Showing the tag to the judges after diving to 90 metres CNF during the 2009 AIDA World Championships in the Bahamas.
Herbert would redeem himself two days later, with a well-calculated dive to 114 metres for the gold medal in Constant Weight. I was 4 metres back on 110, which earned me a bronze medal behind Alexey Molchanov, who dived to 111 metres for silver. As the only male athlete to climb the podium for both disciplines, I felt as if I had atoned for my poor showing during Vertical Blue at the start of the year. I seemed to have drawn level in the rivalry with Herbert Nitsch. Meanwhile, Alexey’s strong monofin dive had revealed him as a future contender, and this event was the harbinger of an even more intense rivalry with the young Russian in years to come.
I finished the year with a depth in No Fins that was 4 metres deeper than that of my closest competitor, William Winram. My training personal best was another 5 metres further than that. Increasingly, I was becoming accustomed to comparing my dives not so much with those of other athletes, but rather with my own preceding performances. How could I tweak my technique in order to be a little more efficient? Is there any way I could refine my equipment? And the biggie: what was my weakest link, and how could I work to turn it into a strong point? In a blog post I wrote:
Dear weakest link,
Today I discovered who you are and where you live.
Rest assured that I’m going to be coming round very often from now on, to chat and get to know you better.
With time, we’ll become best friends, in fact we’ll be inseparable. Then I’ll be able to start calling you ‘strength’.
Yours sincerely, WT
There are moments in which we realise that a skill that we’d really like to possess is actually very difficult, or that we’re putting off doing something because we dread it. In those moments, it’s important to recognise that we have actually been profoundly empowered. We now possess the knowledge of what needs to be done. Up to that point, without even knowing it, we were being affected by a fear of what we were avoiding. At that point, two paths (briefly) open up: on one, we tell ourselves that we really ought to put more time into it in the future, but for now we’re just going to carry on with what we’ve been doing for a bit; on the second, we turn the full glare of our undivided attention onto that one facet, there in that very moment. That proactive step is the hardest one to take (which isn’t to say that the perseverance required afterwards isn’t hard, too), but if you never take it then you’ll always be at the mercy of your insecurities and perceived weaknesses.
In training, whether it was a drill, a stretch or a diving exercise, I learnt to interpret that feeling of ‘Oh my god, this is going to be so hard, why am I doing this?’ as the calling card of a weak link. It was my cue to analyse it, isolate it and make a commitment — the type of commitment I knew I couldn’t break — to turn it into a strength. Then I began. The process didn’t require a competitor, but it was just as motivating as if another diver were neck and neck with me in the depths. I was competing against the notion of my own abilities, trying to outwit the internal sluggard and cynic.
*
Following the closing ceremony of the World Championships, I was broadsided without notice, and passed from joyful celebration to watching my laptop being angrily dashed into pieces against the ground by an inebriated version of the girl I had married. Those pieces would go into the bin, while the pieces of our young marriage were painstakingly reassembled. It was Episode One, and although there is no sense in counting or writing all the following episodes, they were a regular feature and burden in the following years.
CHAPTER 7
THE HECTOMETRE
Stretching the umbilical cord to a gossamer thread
As I drop down into the deep blue I have to let go. I have to let go of everything that attaches me to the surface and makes me human: light, sound, identity, and the need to breathe itself. First I swim, then I sink downwards, my body becoming heavier from lungs shrinking under pressure. I give myself up to the sensation that the ocean is drawing me into itself. In order to completely accept it I must not think about the coming ascent, which will be much more difficult than the way down. I cannot anticipate in any way that this freefall into the abyss will ever end. The crushing pressure silences my mind, and I fly into the night, a being without thought.
Now is the time! Now is the time to return to life, to air, to light! This is the test! The extent to which I have dared to penetrate this twilight realm must be equalled by my desire to return to the element that sustains life. There I will breathe the hungry first breath of a newborn child.
