Oxygen

by William Trubridge

  According to the data I found, the skeleton of a lean person comprises roughly 15 per cent of that person’s body weight, so mine should weigh around 12 kilograms. The average bone density of a white male aged 28 years is 1.06 times as heavy as water. Interestingly, it is a lot more for a black male — 1.2 times the weight of water — which explains why it is harder for black athletes to perform competitively in swimming races, where more of their body remains underwater and creates additional drag. Women have less-dense bones (0.95 the weight of water at 25 years of age), and this is one reason why the fairer sex tends to be more ‘floaty’! The studies showed that these bone densities start to decline in the late twenties and do so more rapidly with increasing age. While the change between 25 and 35 years of age is not great, it is still significant. A drop of just 2 per cent, from 1.06 to 1.04 times the weight of water, which is what would be expected for me, would mean that my skeleton would lose about 250 grams of its weight over this period.

  Additionally, exercise that involves physical impact (e.g. running and jumping) has been shown to help maintain density throughout the skeleton. In the complete absence of such physical impact, astronauts can lose an average of 1 to 2 per cent of their bone density for every month spent in space. Since I spend so much time in the water, where there is little gravity and minimal impact, it’s quite possible that my bones were losing density more rapidly than they otherwise would have. When I put my theory to the test by adding a 300-gram lead weight to a collar around my neck, it immediately reversed the decline in my freefall terminal velocity. The descents, which had been stretching out longer than I’d liked, overnight became 5 to 10 seconds faster.

  I have to admit that it was disconcerting to see the first evidence of age affecting my training. I’ve had to keep on adjusting the weight each year, adding 50 grams or so to compensate for my bones gradually changing from the density of a Mars bar to something more like a Crunchy bar. But if this is the only symptom in my sport of the passing of time, then I will count myself lucky!

  *

  A banner, draped like a heraldic standard from the cliffs beside Dean’s Blue Hole, bore the words ‘Born to Defy’. Below these were inscribed my name and the depth of the freedive I was committed to attempting: 102 metres.

  I moved my toes in the damp sand at the edge of the Blue Hole, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. Why was I here, putting myself through this? After all, I held the world record and no one else had come close to breaking it, or even to reaching the 100-metre mark. Ah, yes: I like a challenge. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I like the prospect of a challenge and I like having triumphed over a challenge, but the part in between where I stand on the beach and look at my challenge emblazoned in writing as tall as I am, knowing that in just under an hour I will have to prove myself worthy of it — that is not the part I like.

  My friends at home in New Zealand had been texting me to say that there were similar billboards above State Highway 1, as well as huge vertical banners covering the entire sides of buildings. It was a good thing that I wasn’t doing the attempt there, or I would never have been able to escape from the pressure. Steinlager had gone all out for this one, and a small posse of executives and marketers, along with a crew from TVNZ, were on the island to document the attempt. It was 2 December local time (3 December in New Zealand), and the second day of Act Two of Vertical Blue 2014.

  It was a windy but sunny day. The Vertical Blue crew were on a short break from the competition, and I could see them checking all the equipment and cameras to make sure that everything was ready for the attempt. I walked back to the athletes’ tent, put my headphones on and clicked on a music playlist with the title ‘Dec 2’. I carried on listening to the music as I stretched my wetsuit onto my body and gathered the rest of my equipment before being taken by a small dinghy out to the platform. Even after I’d set my headphones aside and slipped into the water, 8 minutes before my Official Top time, I kept a tune in my head, cycling it through my mind to give it something to do that didn’t involve thinking about the dive. This was easier said than done, especially since there was another beat to contend with — a rapid allegro tempo playing on a muffled drum inside my chest. My breathe-up was still controlled, however, and when I checked in with my body I found it to be in the required state of complete relaxation.

  If I could have seen the crowd gathered on the beach, or clasping the floating perimeter of the competition zone, I would have been hard-pressed to find any smiles. Every face was glazed with seriousness. In the function room at Steinlager breweries, employees were gathered around a large TV screen, eyes fixed on the screen and some covering their mouths with their hands. Although my face was turned to the sky and my eyes were closed, I could feel the attention of all those concerned observers: not only the spectators close to me but also the families, office workers, construction crews and students who would be tuning in to the televised feed back home.

