Oxygen

by William Trubridge

  I resumed training as soon as I arrived back on Long Island, starting with dives to 90 and 94 metres in order to re-acclimatise to the Blue Hole. Then came my first dives to 100 and 101. These were good, clean dives as well, but my dive time was starting to get slow and I was needing more days — at least two — to recover completely between dives. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to maintain this tempo of diving all the way through to mid-July. At the same time, if I just stopped training and sat at home with my feet up, then the guilt and anxiety I would feel for not diving could remove any benefit I might get from the rest. Perhaps these were legitimate reasons for taking a week off, or maybe I just invented them because I missed Sachiko and wanted to visit her in Japan. When I told Dean and Johnny, they did their best to present their concern impassively but I could tell that they were appalled by the idea. ‘You’re going to fly halfway round the world now? What if you get sick?’

  I had to admit that it was a gamble; but then so was staying on the island, where I would risk burnout. One week away would still leave three more before the attempt, and I felt that if I returned refreshed from a time without thoughts of diving, I would be able to fuel that last push towards the summit.

  With all the time spent travelling I only had three full days on Okinawa Island, but they were spent sleeping in, eating fine Japanese food and even competing in a dragon-boat race (Sachiko’s all-woman crew was missing one oarswoman, so I duly donned a floral dress and filled the gap). When I returned to Long Island I was mentally fresh, and relishing the prospect of one last push for glory. I started back with a sequence of dives to 90, 95 and 100 metres. The last was clean and strong, but still slow. For the next dive I set the line to 102, equal to the planned depth for the record attempt. Nervous about the growing length of my dive times, I tried to swim quicker on this one, and it resulted in my first samba since Vertical Blue. So, after two days of rest I attempted the same depth but allowed myself to swim at a natural pace. This time the dive was clean, but with a time of 4:19 it was scarily long for this discipline. Also, I had started to develop a soreness in my legs that just wasn’t going away with rest. When I climbed stairs, or even if I just stood for a period of time, my legs would begin to ache in a way that implied that the lactic acid and other waste products weren’t being eliminated from their muscles.

  Now that I was reaching my target depths, the rest had become more important than the training, so I focused on doing just enough to maintain my form and confidence, with a deep dive every three to four days. No matter how much rest I took, however, my lower limbs just couldn’t purge the lead that was flowing through their veins. To add to the mystery, Dean and Johnny were feeling similar sensations.

  Just over a week before the attempt, I tried another training dive deeper than 100 metres and this time I came to the surface struggling, hooked, felt the blackout coming on and swore, before spending 2 seconds unconscious. It was clear that my performance had peaked in June, and now I was on a slow but inexorable decline that even time off hadn’t been able to curb. I settled on doing just two dives in the final week, and finished with a promising dive to 101 metres. Encouragingly, the strange heaviness in my legs had finally begun to dissipate. Not so encouragingly, it had been replaced with a much worse bugbear and familiar foe. Stress. It was building: the stress caused by the guarantee of success I had made to an entire nation; the stress of coordinating the record attempt and doing damage control after a blunder by my crew had crippled the underwater drone system; the stress of doing interviews in the build-up.

  *

  The months of carefully programmed and measured training had ensured that my body was now capable of swimming to 102 metres and back on a single breath. That box was ticked. Whether I was able to accomplish it on the day would now come down to a single organ: my brain. I knew that I would have to use every mental tool in my kit, as well as fashion new ones specifically for this dive. The mantra ‘Now is all’ was still fresh and functional, but over the days leading up to the attempt I added numerous other devices.

  My first step was to pull the carpet out from underneath the very idea of competition stress and nerves. After Earth is a pretty basic film, but in it Will Smith’s speech on fear outlines a clever method for dissuading it: ‘Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near-insanity. Do not misunderstand me: danger is very real, but fear is a choice.’

  In freediving the nemesis is not fear of death, but rather fear of failure — in short, performance anxiety. Now, when I felt the fluttering sensation that heralded this anxiety I didn’t shy away from it, but instead looked for a concrete source in the present moment: what was happening right now that I was afraid of? When I couldn’t find anything, this was confirmation that my nerves weren’t actually based in the here and now of current reality, but rather in some kind of fantasy set in the future. It was like the moment when you figure out the magician’s trick and the whole illusion comes crashing down. Rather than being at the mercy of these nerves, I was able to keep them in control and brush them aside with the cursory thought ‘nerves aren’t real’.

