One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  They followed the trail of blood and macrophages, or repair cells, and found extensive damage from multiple episodes of pulmonary hemorrhage, which they were able to correlate to lung squeezes he was known to have had. They marked off the squeeze from Sunday and the previous Friday, and continued to follow the trail as it extended weeks and perhaps months back.

  Pulmonary hemorrhage is not a burst blood vessel but rather an overengorgement of alveolar capillaries—blood vessels in the air sacs of the lung. Those vessels have permeable walls to allow for oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange and when they become engorged due to extreme pressure, the walls can be too permeable. Think of pantyhose stretched to maximum. Those tiny holes get bigger and bigger until they rip. Too often on Nick’s dives, his capillaries stretched and the walls weakened, and red blood cells showered Nick’s alveoli, which were riddled with microtears. Those tears required repair, and like any wound if they’re reinjured multiple times, the result is scar tissue or fibrosis.

  “Think if you wound your knee—like when you are learning to ride a bicycle. The tendency is to take care of it and not fall on that knee again until it is all healed up,” said Gilliland. “If you have an operation you don’t want to play with that scar and pull the stitches out or you’ll have a broad scar, and if you tear it again you could have a broader scar.”

  In Nick, the resulting fibrosis was found in his peripheral lung, where most gas exchange occurs, which may explain why he had such a difficult time recovering from his dive, though he was still conscious for over sixty seconds. “It takes a lot of pressure to get the lungs open after a dive when the air sacs can be stuck together,” Kerry said, “but like a balloon the more air that flows in the easier it becomes to blow up. A damaged lung is like a stiff balloon. In Nick’s case because he’d done so much damage to the lungs—chronic and recent—and then did a longer, more stressful dive than he’d planned, he didn’t have the capability to recover from that dive on his own.”

  Translation: the chronically damaged area limited Nick’s capacity to reoxygenate. But that alone should not have killed him. “There was enough healthy tissue to resuscitate him,” said Gilliland. If Jeschke had managed to recognize Nick’s condition immediately and access his airway properly, there were enough intact alveoli, or air sacs, for Nick to begin to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen and come around.

  What Nick’s case reveals about long-term risk to freedivers is up for debate. “There are two types of alveolar damage,” said Elsayegh, the Los Angeles pulmonologist. “There’s an acute damage such as pneumonia, and pulmonary hemorrhage, which will clear up and the lung will heal, but chronic damage to the alveoli will not heal. Whatever tissue is scarred is damaged for life.”

  Still, neither Dr. Elsayegh nor Dr. Gilliland believes Nick’s lungs were yet damaged to the point where it would have impacted him on a day-to-day level. “It was only a problem because he was at the absolute extreme of hypoxia,” Gilliland said.

  Yet Kerry and Gilliland also found systemic changes in Nick’s heart. His right ventricle was enlarged and the walls thickened, as were several pulmonary arteries, a condition known as right ventricular hypertrophy and a sign of either right heart strain and/or pulmonary hypertension, symptoms common among patients who suffer from congestive heart failure or valve disease. Nick didn’t have those problems, and given that his left ventricle was normal, it was likely not a function of his advanced fitness level either (athletes with left ventricular hypertrophy are often diagnosed with athletic heart syndrome). Gilliland and Kerry believe it’s related to the fibrosis. Their theory is that because his lungs were damaged in the periphery, it took more effort to exchange gases. As a result his heart and arteries were forced to pump harder, which caused them to grow thicker.

  The good news for freedivers, Kerry said, is that while the severity of a lung squeeze is difficult to reliably diagnose in a living patient [though Elsayegh suggests they undergo annual pulmonary function tests to be safe], hypertrophy is diagnosable through an echocardiogram, a noninvasive ultrasound of the heart. “It’s a tool already used in the clinic to define pressure in the pulmonary artery and determine the size of the heart muscle wall. If an athlete is determined to have pulmonary hypertension,” she said, “based on Nick’s autopsy, we can hypothesize that they have interstitial fibrosis in their lungs.” Elsayegh adds that if that happens, the athlete should stop diving until the hypertension is under control. Competitive freedivers are frequently involved in medical studies and have been since the dawn of the sport. Based on her investigation into Nick’s death, Kerry sounded poised to launch a study of her own using cardiac ultrasound. “Coming to a freediving competition near you,” she said.

  Given the volume of evidence, it’s clear that Nick may have been saved with better emergency care, though that isn’t a sure thing, and it’s important to remember that his poor resuscitation was merely the last domino to fall. If any of eight things had gone differently, Nick would have survived. If he hadn’t recommenced his descent, and made unorthodox movements at extreme pressure, perhaps his squeeze would not have been so severe. If he’d been examined more thoroughly and held out of competition, he would have lived to dive another day.

  Squeezes had been a problem in freediving for years, but judges, event doctors, and athletes everywhere had been ignoring the signs and pushing for records and personal bests while injured. That’s the culture Nick came up in, it’s what he witnessed, and if there had been better awareness among his peers and leaders within competitive freediving, perhaps he might have recognized the risks in time or wouldn’t have been taught the skills to go so deep before his body had adapted to pressure.