  While all these people were tuning in to me, I was trying to tune them, and the pressure, out. I wasn’t trying to deny it — for pressure denied, whether underwater or in the mind, makes us rigid and eventually more breakable — but simply to detach myself from it. Normally this would be attainable, but today something was holding the door open, letting the pressure leak in. My training in the preceding weeks had, once again, been erratic. On some days I had been able to manage a clean 100-metre dive, while on others I would fail attempting 98. Four days earlier, on the first day of the competition, I had surfaced from what should have been a routine warm-up dive to 93 metres and blacked out during my first inhale. It was a cold day, and a lot had gone wrong in my preparation and during the dive; but still, that dive should have been as easy as a snorkel on the reef. How could I hope to add 10 per cent to a depth I’d failed at, as well as accommodate the extra pressure of it being a world-record attempt? I’d regrouped slightly the following day, with a clean dive to 94 metres, but was I really ready for 102?

  It’s hard to ask myself that kind of question when success is contingent on a rock-solid confidence in my ability. If the answer is ‘no, I’m not up to it’, then is that motivated by skittish nerves or by lucid evaluation? If the answer is ‘yes’, am I just being doggedly optimistic? I chose to shelve the mental debate. After all, I had to make an attempt of some kind — not just to fulfil the sponsorship contract I had signed, but also on behalf of the supporters both at home and on the island who were following me and who believed in me. I was committed to the dive; so I would commit to the idea that it was possible. I did, however, leave myself one escape clause — an ‘abort protocol’ for if I felt that I definitely wasn’t going to make it to the surface. In that case, I would start to use the rope early to pull myself through the remaining metres. It would disqualify me, of course, but should ensure that I wouldn’t black out under the water on national television. I told this to Jonathan Sunnex and Moss Burmester, the fellow Kiwis who would be my safety divers, then tried to put the idea out of my mind quickly so that I wouldn’t precondition failure. I was going to give it my best shot.

  In the middle of the competition square I lay on my back, drawing in my last breath of air, a breath that would need to sustain 4 minutes of underwater exertion to a depth where the ambient pressure would push the cork back down the throat of a champagne bottle. The dive began, and I had those familiar non-sensations of not being an ‘I am’ that I wrote about at the beginning of this book. The descent went well. At 102 metres I calmly removed the tag and smoothed it onto the Velcro pad on my thigh before starting to ascend. That’s when the ‘stifled sneezes’ started. The squeaks when auntie hugs too hard.

  At 60 metres from the surface, hearing those noises escape my throat as my chest contracted, the thought of aborting resurfaced in my mind. I was a long way from Moss and Johnny. The Blue Hole is still dark at this depth, and the rope I was following was a blurry streak like half-erased chalk on a blackboard. I waited, with an empty, unresponsive mind, for the echo o
f that doubting thought to drift away. My armstrokes continued, although for a brief, terrible moment I felt as if I was doing star jumps on the spot without making any headway towards the surface. Then I noticed a piece of seaweed, suspended in the water column, that I was moving past with reasonable, though not great, speed.

  Further along came another squeak, and another thought — like a newsflash: where were my safety divers? Straight away there followed the inevitable analysis of that thought: ‘If I’m asking myself that question, then it’s a sign I’m not comfortable, I’m not going to make it. Okay, so I just had that thought, that’s okay . . . now let’s re-set to an empty mind and stay calm, stay relaxed.’ Barely a stroke went by, however, before the next interjection voiced itself in my neocortex: ‘It’s no good, you’re awake now. You’re out of the flow state you need for a world-record attempt.’ Now I was having to concentrate to maintain the right timing in my stroke, to resist the urge to swim faster. Yet another breathing reflex hit, and I felt this one pull the sides of my cheeks inwards against my teeth. They were now coming with every stroke.