Words spoken in the short film Hectometer (2011), directed by Matthew Brown and produced by William Trubridge
THURSDAY, 11 MARCH 2010, was a typical spring day on Long Island in the Bahamas. Patches of cloud filed across the low-lying strip of land, creating a comfortable balance between warming sun and cloudy relief. A light southerly breeze ruffled the surface of Dean’s Blue Hole. I was training with Arthur Trousdell, who was taking a long holiday to develop his freediving after having been introduced to it by his older brother Michael, just as I had. Arthur would also help out in the safety team for the upcoming Vertical Blue competition.
The time felt right. I made the decision that I had been contemplating all morning, and Arthur helped to set the line for the target depth. Lying on my back on the platform, my head in the shade, I tried to fall asleep. Of course I never do, but the attempt to sleep is what gets me into the most relaxed state possible. I stay like this for at least 10 to 15 minutes, ensuring that every muscle of my body has had a chance to fully unload carbon dioxide and other waste products into my bloodstream. Most importantly, I need this time to ensure that the blood circulating through my veins is fully oxygenated. For example, if I have recently used my arm muscles to pull the line through to a certain depth, that exertion will remove a little extra oxygen from the blood flowing through those muscles, and this deficit will pass downstream into the veins. The deoxygenated blood won’t reach the lungs, where it can be topped back up to full levels, for several more minutes. So if I started the dive in this state, there would be slightly less oxygen contained in the blood in my veins, which accounts for two-thirds of our total blood volume (the other third is in the arteries). Relaxation is therefore a way of ensuring that we have stored as much oxygen as possible in the blood and tissues of our body.
From the platform I slipped into the water, using the most sparing movements possible. A family of nerves were picnicking in my chest, feasting on the magnitude of the goal I had just set myself, and this meant that I had to be extra-careful not to over-breathe. I didn’t want a countdown for this training dive, so the only sound was the gentle slapping of small waves against the undercut cliffs bordering the Blue Hole. For another 5 minutes I lay on my back in the water, visualising myself as a piece of seaweed and allowing the gentle movement of the water to pass through my body without obstruction.
Another decision was made; I finished my breathe-up with a full exhale, then sucked air deep into my chest, filling my lungs first in their wider base before expanding the ribcage and raising the clavicle to load the upper volumes. Then began the process of ‘packing’: my mouth compressed more air, one bite at a time, into the lungs, pushing down on the diaphragm and outwards on the ribcage until I felt like an extra in an Alien film. Fortunately, this feeling would subside the moment I ducked under the surface and water pressure compressed the air into a smaller volume.
Seven methodical kicks and armstrokes ensued, carrying me down to 25 metres. The first of these were powerful and continuous, pulling me through the phase of positive buoyancy. Then, as the air in my lungs dropped below half of its initial volume and my body became heavier than water, I relaxed the strokes and lengthened the glide phases between them. With the seventh stroke I pulled myself into freefall position, like a seabird tucking its wings into its body as it plummets seawards. My thumbs hooked into elastic bands on my legs so that I could keep
my hands close to my sides and relaxed at the same time. ‘Shut down,’ said the voice in my mind.
This is where the long underwater hangs that I had practised came into play. The accumulated time of several hours that I had spent in a kind of self-induced hypnosis at 60 metres allowed me to slip into that state quickly during my deep target dives.
There were a few initial wobbles in the freefall, but I soon settled in, my motionless and relaxed body falling straight down like a stone into a well. For the next minute and a half I would hold this position, while around me the turquoise blue faded to penumbral light. When I heard my first alarm it felt relatively soon, which was a good sign. I was having no difficulty equalising, and at 1:54 into the dive I stopped my fall, reached out and touched the plate. I was 100 metres down. With no fins. For the first time in my life.