  Nevertheless, sometimes the stress was just too ingrained and visceral for my mind to dispel it completely with a label. On these occasions I could take it in the opposite direction. In a competition or record attempt, it is essentially only the ego that is riding on the outcome. Failure normally involves blackout (on the surface or just below it), when the brain reaches its threshold for low levels of oxygen. Meanwhile, the blood is still carrying enough oxygen for minutes of brain supply — more than enough time for breathing to be resumed on the surface. So it’s less the danger of a blackout than the wounded pride of failure that drives the anxiety felt prior to the dive. In a nutshell, I would be stressed out because I might take a hit to my ego. But what if it was more serious than that? What if my life, or the lives of others, actually did depend on the outcome? What if it was imperative that I was successful — if I had to dive to turn off the nuclear reactor on a sunken submarine that was ready to blow, for instance? When compared with these kinds of stakes, the fear of simply being embarrassed is laughable. I couldn’t imagine how much more anxiety there would be in a life-and-death scenario, but that’s not really relevant — I didn’t have to experience that. I entertained the idea for long enough to put into perspective just how frivolous this circus-style record attempt really was. How silly was I for letting something so trivial and egocentric affect my emotional state! In the immortal words of Natalia Molchanova: ‘Birth and death are important, but freediving competitions are just games for adults.’

  In the weeks before the attempt I took evening hikes over the limestone cliffs of Long Island, to try to clear the heaviness from my legs and the cobwebs from my mind. These were also times in which to reflect and draw energy from the sea. On that shore, the progress of the ocean’s rows of silent envoys was checked and reflected by the jagged rocks, filling the air with spray and a salty mist. Normally I left my phone at home, but on one occasion it was in my pocket and when it buzzed with an alert I absent-mindedly pulled it out. The alert was a simple message from Twitter, but the way it was worded and the moment in which it was received struck a note of significance: ‘Sealife is now following you.’

  Of course I have no pretensions that the ocean’s sealife gives a damn about my silly jiggling around in the upper percentile of its depths. However, I personally do give a damn about sealife, and I know that with every success I achieve in freediving I secure more power and leverage to be able to influence the issues I care about. ‘Do it for the oceans’ is one of my greatest motivators, and so even the passing fancy that the ocean’s sealife might have noticed my efforts and be ‘following’ them added to my motivation.

  Finally there was one last mental device that I used to program the circuitry of my mind for that last push. The colour o
range. I tend to plunder practices like yoga and zazen meditation, taking from them exercises and concepts that I can apply to my training. One of these is the qigong visualisation of a ball of energy that is created with specific hand movements and then stored in the body. I imagined this energy as an orange light, since (in traditional colour theory) orange is the complementary colour to the ocean’s blue and, I’m told, helps to balance the time I spend in the water. After shaping it like a snowball with my hands, I visualise storing it in the tanden (the space between the navel and the perineum that in Eastern martial arts is the seat of the body’s energy), to be accessed only during the ascent of the record attempt itself.

  Do I believe in such an energy? Not literally, but I do believe in the psychological effects that this kind of visualisation can have. The intention and the action themselves create subconscious cues and contingencies that perhaps allow us to trigger elevated physiological levels. If nothing else, the fantasy that I had a cache of stockpiled energy ready to intervene during the dive gave me just a little extra confidence. And at the end of the day confidence is confidence, even when it is founded upon illusion.

  *

  Now is all, nerves aren’t real, sealife, orange energy, and all the regular techniques of visualisation, positive affirmation and mental anchors . . . as that date with the depths drew nearer, my mind had become a kind of one-man army, brandishing an arsenal of weapons with which to eviscerate the hordes of marauding negative thoughts and mutineering apprehensions. I was finally starting to feel that my mind was functioning on a similar level to the way my body had in the training dives past 100 metres. I often tell students in freediving courses that you can’t muscle your way to the bottom plate and back, any more than you can get there with meditation alone. Both vehicles need to be firing on all cylinders, and they need to be driven by an inextinguishable flame of motivation.

  On the day of the record attempt, I felt as if every part of my being had showed up with its toolkit and lunchbox carefully prepared, ready for action. But still, would that be enough?

  The sperm whale takes a final breath and upends its great tail fluke, directing the massive prow of its head downwards into the abyss. That breath must sustain it for an hour and a half underwater, while it descends as much as 2 kilometres below the surface (at that depth, if you opened a pressurised scuba tank, water would flow into it through the valve). Nonetheless, the whale is as dependent on the air above the surface as we are. It must return to it, or perish. Whales are capable of conscious thought, according to the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, so they must be aware of their dependency on air. And yet it is the only existence they know. There is no alternative, so it’s hard to imagine that for the whale the experience of freediving is anything but natural and peaceful.

  That was the kind of dive I aspired to, on that windy July day in the Bahamas. It was the dive that I had aspired to for my whole career, ever since I had stood on that granite promontory in Sardinia on another windy day 13 years before, and committed myself to the pursuit of human aquatic potential. I had spent those years remodelling my physiology, imprinting fluid movement and harnessing the power of my mind for that one goal. Now, if I was to be successful in diving to 102 metres and back unassisted, I would need to channel the calm and ease of a marine mammal.

  As I walked down the beach towards the Blue Hole, children were playing in the shallows and I smiled at them, remembering. They were at the start of a journey of exploration into the sea — I was still on that same journey, but a little further along.

