Nick’s death forced the whole freediving community to review this way of thinking and training. Individually, athletes realised that lung injuries were not just ‘part of the game’, and that being blasé or secretive about them would only proliferate the problem. Collectively, the community also made improvements to its practices, starting with a set of additional safety protocols and measures that were devised and first implemented at Vertical Blue in 2014, and shortly thereafter became a standard for all AIDA competitions. Athletes are now forbidden to turn feet first in descent, or to stop and restart, as these awkward movements are believed to contribute to lung squeeze. Post-dive medical checks have become more stringent, and all athletes must report to have measurements taken such as heart rate and arterial oxygen saturation, which can help detect evidence of a mild lung squeeze.
Even for those who never met him, Nick’s death was a wake-up call that caused a revolution — a sea change, if you will — in the sport. Although, of course, it could never have been his intention, we still have him to thank for paying the ultimate sacrifice. He was a devoutly Christian man when he died at the age of 32, and it might have pleased him to know that, as in the stories of Jesus and many saints, his death was a message that changed — and maybe saved — the lives of many.
CHAPTER 10
DRY PATCH
Diving for a drink
There is a kind of threshold between shallow and deep. Between a state of floating, buoyant with the lungs’ volume, and a state of falling into the abyss where this volume is compressed. As freedivers we must choose with every dive to pass this point, and surrender to the freefall. Any hesitation or reluctance will act like a tether to the surface, that slows or halts our flight.
In the moment we pass this threshold and fall into heaviness, we leave a part of ourselves behind. We leave our history and our hopes, and continue as only our present selves. We leave behind the concept and memory of breathing, and continue with the deception that we are aquatic. In that moment, the self separates and we continue with only what is necessary for our journey.
The less of us we take down, the lighter the load.
William Trubridge, journal entry
FOR ME IN 2014, the load was becoming ever more difficult to shed at the critical moment. It wasn’t that my friend’s death had caused me to question what I was doing with freediving; rather, it was that everything else in my life was coming up for scrutiny. For one thing, the effect that my marriage was having on my career, and on my mental health in general, could no longer be denied.
In a way, it might have been the same determination to succeed at all costs — the force and resolve that had driven me on to eventually set my first world record after two failed attempts — that kept me in a relationship to the point where it was undermining my own stability. Matters were increasingly becoming out of control, and at times I would have to either escape at short notice to sleep in the car or on the beach, or request intervention from family, friends or even the police. Our beautiful moments of harmony had become the exception. I was running out of oxygen but still clinging to the idea of reaching the surface of our relationship, even though I had no idea how far away that was or even whether such a place existed.
It would be another year before I finally redirected that determination and, instead of trying to make things work, used all of my remaining emotional strength to escape what had become little more than a death spiral.
*
Into this chaotic scenography was thrown one of the most difficult undertakings of my career thus far: the 102-metre CNF Steinlager Live Dive attempt.
Coming into 2014, I believed I knew a bit about pressure and about the stifling weight of expectations. I thought I knew what it meant to have to pick myself up after a failure and step back up to the plate. My mother was the first to point out to me how life has a way of raising the difficulty of its challenges in concert with your ability to cope with them. It’s as if life says ‘You got that? Think you’re hot stuff? Righto then, try your hand at this!’ And with that you’re served up — or you serve yourself up — a fresh obstacle even more onerous than the previous one. Perhaps this process is only a ‘manifestation’ of my own, to use a term from self-empowerment circles. After all, I can’t remember how many times I’ve answered in interviews that I ‘thrive on a challenge, especially ones that are mental as well as physical’.
In March that year, I had just finished drying myself off after training when a call came through from my sports agent, Jason Chambers, who handles all my sponsorship and media jobs. Jason is a retired MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter who now wrestles sports brands into submission for the stable of athletes he manages. ‘Care to do a live-to-air record attempt as part of a marketing campaign for Steinlager beer?’ he asked me point-blank. The ‘live dive’ idea had been on the table between us for some time, with National Geographic originally showing interest but backing out when a similar project was hit by tragedy (the planned live-to-air broadcast of a base-jump from Mount Everest was cancelled when five of the project’s Sherpas were lost in the most deadly avalanche ever seen on the mountain).
Of course I was interested — especially when Jason mentioned the fee, which would pay for the construction of a lap pool at my house on Long Island, meaning that I wouldn’t have to spend time away over the summer for base training. As long as I had several clear months to prepare, I should be able to return to hectometre depth in the No Fins discipline, picking up where I had left off in 2010. Or so I thought. In the three years since my last CNF record I had notched up a mere 20 deep dives in the discipline I was most known for (compared with 50 in 2010 alone). When I took on this new commitment — to freedive to at least 102 metres unassisted — I did feel a slight filament of anxiety. Had I been away from it for too long, chasing that slippery record with the monofin to the point where I would feel naked without it? Would even a single metre prove too large an increment, in the same way that an additional centimetre on the bar might make a high-jumper fail every time?