  Finally a human shape, Johnny’s, descended into my field of vision, turning in front of me and signalling to me with a grouper call. Moss was there too, flanking my other side, and the security of seeing them and knowing that I was now 30 metres from the surface gave me my second wind. I might be able to make it after all. The pressure was dropping, my lungs were re-expanding and my body was becoming more buoyant again, making it easier to keep swimming. I turned my attention to my attention. Am I sharp? Am I still lucid mentally? This was the only way I could truly gauge my oxygen levels, since the urge to breathe and the contractions that were racking my body were all actually due to elevated carbon dioxide. The answers were uncertain, and that was indication enough. I needed to abort now, before I went over the edge into low-oxygen mindlessness, where I could no longer make prudent, reasoned decisions and would just keep swimming until I blacked out. I took another two strokes, just to make sure. The surface was in sight now, for the first time in almost 4 minutes. It was tantalisingly close; if I looked directly up, I would be able to see the dangling feet of the spectators and the masked faces of those who were watching the final phase of my freedive. But it had crystallised now, that unquestionable feeling of urgency combined with a gathering mist in my awareness: I was not going to make it. I shook my head from side to side at my safety divers, and my pride and ambition screamed in agony as my arm reached out to grasp the rope.

  Despite aborting the record attempt by pulling on the line and being boosted by my safety divers the final 12 metres to the surface, I still blacked out briefly while taking my first recovery breaths. When I came round, I was surprised to find that no chasm of disappointment had opened up beneath me. I drew comfort from the fact that I had genuinely given it everything I had, and all around me and on the beach the faces were warm and supportive.

  The TV crew needed to do an interview straight away, and I thanked my country for the unwavering solidarity I had felt from afar. ‘This is just a plot twist,’ I promised, ‘I feel like I owe New Zealand a world record, and when I do finally reach it it’ll be dedicated to everyone who’s watching this and to everyone who’s sent in their support.’ Steinlager were quick on their feet, putting a positive spin on the result with the line, appearing at the end of the attempt video: ‘When you push boundaries, success isn’t guaranteed. But our support is.’ I knew that this was more than just a marketing slogan, and it humbled me to hear those words echoed by the managers who had made the long trip to the Bahamas for the attempt.

  *

  With the onerous burden of the live attempt out of the way, I could turn my attention to the remaining two days of competition at Vertical Blue. Was there still a chance that I could win the event to salvage something from the training I had put in? It would be a tall order, since Alexey had logged strong dives in two of the disciplines, with 123 metres CWT and 114 FIM, and only needed a good dive in CNF to round this out. However, in this discipline he had been over-reaching himself, trying to exceed his recent personal best at Roatan by diving to 97 metres with no fins. Twice he had attempted this depth, and both times he had blacked out on the surface after long, tiring dives. Conversely, CNF was the only discipline where I had any points at all, from the 94-metre warm-up I had completed before the record attempt. I would need solid performances in the other two disciplines over the last two days. There was no margin for error.

  On the penultimate day I announced 120 metres in Free Immersion. I had vacillated over a depth between 118 and 122, and was happy about the final decision as the dive was difficult — I probably didn’t have two more metres in me. Meanwhile, Alexey had taken it down a peg with 95 metres CNF. At the end of his ascent he abandoned his leaden arms to dolphin-kick the remaining distance. He managed to make the surface, and fought to keep his head above it as he breathed, holding on to consciousness to finish the protocol. There was a hushed silence while the judges conferred; then a red card was shown. In his struggle to avoid blackout, Alexey had gone over time on the protocol.

  Alexey Molchanov prepares for a dive during Vertical Blue 2014. (Daan Verhoeven)

  So, it came down to the last day and now the ball was in my court. Alexey still had to complete a no-fins dive to be a contender overall, and I was confident that he wouldn’t be attempting 95 again. On my part, I still had to log a dive with the monofin, and calculated that 117 metres would be enough to cover Alexey doing a dive to 94 CNF. In the end he announced 90 metres, and since he was scheduled to dive after me it would all be decided by what happened in my CWT dive.

