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One Breath

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by Adam Skolnick


  “To me,” said Mike Board, “it’s a sport that combines a physical challenge with a mental challenge. I get to overcome another barrier or break through another perceived limit.”

  “It’s total freedom,” said Yaron Hoory, an Israeli record holder. “You’re floating. You merge with the water. You’re at one with the elements. It’s this meditative state I don’t get in any other situation, a switching-off kind of thing. It’s therapy. It’s therapy for many people. Once they discover it, it becomes addictive. We alter our lives for it.”

  Ask a hundred freedivers the same question, and you will get that many unique answers, but one thing is certain. Freediving is universal. Anybody who has ever kicked and dived down to the bottom of a pool or to a reef has done it, and for millennia, all over the world, it’s proven to be more lifestyle than competitive sport.

  In ancient Greece there were sponge divers—and there still are in modern Greece, and in Greek American towns like Tarpon Springs, Florida. In the fourth century, Roman freedivers were used like early Navy SEAL teams to erect and destroy underwater barricades during an invasion. The Ama, a culture of Japanese and Korean women, have been freediving for oysters and pearls for over two thousand years, and lobstermen and spearfishermen have been hunting this way in the waters of Europe, Africa, Polynesia, and Southeast Asia for centuries.

  Spearfishing remains the most popular form of freediving. It’s also the bridge that links aboriginal hunter-gatherers to modern competitive freedivers, many of whom are expert ocean hunters, too. Like hunters on land, spearfishermen wear camouflage (in this case, “camo” wetsuits) and stalk prey with passion, but they are also part of the food chain. Their catch can lure bull, tiger, and oceanic whitetip sharks, even great whites, all hoping to scavenge. The wise fishermen toss them some free lunch. The unlucky don’t just lose fish. Whether they are competing or hunting, however, the techniques are the same. Both groups have learned to master their own physiology, push past discomfort and fear, kick down to blue water, and hold their breath for minutes at a time.

  Freediving didn’t become a competitive sport until 1949, when Italian Air Force captain Raimondo Bucher dove to 30 meters in a lake on the island of Capri to win a fifty-thousand-lira bet. He rode weights to get down, dropped them at the bottom where he handed a scuba diver a package to prove he made depth, and finned to the surface. Part stunt, part athletic feat, it took tremendous courage because doctors at the time believed it impossible to survive a freedive to such depths.

  Those doctors pointed to a seventeenth-century law of physics discovered by Robert Boyle, known today as Boyle’s law. It states that pressure and volume are inversely proportional. As atmospheric pressure goes up, the volume of a gas will decrease at the same rate. Consider a balloon. At the surface it can inflate to its normal size and the volume of gas inside remains constant. Under pressure, however, that balloon will shrink, and as a result, there will be less room for air inside. As far as freedivers are concerned the balloon is their lungs, and the gas is the air they inhaled on their last breath.

  Like the balloon, on the surface the amount of pressure exerted on the human body is neutral, and is measured as 1 ATM (atmosphere, a unit of pressure), but as a diver descends, the pressure begins to increase because water is much more dense than air. At 10 meters, the diver is at 2 ATM, at 20 meters he is at 3 ATM, and scientists know that as the pressure cranks up, the lungs will continue to compress. At 2 ATM the lungs shrink to half their normal size, and at 3 ATM, they are one-third. At 30 meters, where Bucher touched down, his lungs were one-fourth of their normal volume, and scientists were certain there would be nothing to stop his rib cage from collapsing, which would cause fatal internal bleeding. Bucher proved them wrong, launching a never-ending race to become the deepest man in the world, and even more important, expanded the limits of human understanding. Over the years, early freedivers continued to push the known limits of physiology, while doctors continued to wag their fingers in warning.

  In 1966 (seventeen years after the Bucher bet), the great Italian freediver Enzo Maiorca extended the record to 62 meters, only to be eclipsed by a US Navy submarine sailor and pioneering technical diver, Bob Croft, when he dove to 64 meters in Ft. Lauderdale. Both men rode weights down and climbed back to the surface along a line. Croft broke his own record twice more, nearly going bankrupt to cover the cost. He and Maiorca never bothered to deeply relax before their dives. Croft was known to smoke cigars and drink whiskey until 1 a.m. the night before a record attempt. What they had was an enormous lung capacity, which meant they had more oxygen for their muscles to use. Back then lung capacity was what separated underwater studs like Maiorca and Croft from mere mortals.

