Oxygen
Page 24
At one river crossing we climbed down from the swing bridge to a rocky pool that provided a bracing rinse. It was deep enough that I could hold on to a stone and fully submerge myself while the water flowed around me. In January, I had started the year with a week of training dives with no wetsuit, to a maximum depth of 82 metres, and I had revelled in the intimate contact with the water, and the sensation of my body opening a path through it. Here in the mountains the roles were reversed, with the water moving past my immobile body, but the sensation was almost identical. Sometimes when I freefall into the depths now, I imagine myself lying just beneath the surface in that peaceful Himalayan stream.
As we gradually ascended in altitude I used a pulse oximeter to keep track of how my body was coping with the low oxygen levels. On a rest day in the Sherpa village of Ghunsa, at a height of 3500 metres, my arterial saturation (a measure of how much oxygen the red blood cells in my arteries were carrying) was steady at 92 to 95 per cent, similar to that of our Nepalese guides. The following day, during a steep climb up a scree slope, I decided to test my limits a little. After a burst of exertion, my heart rate peaked at 146 beats per minute while my saturation dropped to just 77 per cent — about the level it would reach 5 to 6 minutes into a static breath-hold. It was interesting to feel the sensation of low oxygen without any of the high carbon dioxide that is inseparable in a breath-hold freedive. I could perceive the drop in my mental lucidity; it seemed almost as if the frame rate of my vision was slower so that I was seeing in flashes rather than in a smooth continuum. Later, on the way back down through Ghunsa, my saturation held fast at 98 per cent, clear evidence that my body had made changes to cope with the thinner air.
Once above the tree line, the colossal rocky summits that the locals dismissed as ‘hills’ gave way to reveal the true mountains of Nepal. While their lower slopes were a pattern of snow and black rock, the lofty shoulders of those distant peaks were a shiny cream, as if some golden rock had been thrust up from within the mountain to crown its summit. But the colour that took what little remained of my breath away was the blue. The shade that fringed the icy contours of those mountains was exactly the same colour as the blue of the open ocean if, when ascending from a dive and still far from the surface, you look sideways across into liquid space.
Staring up at those giants, and the space they carved out of the firmament, also gave me a sense of perspective about the grandeur of our planet’s seas. To think that the massif I was viewing could disappear in the ocean like a pebble in a lake, all the space around it and above it filled with an unthinkable volume of water . . .
Even in the clearest water we cannot see more than about 50 metres away — half the length of a rugby field. Imagine, then, that seawater shared the limpidity of the atmosphere, and we could gaze down from the surface to the underwater ridges and valleys of the oceans, seeing schools of tuna flying in formation like migrating birds, sperm whales plummeting downwards towards unsuspecting squid, and clouds of herring being shepherded towards the surface by flashing marlin. In truth, the ocean masks her secrets in a cloak of darkness and opacity, and they can be discovered only in the microcosm of light’s purview.
*
While traversing that punishing trail (sometimes uphill, sometimes downhill, but never, ever, flat!), I had plenty of time to reflect on the events of the past year, and where I wanted my path to lead on to.
Vertical Blue had been the first of the competitions, but since Alexey wasn’t attending and I didn’t want to peak too early in a season that would end with the World Championships in Cyprus, I logged conservative dives, although these still netted me gold in all the disciplines (94 CNF, 120 CWT and 115 FIM).
The Caribbean Cup in Roatan followed shortly afterwards. There I focused on CNF, improving my depth for the season to 96 metres. I also experimented, for the first time, with diving with bare eyes. Several other of the top athletes had already made this change, and it appeared that water flowing over the eyelids enhanced the dive reflex, allowing the body to better conserve oxygen. It didn’t take long for my eyes to become accustomed to the saltiness of the water and stop stinging, and although my vision was always going to be blurry I could see enough of the line to be able to swim alongside it. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, the Bajau people (known as sea gypsies) live in boats on the water and dive all day without goggles. As a result, from a young age the lenses of their eyes develop a slightly different shape, allowing them to see more clearly underwater. On the last day of the competition, I was tired but decided to try a dive to 92 metres with no goggles, and was amazed at how easily and cleanly I surfaced. From that moment on, all of my deep dives have been made with no covering over my eyes.