Narcosis settled over me in the ascent, as well as some contractions, although none of them were urgent. Towards the end my muscles were beginning to fatigue, but I’d experienced worse. Finally, I heard a grouper call (a sound made in the back of the throat, that resembles the grunting of a grouper) from Arthur, signalling his presence as he fell in beside me for the home stretch. It made me realise that I’d had my eyes mostly closed and was swimming mainly by feel. Arthur later said that I looked relaxed and calm, with a faint smile.
After 31 strokes and 2 minutes 6 seconds of swimming upwards, I broke the surface and drew my first breath. I looked upwards and away at the sky to the north, savouring the moment, and inhaled again. There would be no surface protocol for this dive — it didn’t feel right to spoil the sanctity of such a journey. Instead I turned, smiling, to Arthur, who alone in the world knew what I had just achieved, and gave him a wordless high-five.
*
When I had begun freediving, in 2003, the world record was 60 metres No Fins, and 90 metres with the monofin. The idea of a finless dive to 100 metres might have been beyond the imagination of any freediver living at the time. It had certainly been beyond mine. This year, 2010, I had steadily progressed through the nineties, improving my training personal best with dives to 96, 98 and 99 metres. When I surfaced from the 99-metre dive it had felt so truncated and easy that I’d needed to check the depth on my Suunto gauge to make sure we hadn’t made a mistake setting the line. I saw ‘Max depth 99.2m’ and couldn’t hide my astonishment: ‘What the fuck? That was a piece of piss!’ In that moment, I had known that my next dive would be to a three-digit depth.
*
When we think of the pinnacle of human speed, the image that probably comes to mind is of Usain Bolt striding away from the pack in the 100-metre dash — it’s less likely that a picture of the world’s fastest cyclist, François Pervis, or the pilot of the ‘Budweiser Rocket Car’, Andy Green, will be conjured. Likewise, the ‘world’s greatest jumper’ will bring to mind the long-jumper or high-jumper more often than the pole-vaulter or ski-jumper. On the whole, we seem to be most fascinated by what the human body can do with zero assistance. In Ancient Greece, Olympic athletes competed naked, proof of their devotion to the same concept of pure human potential.
So, to the question ‘How deep can we dive?’, the most fitting answer shouldn’t involve gas cylinders, sleds, lift bags or even fins. It should be measured by the unaugmented human body that uses only limbs, hands and feet to propel itself down and up through the water. This is what attracts me most to the discipline of unassisted freediving: it is the truest measure of human aquatic potential. The 100-metre unassisted freedive was likely to be the biggest milestone in the progression of that measure.
All the same, sometimes it’s worthwhile to remember what a metre actually is: the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second (setting aside the fact that a second itself is an arbitrary division of time). So, 100 metres is just 100 of those. And 100 itself is only a fancy number because we happen to have ten fingers to count on. Metres and multiples of them aren’t written into the sea, or anywhere in nature. Yet, as a symbol, the metre can still be used to draw a line in the void and pause for contemplation, although I wouldn’t be doing any of that at 100 metres down!
Of course, it’s one thing to dive a depth in training, and quite another to do it in competition. On 11 March I was freediving without a lanyard and without the extra task of retrieving a tag from the plate, and both of these factors make a dive significantly more difficult. If I was to attempt such a momentous depth I wanted to be successful the first time, and with Vertical Blue 2010 only a month away I didn’t anticipate being ready for it at that event. Instead, my attention turned once more to my ongoing battle with Herbert Nitsch, whose records in Free Immersion (FIM) and Constant Weight (CWT) had been broken by Martin Štěpánek and who would be hungry to return to the top during Vertical Blue. For the first year, Suunto was sponsoring an overall prize, for the athlete who accumulated the greatest total from their best dives in each of the three disciplines. I assumed that I was diving a lot deeper than Herbert without fins (CNF), but I would have to stay close or equal to him in FIM and CWT to have a chance of taking the title.