  With all my focus having been on the no-fins record attempt, I hadn’t logged a single deep dive with the monofin since Honduras six months earlier. When I strapped the fin to my feet it felt alien, so I did a quick test-dive to 20 metres just to remind myself how to use it. As it turned out, there was no need for concern, and it even seemed as if the time away from CWT had done me good! I touched the plate at 1:47, turned and powered back towards the surface. My whole body felt like a steel blade vibrating at its resonant frequency. The first 50 metres took just 30 seconds, and although I started to slow after that the whole ascent was still only 1:22.

  I surfaced, quickly ran through the surface protocol, then tore the tag from my leg to show the judges. Vertical Blue was mine for another year.

  CHAPTER 11

  DOWNWARDS

  The greatest adversary: oneself

  What we ordinarily think of as mind is an extremely gross level of mind. In deep meditation or when faced with immediate danger to our lives, a different type of mind becomes active. In Tibetan Buddhism it is called the ‘subtle mind’. It transcends time and space as well as distinctions among all the various type of forms. It is connected to all life in the natural world.

  Dalai Lama

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN KATHMANDU to meet my father and brother in late September 2015, I had competed at four international freediving events that year, winning ten gold medals. I had also finalised and signed a divorce settlement agreement, bringing to an end the see-sawing relationship of the previous six years.

  We were in Nepal to hike the trail to Kanchenjunga Base Camp, supposedly the most difficult base-camp route in the Himalayas — although we didn’t find that out until we were already past the halfway point! My father has a great love of wild open spaces, and growing up we would spend our holidays hiking through the Kaweka and Ruahine ranges of Hawke’s Bay, sleeping in the well-worn but homely huts managed by the Department of Conservation. Now it had been years since I had spent time in the mountains, or finished any walks that took longer than about a day.

  Books about alpinism captivate me, whether they deal with the near-death experiences of climbers like Joe Simpson (Touching the Void) or the heroic purity of Reinhold Messner’s oxygen-free solo climbs. Perhaps it is the common threads I draw between mountaineering and freediving that keep me enthralled. In his book Into Thin Air, which covers the M
ount Everest disaster of 1996, Jon Krakauer writes, ‘It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.’ Although I suspect that this isn’t mountaineering’s only drawcard, it has a carbon copy in freediving, where the minutes spent in a kind of suspended animation allow us to taste our own existence all the more acutely.

  Kiwi Everest guide Robert Hall’s observation, ‘With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill [Everest]. The trick is to get back down alive’, could almost be paraphrased as a description for a freedive — where the descent is in reach of the idiot but the way back up is an entirely different story. At the extremes of each sport, there lies a so-called death zone. The air above 8000 metres of altitude is almost as inhospitable to human life as the underwater world, with an oxygen level just 30 per cent of what it is at sea-level, and there is a similar risk of blackout if a climber pushes the respiratory system too hard. The lungs themselves can also display oedema, where fluid leaks from the blood into the alveolar airspaces, in the same way that it might in a freediver suffering from lung squeeze. Although I wouldn’t be going to anything like the extremes involved in that kind of climbing, I was still curious to see how my body, which had become accustomed to warm climes and underwater weightlessness, would respond to the other end of the spectrum.

  *

  Kanchenjunga is in the far east of Nepal, its peak straddling the border with India. It was once thought to be the tallest mountain in the world, until in 1852 more-accurate trigonometry found that Everest and K2 were both higher. In recent times Kanchenjunga has acquired the highest fatality rate of all 8000-metre-high peaks, and it is also the most sacred of these, with climbers forbidden to actually set foot on the very top of the summit. Compared with the heavily trafficked treks to Manaslu, Annapurna and Everest, the Kanchenjunga trail is far less developed. We started with a steep descent into a valley that was only 900 metres above sea-level, and then climbed progressively (though not smoothly) over the next ten days to the base camp at 5200 metres. The trail followed a river gorge up through Nepalese villages, where ‘teahouses’ offered the sparse groups of trekkers basic accommodation and carbohydrate-rich meals: nine times out of ten this was dal bhat washed down with Tongba, an earthy drink made from fermented millet.