  Steinlager had labelled the attempt ‘Return to the Deep’. In essence, that was also a description of freediving: a return to the deep oceans after an absence of 400 million years. If you repeat the word ‘great’ continuously for four years and add ‘grandmother’ on the end, you will have described your ancestor who lived in the sea. Who breathed the sea. There is no break in that family line; no child who didn’t look more or less the same as their parent. The first tetrapods to leave the water breathed by swallowing air into their digestive system, and absorbing oxygen through the gut lining. Pockets of the gut evolved into the lungs we have today. Now, today, I was lying on the surface of the Blue Hole having taken a full breath and swallowed bites of air into my lungs to fill them with all the oxygen they could take. Satisfied that I had taken onboard enough for the dive, I rolled over to face the blue depths below me.

  The development of the amniotic egg — an egg with a shell — allowed early land-dwelling tetrapods to prevent the embryo inside the egg from drying out in a dry land habitat, by holding it in a sac of liquid within the shell. Human babies grow for nine months inside a similar amniotic sac: a little bag of ocean within the womb. As I scooped the water aside with my arms and feet, pulling my body downwards, I was back inside the planet’s amniote, from which all life has evolved. Perhaps the whole terrestrial escapade had all been a big mistake. Perhaps, realising this, the dolphins and whales had made the migration back from the land to the sea, and were all the better for it. Here was I, attempting to do the same in the course of just one lifetime.

  I was freefalling now. As the bubbles of air shrank inside my lungs, the bubble of emptiness expanded in my mind. The taut rope skimmed against the silicone of my swim cap where it was pulled tight down over my forehead, and this allowed me to close my eyes and fly, sightless, into the void.

  On the surface, Shiv watched the sonar and announced the depth and time readings. Fifty metres after 1:00. Seventy-five metres by 1:30. The first depth alarm on my Suunto gauge sounded when I reached 82 metres. My mind woke up, pressed the snooze button and went back to sleep. I wasn’t there yet.

  ‘Peace and precision.’ This simple word pair had come to me in a moment of contemplation years ago, as a distillation of what I must achieve in a freedive. The peace of a resting mind, and the precision of a body that uses the minimal amount of oxygen to move through the water. In the 90-second freefall from 30 metres to the bottom plate at 102, the centreline of my body hadn’t deviated more than a centimetre from the vertical axis of the rope, and during that period I could have counted on one hand the number of thoughts that had briefly occupied my mind.

  When the final alarm sounded, 7 metres from the target, my right arm slowly reached above my head, feeling for the plate, while my left hand circled the rope. Without looking, without even opening my eyes, I removed a tag from the plate and pulled on the rope, once, to start my ascent. Two minutes had passed since my last breath, and I was more than 2 minutes of hard swimming away from the surface.

  I was slow in my ascent, slower even than I had been in training. Initially I was only gaining about 2 metres with every 3-second kick-and-stroke cycle. But gradually I climbed, scaling my own personal Everest, stroke by stroke. ‘Now’ was the only concept that existed in my mind. There was no anticipation of a record, of surfacing, or even of an end to the slow rhythm of pulsing legs and sweeping arms. I swam as if I had been born swimming and knew no alternative.

  By 3 minutes I was at 60 metres and my safety divers were setting off from the surface, on their way to meet me. My eyes were half-open; just enough to perceive the blurry line of the rope in front of me, as well as the gradual renewal of light. If I had been paying attention to my body, I would have noticed my limbs fatiguing, my stomach hollowing with each breathing reflex. But my body didn’t need my attention: it had been here before, had overcome these same barriers and knew what to do without being told.

  (Daan Verhoeven)

  Now a shape swung into view and turned in front of me. Dean, my first safety diver, had come deeper for today’s dive: to 37 metres. Part of my brain was starting to stir — not a part that performed any kind of computation or reasoning, but more a faculty of willpower and concentration. I had to ensure that I stayed present and self-aware in this crucial final stage of the ascent, even if there was still no content to that awareness.

  I could now see the surface in my peripheral vision: the judges cl
ose to the line; the medic, Tom, standing on the platform and peering anxiously down through the surface, as if from another world.

  The dive profile of my 102 metre CNF world record, downloaded from my Suunto depth gauge. The gauge is worn on my wrist, so the ‘ledges’ in the profile indicate armstrokes, when the hands stay at more or less the same depth while the body is pushed forwards. The clean line in the descent after 23 metres describes the freefall phase.

  The shroud of low oxygen was starting to cloak my mind, but I knew that there was one last thing I had to do, and I knew that I could do it.

  My final stroke, the thirty-fifth of the ascent, lifted me the last few metres to the surface, and after a dive time of 4:12 I emerged from liquid to air once more.

  I took a deep breath in.

  EPILOGUE

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Ariel’s song, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest

  WHEN I ACTED IN MY BROTHER’S PRODUCTION of The Tempest in 1997 I played the part of King Alonso, who is shipwrecked on the magician Prospero’s island. Now, 20 years later, having returned to the surface from not five but 55 fathoms — though I did not donate my bones to any coral in the process — I know that I have undergone a sea change, and I stand on the other side of the stage.