After Roatan I travelled to San Andrés Island, a small but densely populated coral island lying 150 kilometres east of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, although it is part of the territory of Colombia to the south-east. Three competitions in a row was always going to be a little ambitious, but one of my reasons for continuing this tour was that the divorce proceedings begun in April were still being finalised, and I preferred to keep my distance from the Bahamas during that process. In San Andrés I continued increasing my depth in CNF, with a strong dive to 98 metres that took exactly 4 minutes. However, the travel and the relentless competing were draining my reserves, and when I attempted 100 metres on my next dive I started getting strange, insistent contractions, starting at the plate and continuing into the ascent. There was no point in risking a blackout, so I pulled myself to the surface.
Other than the dives I had aborted, all of my competition dives had been clean white card performances. My confidence and depth were building at just the right speed for me to be at my peak during the World Championships in September. First, though, I had to return to the Bahamas, to a difficult period when my arrival back on the island overlapped with the last two weeks of my ex-partner being there. Even dysfunctional relationships have their joys and harmonies — otherwise we would never find ourselves in them to begin with. Parting is never easy, no matter how irrefutable its necessity. One of the things that affects me most is the loss of dreams, in particular those of others’. There is such vulnerable innocence in hopes and dreams that are born of love, and to see this shattered, and to have played a role in that, is especially difficult. Although the parting might be 100 per cent necessary and inevitable, and even though it may lead to other, greater things, the non-realisation of those initial hopes is akin to a death of sorts. Back in 2008, after having said goodbye to my girlfriend Tiziana for the last time, I arrived back home from the airport to find the waffles that, in her heartbreak, she had been unable to finish that morning at breakfast. They lay, nibbled-at and abandoned, a truncated pleasure, haunting me with a reminder of her Italian pronunciation: ‘wuffle’.
Now, after returning from San Andrés I stayed in a friend’s house until Brittany left and I could finally move back into my own. On arrival I opened the fridge, and there on the top shelf was a large sack of untouched red grapes. It was an expensive treat that she had possibly bought in the hope of a moment’s gratification during such a painful time. Instead, it was forgotten among the sorrow. Such details are the minutiae of grief, but they bore holes through the dam holding our emotions back. ‘The cure for anything is salt water — tears, sweat, or the sea,’ wrote Karen Blixen. I chose the third of these, and threw myself into my training, resolving to ‘fall for no one but the sea’.
Once the separation was finally concluded, the rush of freedom and peace of mind was intoxicating. After several weeks of training in the Bahamas, and just before leaving for Cyprus, I performed one of my deepest-ever no-fins dives, as well as an interminably long (4 minutes 50 seconds) FIM dive to 120 metres.
*
The World Championships would pitch me a couple of inswinging yorkers — or curveballs as the Americans know them. The first was the impressive difference in water density between that part of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Not only were the waters of Cypr
us more salty, but below 30 metres there was a brutal thermocline where the water temperature dropped from a tropical 28°C to the ice-cream headache that is 17°C. Coldness also makes water more dense, until it drops below 4°C, at which point it starts to expand and become lighter again — which is why ice floats. Water is the only common liquid that has this property, and it’s a good thing that it does; otherwise, our planet’s oceans would be completely frozen over and life here would have never developed!
Denser water means that the body is comparatively more buoyant, so we sink more slowly. I had expected the effect of the higher salinity, but had completely underestimated that of the temperature. In the briny and frigid depths my freefall slowed to a dawdle, dive times stretched out into narcosis territory, and I blacked out on the surface after a 95-metre no-fins dive that lasted 4 minutes 1 second. That night I looked up the equations for water density, made some calculations and came up with the figure of 300 grams, which I added in lead to my neck weight. On my next dive to the same depth I shaved off 17 seconds, and a few days later I completed a very comfortable dive to 97 metres in only 3 minutes 47 seconds, just before the World Championships got under way.