  Most important, if he had listened to his own body, and opted out on Sunday, November 17, he would have lived. When he died, a handful of athletes and writers, as well as AIDA officials, were quick to pile on Nick Mevoli. They called him reckless and egotistical, thoughtlessly diving for numbers. His uncle, Paul Mevoli, has other ideas.

  “Rarely did he talk about his success unless I pried it out of him,” Paul said. “He never even told me about the silver medal at the World Championship. He was the second best in the whole frickin’ world and was like, ah, no big deal. That’s just the way he was. He wasn’t egotistical. He was humble.” Paul, a competitive racecar driver, knows what it’s like to want something so bad that you come to believe you need it—when your mind flips, and the passion that has fueled and challenged you to pursue a dream and achieve, turns against you. That’s what he thinks happened to Nick.

  “He wasn’t reckless, he was fixated. Mentally fixated. I saw that many times chasing fish out at Seven Mile Bridge. He won’t quit. Believe me, my nephew had just as much fault as anybody. He was the one that dove, he knew how he felt, and he kept going down when he had already turned around, but they need to make some changes. To give the next kid who shows up like Nick a fighting chance even if he makes a mistake. Because as it is, if you make a mistake, it can be lethal.”

  At 11:06 a.m. on December 2, 2014, Will Trubridge floated into the competition zone in Dean’s Blue Hole. It was day five of Vertical Blue 2014, with thirty-five athletes from eighteen countries on the island looking to break records and push personal limits. Will among them. If successful on his 102-meter Constant No Fins dive he would break his own world record.

  That was no sure thing. For weeks Will’s training had been hit and miss. He’d take a step forward on a Monday only to stumble on Wednesday. On his final training dive, however, he’d hit 100 meters and come up squeaky clean. That day 102 meters seemed not only possible, but a likely next step. Then on his first competition dive he blacked out after what was supposed to be a warm-up jaunt to 93 meters. That did not bode well.

  The very next day he got a white card after a dive to 94 meters, reestablishing positive momentum, but 8 meters was a huge leap, and Will knew that better than anyone. To make matters worse, after a dominant year, Alexey Molchanov had put himself in position to win W
ill’s home tournament, with white cards after a 123-meter dive in Constant Weight on day three, and a 114-meter dive in Free Immersion only thirty minutes before Will got in the water. True, Alexey had blacked out on both of his attempts to hit 97 meters in Constant No Fins, but he was still in command, and after Will’s record attempt there were only two days left in the competition. Will would have just one dive each to score in the two remaining disciplines. If he failed to get his record, he might as well kiss competition gold goodbye as well.

  Alexey wasn’t the only external stressor in Will’s head. His record attempt was big news back home in New Zealand, thanks to Will’s sponsor, Steinlager, who along with NZ TV One was broadcasting his 102-meter dive live on national television. After the National Geographic record attempt fell apart, New Zealand’s national beer brand stepped in and became Will’s main sponsor, paying him $150,000 to train hard, shoot a riveting commercial, and deliver a new record to his homeland, if only the weather gods would cooperate.

  Those ideal conditions Dean’s Blue Hole was known for had not been so perfect over the past week. The night before, big waves thrashed the limestone bluffs, sending a halo of whitewater fifty feet high. The morning of the record attempt, winds were upwards of thirty miles per hour, bringing cool wind and rain, which had competitors shivering before their dives. This was a major problem, because shivering muscles burn much more oxygen than when they’re warm and loose, and several athletes struggled with conditions.

  Then something magical happened. Swatches of blue sky opened above the hole as a bright shining sun tried to burn its way through to clarity. Behind Will, a minimalist Steinlager banner hung from the bluffs. Its message was simple: 102M. Across New Zealand, viewers were glued to their televisions, and about seventy athletes and fans were crowded around the competition zone, treading water and aiming their GoPros above the deep blue. All of them hoping for history.

  Will’s dive time had been the most reliable indicator of success or failure over the past weeks. If his sink phase was too slow or his ascent lagging, the dive would stretch beyond 4:10, which would leave him too hypoxic to maintain consciousness at the surface. Whenever he managed to get closer to four minutes, however, his dives had been clean. On December 2, Will’s dive was supposed to take 4:04. Like a great stage actor, all he had to do was hit his marks and perform what he’d rehearsed countless times. He was the best no fins man in history, and it was time to prove it to New Zealand, to his rival, and to himself, once more.

  For nearly six minutes Trubridge lay on his back, faceup with a foam float beneath the crook of his neck and another beneath his knees. His breathing was slow and steady, and as the anticipation grew, he looked like he was sleeping. With forty seconds to go, he arched backward, dipping his face in the sea, filling his goggles with water, stimulating the nerve endings around his eyes. With twenty seconds to go he built toward peak inhalation, beginning with his belly, moving up into his chest and into the subclavian air pockets beneath his shoulder blades. Forty sips and packs later, he flipped onto his stomach and duck dove, his long, elegant strokes propelling him toward his goal.