  Their feats dazzled because with each dive they were risking their lives. Nobody knew where that unknown human limit was. If the thorax didn’t collapse at 7 ATM, would it collapse at 8 ATM? Who would be the sacrificial daredevil to find out? On the day of his dive to 64 meters, Croft’s commanding officer, a master scuba diver, took him aside and said, “You know you’re gonna die, right?”

  Almost every scientist who was paying attention agreed. Even the navy’s dive manual—Croft’s bible—said that if anybody went below 120 feet (about 35 meters), he would die from a thoracic squeeze. Croft was nervous, his stomach twisted in knots. “If you’re doing something that could possibly kill you and you don’t have at least a small amount of apprehension,” he said, “you’re either a liar or a fool.”

  It made sense that scientists would be concerned, because they knew that pressure at depth squeezes with incredible force. At 70 meters, the vice grip of pressure is nearly 17,000 pounds per square foot. How could the human body withstand that? What would be revealed to researchers was that Maiorca’s and Croft’s bodies were undergoing physiological changes in response to that pressure. While their lungs compressed, it was as if an alarm sounded in their brains. To avoid the skeleton from collapsing in on itself, something had to be done. Cue: the physiological hack.

  The vessels in their arms and legs involuntarily constricted, pushing that blood to the core to fill the vacuum with fluid, which is incompressible. Think about a plastic water bottle on an airplane. If it remains full from runway to runway, the bottle’s shape remains intact, but if you drink some, leaving space inside, that bottle gets crunched. This shunting of blood was a lifesaver, and few knew it was happening.

  One Swedish scientist working in the states, Per Scholander, was the first to discover it in 1962 when, after observing blood shift in Weddell seals, he put a group of humans through a range of underwater calisthenics and found a similar response. Two other scientists had an inkling. Robert Allison, like Scholander, had measured blood shift in sea lions during deep dives and hypothesized that the same phenomenon would take place in humans. He called Karl Schaefer looking for a daredevil. A former U-boat officer who immigrated to the States from Germany after the war, Schaefer led the test diving program at the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, where Bob Croft happened to work. Allison and Schaefer teamed up to measure blood shift in Croft, who went through a series of experimental dives in a wet hyperbaric chamber. The so-called wet pot simulated the effects of depth and pressure, though Croft’s head was just a few inches underwater. He hit over 70 meters in that chamber, and afterward, Schaefer’s confidence and Croft’s intuition told him that he’d survive a similar dive in open water, which is why he went for Maiorca’s record.

  Allison and Schaefer, who had monitored Croft’s heart, lungs, and brain, as well as his blood shift, also noticed a sharp drop in his heart rate at depth, which jived with the sea lions Allison observed. We’re talking about a pulse in the twenties and thirties. Until then, heart rates that low had only been observed in Tibetan monks deep in meditation. The average Joe’s rate is over seventy. Additional physiological changes in freedivers wouldn’t be discovered for decades. For instance, instead of constricting, the blood vessels in their hearts and brains dilate, flooding them with oxygen mo
lecules, and their spleens contract, sending a fresh supply of red blood cells into the circulatory system. Blood is made of plasma, which is the fluid, and blood cells. Oxygen travels from the lungs to the muscles and organs by hitching a ride through that river of plasma on red blood cells. When Maiorca and Croft held their breath, they had cut off their regular oxygen supply, which the brain needed to remain alert and function. But when their spleen contracted, and the blood vessels in their brain and heart strategically dilated, it allowed oxygen to get where it was most needed, more efficiently. This phenomenon—the blood shift, bradycardia (that extreme lowering of the pulse), and all the rest—is now known as the mammalian dive reflex. Maiorca and Croft weren’t enlightened monks and they weren’t daredevils either. They were becoming dolphins and seals.