These training dives were all taking place in the late morning, when the sun was high in the sky and my breakfast was low in my digestive system. So it was another disorienting surprise to get the news, the day before the first day of CNF competition, that the diving would begin at 8 a.m. I had no way of knowing what effect this would have on my performance, so I chose what I considered to be a conservative depth of 94 metres.
That morning I woke at 5 a.m. and ate a small breakfast before starting my stretching routine. In the dawn light I could see that the sky over Limassol had continued to clear. Days before, a biblical dust storm had blown across the short stretch of water from the Middle East, blotting the sky with orange haze and reducing visibility to a stone’s throw away. Hospitals had filled with patients with respiratory problems, and the freedivers, to whom clean air is sacrosanct, had wrapped their faces in scarves whenever outdoors. This day, however, the sea and the sky were both rich shades of blue as the shuttle boat took us out towards the deep water and the rising sun.
My 94 metres was the deepest announcement, followed by the 90 announced by defending champion Morgan Bourc’his. He would dive just before me, and if he didn’t make it then that would mean I could turn at 91 and still claim gold. I set an alarm for 91, just in case. From where I was lying, unable to see Morgan’s dive, it sounded like the surfacing at the end of his dive was tight, with urgent commands to breathe repeated by his coach, followed by a hasty ‘I am okay!’ from Morgan. However, he had gone slightly over time in the protocol, and the judges reluctantly showed their red cards. The spectating crowd was conciliatory, giving him a rousing round of applause anyway. ‘He made it?’ I asked a friend, who replied that it looked like it.
So down I went, thinking that my gauge would have to read 93 for me to still win gold after penalties — in which case I might as well just touch the plate at 94 to be sure. (A reading of 92.9 would be rounded to 92, resulting in 89 after penalties — two for the difference in depth and one for the lack of a tag.) At that early hour of the day, my body was responding to the depth very differently. At the end of the descent, just before the plate, I felt several strong contractions, one of which caused me to lose some of the equalising air from my mouth. ‘That’s not good,’ I thought, before reminding myself that I had done an incredibly fresh 97 metres in training, so there should be at least some margin for error. I was, however, on the alert.
My stroke was quick on the way up, and I felt as if I was staying just ahead of the urge to breathe, like a surfer outrunning a dangerous wave. According to spectators, I still looked good even in the last 10 metres, but the final — and unnecessary — stroke I took, just below the surface, was a sign of trouble. I broke back into the atmosphere, grabbing the line and hook-breathing several times as I fought to stay in control. Then the light went out for a split-second and my head dipped forward. The moment my mouth touched the waterline I came to again and completed the protocol, but it was no use. The gold medal had slipped through my fingers once again. Alexey Molchanov would claim the title this time, with a safe dive to 85 metres. He would rule in Constant Weight as well, with a 122. It was an impressive showing from the Russian, who was attending his first competition since the death of his mother only six weeks before. On 2 August 2015, Natalia — the strongest freediver to have ever lived — had been taken by the sea while performing routine dives to shallow depths in the company of private students in Ibiza, Spain. It was an area of strong currents, and despite extensive searches by boat and submarine her body was never found; we can only speculate as to what became of her. The tragedy rocked the freediving community. Although it was clear that Alexey was still grieving for Natalia’s loss, his playful and enthusiastic character had made it through the ordeal unchanged. Not to mention his abilities underwater. In my own CWT dive I again had difficulty on the surface, this time completing the protocol but using half a second too much time. I thought I had compensated for the effect of the early start, with an even more conservative announcement of 115 metres, but it had proved once again to be a hair’s breadth too deep.
