststroke swimming: wide knees that advance beyond the central axis of the body. However, there is a subtle — but decisive — difference between no-fins freediving and Olympic breaststroke. Underwater, the axis of the body remains in line with the direction of movement, whereas in surface swimming it is inclined upwards during the moment of the kick, as the swimmer takes a breath. Thus, the swimmer keeps the upper legs straight to reduce drag on the thighs, and takes advantage of the turbulent water behind the torso for the legs to coil. With full immersion, the water streams unobstructed down the freediver’s straight back, and so the legs need to be evenly distributed on either side of this axis: thighs slightly forwards, heels the same distance from the centre line as the knees. There were pretty regular comments on my YouTube videos, from swimmers and swim coaches alike, suggesting that if I improved my kick I would be able to dive much deeper, but after replying to a dozen or so of those I lost interest in repeating my analysis.

  The courses in Europe allowed me to share the methods and ideas I had come across, and if they ‘stuck’ with others then that would imply that they had some kind of universal value. I demonstrated, using a heart-rate monitor, how the heart and metabolism could be slowed down abruptly by blocking the contractions (breathing reflexes) that come on with the increase in carbon dioxide levels. I also showed students the exercises and stretches I had developed to improve the flexibility of my lungs. In particular, I paid a lot of attention to ways to reduce the lungs below their residual volume, by using the mouth like a vacuum pump to suck air out of the lungs after a full exhale. These exercises have now become standard fare for freedivers, and are taught in AIDA and SSI (Scuba Schools International) syllabuses.