The first few dives were encouraging, and I quickly found myself back in the nineties. However, from there on my progress was not consistent. A clean dive to 95 was followed with a samba on a 97, then a surface blackout on another 95. Suddenly I couldn’t do a strong dive to 93 metres anymore. The filament of anxiety grew strands, like a mass of hair being pulled from a drain. I tried altering elements of the dive: an extra stroke before the freefall to cut some time off the descent; a change in head position to experiment with different streamlining; a slightly quicker rhythm in the ascent. It seemed that nothing could reinstate the ease with which I had been surfacing from these same depths four years previously. I was running out of time before the first event of the year, the second edition of the Caribbean Cup, and to add to my tension I’d heard word that Alexey had been training exclusively without fins in an attempt to beat me at Roatan in my strongest discipline.
When I arrived in Honduras in mid-May, I started with a conservative 85 CNF and added 3 metres with each successive training dive. Then, with the line set at 94 metres, I had a terrible, slow descent and an even worse ascent, and decided to abort at 30 metres from the surface by pulling on the line. Despite the easier ascent this afforded, I still blacked out on the surface for 2 or 3 seconds. It was my last dive before the event, and I was right back at the drawing board.
The Caribbean Cup would be my first competition since Nick Mevoli’s death, and as the opening day neared I was feeling mixed emotions. It was as if we’d lost a man overboard and the ship had done a quick turn back to look for him before continuing on in the same direction as before, with the ship’s band resuming its song. Were we really ready to move on and start competing again so soon? Was I?
If we were to start again, I wanted to do so with one last glance over my shoulder. It seemed that a fitting way to do this was to complete the final task that Nick had undertaken: the dive that had taken his life. For the first day of the event, I announced 72 metr
es No Fins. I prepared carefully, wanting this tribute to be as close as possible to the perfect dive we all aspire to. In the freefall I didn’t turn my mind off completely, as I normally try to do, but rather let it dwell on what was happening. I took the tag from the bottom, aware of how hard Nick had fought to claim that emblem six months earlier.
Mid-way through the ascent, around the time I was met by the first safety diver, I was overtaken by a surge of the same intense energy I had first experienced in 2008 after doing 90 metres for the first time, the energy that occasionally accompanied meditation, music or even large social gatherings. There was nothing in particular to precipitate it: no thought, experience or action. One second I was swimming at peace; the next, I was overflowing. When bubbles of air ascend in the water column they expand as the pressure decreases, and this effect accelerates as they get closer to the surface: air volume doubles between 30 and 10 metres, then doubles again between 10 metres and the surface. It felt as if something similar was going on in my body: the very sense of being alive was being dilated to beyond what my body could contain. I felt love for my safety divers, for the ocean, for myself. When I surfaced and finally removed my fluid goggles, the safety crew were looking at me curiously; I must have been wearing a rather different expression to what they’re accustomed to seeing in my dives. Journalist Adam Skolnick wrote that I ‘blinked hard, twice. Then a third time as if waking from a stressful dream.’ I might have even been crying — it’s hard to tell with goggles full of salt water. No one, it seemed, had deduced the reason behind my announcement — they must have thought that I was starting with a conservative depth because of poor performance in training before the competition.
I stayed with conservative depths — 111 in both Free Immersion and Constant Weight — before returning to No Fins with a dive to 90 metres. On the same day, Alexey made his second attempt at 96 CNF, after his first dive to that depth had ended with a surface blackout. After my dive I put on bi-fins and swam down to watch his final approach to the surface. He was rising quickly and looked to be in full control this time, although it was clear that his arms were starting to run out of energy: between each stroke he would add a dolphin kick of his legs to take some of the load off his upper body. This movement can add a little extra speed and power to the stroke but is ultimately less oxygen-efficient than the regular arm and leg movements of underwater breaststroke, so Alexey was only using it sparingly at the end of the dive, when the lactic acid building up in his arms made them feel like heavy and awkward clubs.
He drifted the last few metres to the surface and completed a clean protocol, removing the tag from where he had stashed it in the hood of his wetsuit to a flare of applause from those watching from the spectator boat. I was clapping too, but was inwardly conflicted. Records are temporary, and no athlete can dominate indefinitely. I often remind myself of these facts because it’s easy to become accustomed to seeing your name at the top of the rankings and get sucked into feeling a sense of ownership. No one spells it out more starkly than Bob Dylan, who sang about the ‘disease of conceit’, and how it will ‘give you the idea that you’re too good to die’ (or lose your world record in my case).
I’ve always tried to be on the lookout for this pitfall. And yet, when I saw another athlete outshining me in the discipline that I had devoted my career to, it was impossible to hold back the urge to rise to the occasion. My training had indeed been poor, but in the dive to 90 metres I had experimented with an even more minimal breathe-up (slower and more passive breathing before the dive), and this seemed to have paid off with a very comfortable dive. I chose to have confidence in my ability, and announced 97 metres for the following day.