After two red cards, only Free Immersion remained for me to try and redeem myself. By this time, I had lost all confidence in my ability to determine what depth I was capable of diving at cock’s crow. I decided to announce 113 metres, which should suffice for a silver medal, and this time I completed the dive easily in 3:52. As I’d expected, Alexey had announced a deeper target, of 118 metres, but it was his turn to over-reach, with a blackout on the surface that handed me the gold medal.
My goal had been to reclaim gold in CNF, but the medal had now eluded me for two years and I arrived in Nepal without the sense of fulfilment that I had hoped to take away from the World Championships. Gradually, though, that skin of disappointment was scuffed away by the abrasions of the trail, sucked out of me by the leeches lurking in the wet valley foliage and then violently expended into the outhouse toilets when I contracted a persistent case of bacterial dysentery. After a head cold and strained knee ligaments were added to the mix, even making it through the trek became an ambitious goal. Just as in freediving, it was moving back towards sea-level that presented the biggest challenge for me. After years of pushing only against yielding water, the jolts and strains of the rough ground were a sudden shock to my knees. I relished the uphills, where I could lean into the mountain and surge forwards, but every downhill step sent a stab of pain into the side of my knee joints. Anti-inflammatories weren’t enough to dull the pain, and at times I resorted to walking backwards for the downhill stretches.
Needless to say, it was all worth the transient discomfort. Not just the incredible views of mountains like Jannu, Chang Himal and, of course, Kanchenjunga, which can only be comprehended when you’re breathing the same thin, bright air that envelopes those majestic giants, but also the decisive hiatus it provided to my training and aquatic life. For three weeks, exhales followed inhales with no interruption, and other than dunks in mountain streams I was never underwater. It was the longest I had been absent from either apnea or salt water in 12 years. The wider perspective of the higher ground, the meditative rhythm of walking and the timeless civilisation of the Nepalese all gave me the time and the means to let the internal gyroscope that had been spinning furiously to sustain me come to a rest. Those wheels would soon turn again, but for a brief moment they stood still and let me admire the world around me as well as the one I had created within myself.
By the time we returned to Taplejung, the village we had set out from 18 days earlier, we had covered a distance of 300 kilometres, and climbed (and descended) a total of 10,000 metres — more than the height of Everest. I left Nepal several kilograms lighter and with the dysentery still in my system, and arrived back to a Long Island that had just been ravaged by the worst hurricane in a hundred years — one that had
killed, by salt-water flooding, every tree that it hadn’t ripped out of the ground. But I returned fresh, and ready for the next challenge. The next depth.
*
It took a while to recover from dysentery, and to regain the body mass and vitality that the infection had drained from me. Eventually, though I resumed training with Johnny, Dean Chaouche and Shiv Madhu. Dean and Shiv had become semipermanent freediving residents of Long Island. Dean was a young Welshman with fair skin but the curly black hair of Arabic blood. He had stayed in my house during the devastating hurricane, literally holding it together by bracing a door with his body weight for two hours. A wild-haired and whip-smart Indian, Shiv supported life on the island for him and his wife, Emily, by writing software algorithms for the internet advertising companies he founded. During the same hurricane, he stood on the roof of his flooded apartment, filming the carnage with a GoPro.
The four of us developed a sound understanding of each other’s idiosyncrasies in the water: how we liked to be positioned in the breathe-up, what the phases of the dive would feel like when monitoring the rope from the surface (every vibration, brush or pull on the line is telegraphed along its length, and can be felt by the person holding it on the surface), what the signs were that one of us was having a tough dive, how best to coach during the surface protocol, and so on. This level of familiarity is vital to safety and the feeling of serenity that comes from knowing that someone else has you covered. Of course there was rivalry as well, but since we were mostly diving at different levels and in different disciplines, this found its outlet in throwing each other off the platform, especially when the victim was in the middle of taking off his wetsuit, with the jacket up over his head.