  As the sport matured, athletes would come to learn how to maximize the mammalian dive reflex thanks to Frenchman Jacques Mayol, an early rival of Maiorca and Croft who first integrated yoga practice and philosophy into freediving. As he stretched and meditated before a dive, his competitors laughed at him. They relied on their massive lungs and their fearlessness. They knew they were tempting fate and had trained their minds to blast past their fears and dive farther than anybody else. Mayol believed there was another level to mind over matter. His theory was that if he relaxed, emotionally, psychologically, and physically before the dive, he’d become even more oxygen efficient and perform better because his heart rate would be lower than normal before he ever went down.

  Proving his theory, Mayol would be the first to eclipse 100 meters when he touched 101 meters in 1975, and extended his record to 105 meters in 1983. Maiorca had his share of victories in between, beating Mayol for world titles here and there, but he wouldn’t eclipse triple digits until 1988, when he hit 101 meters. Their gripping friendship and rivalry inspired Luc Besson’s seminal freediving film The Big Blue, which in turn inspired a generation of freedivers, Nick Mevoli included, but it was Mayol’s concepts that would push the sport deeper.

  Among the most important was the yoga pose Uddiyana Bandha, or upward abdominal lock, which serious competitive freedivers practice nearly every day. Although the diaphragm is a muscle everybody uses to breathe, in most people it’s an independent contractor. It gets the job done, but very few know how to manage it. However, those who become proficient in Uddiyana Bandha, like Will Trubridge and other elite freedivers, have complete control of their diaphragm. They can pancake it against their spine or suck it up beneath their ribs until it disappears. They can even ripple it in waves like a contortionist. Mayol also pioneered stretches for the intercostal muscles, which increased his rib cage flexibility. Combining the two allows modern-day freedivers to pack their lungs in excess of 20 percent over their normal lung capacity, and helps their bodies withstand the effect of increased barometric pressure.

  Records for self-propulsive freediving were recorded for the first time in the 1980s, when weighted freediving was still king and had been tagged with the name No Limits. In No Limits, competitors would ride weighted sleds to depth and inflate a balloon to rise back to the surface. When Pipin Ferreras took a sled down to 112 meters in his native Cuba in 1989, he became the deepest man in the world. For the next decade, Ferreras would battle Jacques Mayol’s protégé, Italian Umberto Pelizzari, for that title.

  Pelizzari broke the 150-meter barrier in No Limits in October 1999. Ferreras never eclipsed it, but in a feat that shocked the world, American Tanya Streeter did when she dove to 160 meters in the Turks and Caicos Islands in August 2002, breaking the world record for both men and women.

  That set the stage for one of the sport’s biggest tragedies. Ferreras’s wife, Audrey Mestre of France, attempted to break Streeter’s record less than two months later with a dive in the Dominican Republic to 171 meters. Mestre touched down, but when she turned the knob on the air tank that was to inflate the balloon that would bring her to the surface, nothing happened. A safety tech diver came to her aid and brought her up partway but couldn’t immediately swim to the surface or he would die. Ferreras finally swam down with a scuba tank, risking decompression sickness to bring her back.

  Mestre was underwater for 8:38 and never revived. Her death was the subject of two books and an ESPN documentary entitled No Limits, which revealed that her air tank was empty and that Ferreras, who trained and pushed Mestre to make the attempt, was in charge of filling it that morning. Rumor also seeped out that Mestre was preparing to leave Ferreras, and many of her friends suspected foul play. Their accusations were tempered by his daring rescue attempt, and no charges were filed.

  Mourned by her competitors, Mestre’s death didn’t stop them from continuing to push limits. Austrian Herbert Nitsch was the first to surpass 200 meters, as the No Limits world record inched closer to certain suicide. Venezuelan world champion Carlos Coste suffered a major stroke caused by an air embolism (when an air bubble blocks a blood vessel) while training for a No Limits world record attempt in Egypt in 2006. Nitsch had a similar accident during an attempt to break his own No Limits record in 2012 with a dive to 248 meters. Although he’s made vast improvements, his speech is still slurred, and his left side remains partially paralyzed. With each passing year, a full recovery becomes less and less likely.