We both had a slow start to the competition, not diving the first day and turning early on FIM world-record attempts on the second day. On the third day we simultaneously found our groove, me with a CNF world record of 92 metres, waving to my safety divers as I cruised the last few metres to the surface, while Herbert broke the FIM record with a dive to 114 metres. On the first day of Act Two, we were both diving in CWT. I set a new New Zealand record of 116 metres, while Herbert turned early in his world-record attempt at 124. On day five we were once again back in synch, with Herbert logging an excruciatingly long, but clean, world-record dive of 124 metres with the monofin while I broke his three-day-old record in Free Immersion with a dive to 116 metres.
With performances logged in all three disciplines I sat out the next day, while Herbert attempted 118 metres FIM but failed his surface protocol, possibly because he was diving too slowly — the dive time was a massive 4:38! He knew what he had to do to correct that, however, and on the next day he announced 120 metres FIM and then shaved 10 seconds off his dive time to achieve a successful world record. Meanwhile, I had attempted 118 metres CWT but it was my turn to fail the surface protocol.
The event had two more days to go. If Herbert was to win the overall prize, he would have to log a significant dive in CNF. I anticipated that he might have a crack at exceeding my 92-metre record, with something like 93 or 94, and so I sent the judges my AP of 95 metres CNF for the penultimate day. At 3 minutes from the AP cut-off time of 6 o’clock I received one last announcement via e-mail, and saw just how wrong my prediction had been. Herbert had announced 101 metres CNF.
As the organiser of the event, I have to ensure that safety protocols are followed. This includes checking with the judges that they are happy to allow the athletes to attempt the depths they have announced. For Vertical Blue, as well as most other events, any announcement that is more than 3 metres beyond the athlete’s personal best can be reduced at the judges’ discretion. As far as anyone knew, Herbert’s personal best was still 83 metres and he was notorious for hating to do deep CNF dives outside competitions. I messaged the head judge, Grant Graves, to see whether he approved the announcement, and he said to ask Herbert what his personal best was. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable at being involved in such a process with someone I was competing against, especially when I needed to be preparing for my own world-record attempt.
At 7 p.m. we had a brief conversation on Skype. I asked him what his personal best (PB) was in CNF and he responded ‘98m’ with a winking emoji ;) — I told him that meant the judges could allow his announcement (since it was less than 4 metres deeper than his PB), as long as he could get his safety diver from the 98-metre dive to sign off. He responded that ‘it [the dive] wasn’t here,’ and my following question ‘did you have a safety diver?’ was left hanging. Soon after that exchange Herbert disappeared from my contacts list on Skype. If he did ev
er achieve 98 metres in a discipline where he had recently failed while attempting 89, then no one else has ever talked about it, then or since.
Most of the athletes at the event, as well as other AIDA judges, presumed that Herbert’s claimed personal best, as well as the announcement itself, were a pretence aimed at trying to rile or unnerve me. If that was the case, it would not prove to be successful. The following day, I surfaced from 95 metres feeling even more fresh than I had after the 92-metre dive, and with a time of 3:56. Herbert dived next; the line was duly set to 101 but no one appeared particularly surprised when he turned early and pulled back up to the surface.
The ease of the 95-metre dive, and a creeping anxiety that someone else might beat me to the 100-metre mark (even though the next deepest athlete was still William Winram at 86 metres), led me to announce 100 metres CNF for the last day of the competition. I had no expectations, and was prepared to turn early if I wasn’t feeling in perfect shape. Incidentally, for me this ‘go and see’ approach is conducive to the most relaxed and stress-free preparation. Having made three consecutive successful record dives in the competition, I was riding a wave of confidence and fully believed that I was capable of the depth. The only niggling concern was whether it would be a good idea to do it then, or to save it for a more fitting occasion. Perhaps this indecision acted through my subconscious to sabotage the attempt: as I rolled over at the start of the dive, some of the air that was packed into my lungs momentarily ascended into my throat before being swallowed into my stomach. On a shallower dive I might have continued, but not knowing how air in my stomach would affect my equalising at great depth, I wasn’t about to find out in such a critical dive! I abandoned it.
Oxygen Page 16