The crew and safety divers had seen me training. ‘He doesn’t have it,’ one of them commented to the others, and I don’t blame them for thinking this way. I started doubting myself during the build-up to the dive. The athlete who was diving before me had borrowed the flotation device I use to breathe-up without asking, and then ate into my preparation time by dallying on the competition line to chat with the judge after his dive. It was a windless day, and the spectator boat had started to drift in around the platform, so the safety divers were swimming it back into position. I tried to block all of this out and focus on my breathing: slow and shallow. At 11.10 a.m. I took my last breath, packed 45 times, trying to relax my chest more deeply with each pack so that my lungs could expand to their maximum dimensions. Then I turned and took my first stroke down into the cobalt void below. Most of my diving happens in Dean’s Blue Hole, where the shadowed balconies and caves surrounding the hole drink the light out of the water, leaving it dusky and colourless at depth even on a clear day. So it’s a pleasant novelty for me to dive in the open ocean where the light rays are unobstructed from any angle, and even at depth the palette is a pure and splendid cerulean blue. When I turned at 97 metres that colour was both the start and the end to the world around me. I was calm and centred. Most of all, I was confident. I started counting the ascent strokes, but soon lost count (my dive log shows 31). At 30 metres I nodded confidently to my safety divers. However, despite my positive mindset the dive was still verging on my limit. When I surfaced, I grabbed high above the water and held myself tight to the rope while I hook-breathed. My hand started to shake as I brought it to my face to remove my goggles. ‘Breathe!’ shouted Carla-Sue, who was coaching me in the water. ‘Keep breathing!’ The urgency in her voice told me that I wasn’t out of the woods yet, and I did one more strong hook-breath while removing my nose clip. Finally, freshly oxygenated blood arrived at my brain and with the return of lucidity I turned to face the judges and completed the protocol. As I reached for the tag to show it to them, I fumbled it in the water and it slipped out of my reach. The immediate instinct when this happens is to duck under and grab it, but any re-immersion of the airways before the judges have made their decision will earn you a red card so I let the tag go. Luckily the judges saw that I’d had it, and were able to display their white cards to a rousing cheer from the spectators in the water and on the boat.
The CNF title would stay with me for the event, but in the overall standings Alexey had moved ahead. On the same day he exceeded my FIM dive by 1 metre, and then a strong CWT dive on the last day put the overall title out of my reach. For the first time, Alexey had outstripped me in total depth across the three disciplines. In his book One Breath, Adam Skolnick writes: ‘Will was as graceful as ever and there were smiles all round, but whether he acknowledged it or not, he was aware that observers within the sport, and almost all the athletes present, were certain they had witnessed a changing of the guard. With his victory, Alexey, for years Will’s heir apparent, had been declared the new king. Or so went the theory. By the bar, on the dance floor, in the barefoot shallows, and even later at a boozy nightclub on the hill, that’s what everyone was buzzing about. Will wasn’t so sure.’
With the 102-metre live record attempt scheduled to happen during Vertical Blue at the end of the year, my focus was firmly on the no-fins discipline. There was still a long way to go, but 97 metres had been my deepest competition performance away from Dean’s Blue Hole, so I let myself be heartened by that small indication of progress.
*
I threw myself back into training, devising the most gruelling and targeted drills and exercises possible for the no-fins stroke. I’d had a 25-metre lap pool installed in the back garden of my house tucked away in the low-lying bush of Long Island. This meant that I could combine the high-volume workload of pool training, which targets technique and freediving fitness, with more-specific depth work in Dean’s Blue Hole.
It’s never enough just to do the physical work, though — I must always be analysing my dives and training, looking for an edge or any sign of a potential weak point. As I was going through my dive log, which is created by downloading all the data from the Suunto gauge I wear whenever I’m in the water, I noticed something peculiar. It looked as if, over the years, I had been getting slower and slower i
n my descent, specifically in the terminal velocity of my freefall. As my lungs shrink and my body becomes more negatively buoyant, I pick up speed the deeper I fall, but eventually the decreases in buoyancy are so small that my speed stops increasing — this is my freefall terminal velocity, which happens at around 80 metres. In 2008, when I was diving with a slightly thicker (and therefore more buoyant) wetsuit, my average terminal velocity was 1.03 metres per second. By 2009 it had dipped below 1 metre per second, and in 2010 it was 0.93 metres per second. However, by the start of 2014 it had dropped even lower, to 0.88 metres per second.
I searched for a possible explanation. It couldn’t be my equipment: my wetsuit was now made from thinner neoprene, which should have had the opposite effect of making me sink more quickly. My lung volume hadn’t changed significantly over that time (and besides, I would need to be packing in an extra litre or two of air to account for such a drop in speed). This left technique as the culprit — but that didn’t make sense, because if anything my technique had improved; I was able to stay more balanced and streamlined while relaxed in the freefall than I could when I was newer to the sport. It was the smooth and gradual decline that eventually tipped me off. I knew that with age we begin to lose density in our bones, and this would make our skeleton, and thus our body, more buoyant. But could such a subtle shift in just one of the tissues of our body have such a marked effect?
Oxygen Page 22