  That run of injuries convinced AIDA officials to end sanctioned No Limits attempts. Their decision was a de facto admission that humans may have met their physiological limit in that discipline when Herbert Nitsch hit 214 meters in 2007. Where the human limit lies in the six disciplines that make up competitive freediving, the sport practiced by Nick, Will, and the rest, remains a mystery.

  The oldest competitive freediving organization was founded in Monaco in 1959 as the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (CMAS), which translates as the World Underwater Federation. They officiated the battles between Mayol, Croft, and Maiorca, and held popular pool competitions as well, but in the early 1990s they stopped running depth competitions to focus on pool events exclusively. In the void, a new organization was formed in Nice called the Association Internationale pour le Développement de l’Apnée (AIDA; International Association for the Development of Apnea).

  Although corporate sponsorships are few, and events are often run on a shoestring budget and are managed by the athletes themselves, there are a whopping 140-plus annual competitions on the AIDA calendar. Depth competitions include three main disciplines. In Constant Weight, divers dolphin kick to depth wearing a monofin, which looks like a dolphin’s tail. The weight refers to any weight they carry around their waist or neck, but unlike in No Limits, if they use weight to descend—and almost all do—they must swim it back up. In Free Immersion, athletes pull themselves along the competition line to depth, then back to the surface without wearing fins, and the same weight rule applies. The most difficult event is Constant No Fins, where competitors dive using a modified breaststroke, wearing no fins at all, and adhere to the same weight rule.

  It’s this type of self-propulsive freediving that has exploded in popularity in recent years because it’s so pure. There are no bulky sleds or tanks and no air-lifting balloons. There is only the diver, who relies on the bare minimum of equipment, a trusted routine, the laws of physics, and his or her own innate physiological response to pressure, to go deep and come up clean without assistance. More than the No Limits dive pioneers of the past, it’s today’s competitive freedivers who are coming as close as anyone has before to bridging the evolutionary gap between humans and marine mammals, one elegant dive at a time.

  Of course, every athlete knows that in order to be a star in the open water, it helps to train and compete in the pool. Pool events include Dynamic and Dynamic No Fins. In Dynamic, a diver attempts to swim as many laps as possible on a single breath with a monofin. Dynamic No Fins is also a distance event, in which divers use the breaststroke.

  Static Apnea is the simplest and perhaps the most challenging discipline. All competitors do is place their face in the water and hold their breat
h as long as possible. But without the motion and flow of water to distract their swirling minds, the athletes have only the long strand of time and the violent intensity of an endless breath hold to keep them company, while CO2 builds up and their thorax shudders and contracts. Translation: it hurts. AIDA judge Grant Graves describes it this way: “Imagine placing your testicles in a drawer and slamming it shut over and over again.” With a time of 11:54 seconds, Serbia’s Branko Petrovic is the Static king. The women’s record is 9:02, held by Russian Natalia Molchanova.

  Pool training is important for deep divers because they know that to dive to 100 meters, they must be able to hold their breath for close to six minutes on the surface. And by training in the Dynamic disciplines, athletes like Will Trubridge and Mike Board build up lactic acid and CO2 tolerance, which helps on deep dives, when they must fight through both, as well as negative buoyancy, to get back home.

  Negative buoyancy is underwater gravity. When an athlete duck dives, he must kick hard to get to neutral buoyancy at 10 meters. It takes about half the power to kick from 10 to 20 meters, and when negative buoyancy takes over at 20 meters, the diver sinks like a stone. On the way up, the athlete has to kick against that negative buoyancy, as if swimming against a stiff current, to reach 10 meters, when positive buoyancy floats him to the surface. The point is, on deep dives the hardest work begins when the athlete has already been underwater for a long time.

  No matter the discipline, upon surfacing, divers must face the judges, clear their face of all equipment (mask, goggles, and/or nose clip), make the universal “okay” sign, and say the words, “I am okay,” in that order. If they do it within fifteen seconds after surfacing, their surface protocol is clean. They earn a white card and score points. If they don’t, they get a red card and no points. Penalties may also be assessed for cutting a dive short and turning early, putting their face in the water before letting go of the line, or breaching the surface of the pool with their fin or body on Dynamic dives. In such cases, divers earn yellow cards. They’re docked points and their dive won’t count as a world or national record.

 

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