  Within three strokes he passed the sandfalls, and after three more he’d reached negative buoyancy in the midnight blue. His arms at his side, his chin tucked, he became streamlined. He closed his eyes and let gravity do the rest. “Shut down, shut down, shut down,” he told himself, hoping to keep his mind blank. Thoughts take energy. Thoughts consume oxygen.

  Steve Keenan, the safety diver from Kalamata, had flown in to manage the platform and announce the dives. He squinted into the sonar monitor and announced Will’s progress. “Okay, I’ve got him. Dive time thirty seconds, diver’s at 30 meters.” Will was past 50 meters when the clock struck one minute. Thirty seconds later he’d reached 81 meters, and before two minutes had elapsed, he’d touched down, grabbed the tag, and started swimming back. His timing had been perfect. Optimism bloomed at the surface of Dean’s Blue Hole.

  Among those monitoring Will’s progress more seriously was Johnny Sunnex. Just like the year before, Johnny was Will’s right hand in the weeks leading up to Vertical Blue. Whenever Will was training, Johnny was there, spotting him, lending an ear, and helping Will analyze and troubleshoot. But Johnny wasn’t a competitor in 2014. He was head safety and would be the first man down. He’d greet Will at 40 meters and escort him all the way home. He checked his dive computer, marking time, and as soon as Will had passed the 80-meter mark, he duck dove to meet him. His nickname, “Johnny Deep,” was visible on the blades of his bi-fins as they sliced the surface and disappeared.

  Johnny hadn’t been looking forward to coming back to Long Island. The memories were too fresh, too dark. After Nick died, Johnny packed all his gear for the family, and found Nick’s passport to help get him back home. The following January, he was spearfishing in Dubai with a group of buddies. One got separated. He wasn’t found until the next day, when his body washed up on shore. Johnny harbored a lot of guilt for losing contact with his friend, and was overcome with grief.

  “I lost my passion for freediving for a while,” he said, though it was hard to tell from the outside. He still taught freediving courses and lived the carefree life of a handsome, thirty-year-old breath-hold gypsy—traveling to Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Croatia, and more. Yet part of him was missing. He stopped training. He lost the fire to push his limits. What did it matter if he could swim like a superhero, when his fellow divers kept dropping dead? When he arrived at Dean’s Blue Hole, he knew it was time to dive for himself again, and what better way to restart than to spot his friend, mentor, and countryman—the best freediver in the world.

  Johnny started with shallow dives, for him anyway. He tapped 50 meters, then 55. Soon he’d progressed to 70 meters. New freedivers enjoy the feeling of their first freefall from 20 to 30 meters, but it still feels like effort. As the slow, steady sink phase gets extended, however, the easier it is to feel the sea squeeze and time expand. Experienced divers say the real fun begins below 50 meters, when freefall becomes even dreamier, and if an athlete can relax deeply and there’s no pressure to achieve or win, the mind opens as the heart rate drops and they feel blank, pure, completely at one with the water and within themselves.

  As it had for Nick, freediving had become too much about competition for Johnny, and these deep, agenda-free dives were infusing him with that inner peace he’d lost. Deep water was his ally again. At least until the day he dove to 80 meters, and came up coughing. He climbed onto the platform and spit into his palm: blood.

  —

  ALEXEY AND NATALIA chose to build their sport, diver by diver. Will Trubridge builds the sport with a broad media reach. Will’s deal with Steinlager, a major beer brand, was freediving’s first six-figure sponsorship. He’s had a documentary made about him and been featured on 60 Minutes, when Scott Simon visited Dean’s Blue Hole, and he uses his celebrity in New Zealand to promote ocean conservation projects.

  He also does the dirty work to make sure Vertical Blue happens, whether that’s recruiting other athletes; seeking corporate partners, like the dive computer manufacturer Suunto, to stuff the champion’s purse; or taking apart and towing the dive platform in and out of Dean’s in his blue pickup, his Vertical Blue logo on the driver’s side door. Each day, piece by piece, he personally cleans out the plastic that drifts into the blue hole and collects on the beach from the open water, and he’s also part of the registration team when the divers arrive. Such is life even at the top of the freediving world, a diverse community that is strongest when everybody plays a role. “Compared to other sports, there have been so few competitors and almost zero financial backing, so that’s the way it is,” he said.

  Imagine the best marathoners or triathletes on earth organizing their own races, and even helping block off the streets ahead of time. That’s what Will does. In competitive freediving, elite athletes are also the brick and mortar when duty calls. But Will’s most important contribution to competitive freediving is
putting Dean’s Blue Hole on the map to begin with. It began with a rumor, which led him to inquire about it on the popular freediving forum, Deeper Blue. Nobody seemed to know anything concrete, so he decided to see for himself.

  “The first time I rocked up to the blue hole, I could tell straight away it was gonna be as good as I’d hoped,” he said. A few of the locals he’d met had warned him of dangerous whirlpool currents and resident bull and tiger sharks. They told him to stay away. He didn’t. “The first few dives were a little creepy, a little ominous, because it gets quite dark,” he said. “If you go deep enough it gets black, but the freefall is better here because there’s no current.”

  Will’s initial trip to the hole was in 2005, and for the first few years he would come for four to six months at a stretch, spending the rest of the year competing or teaching in Italy. He befriended a local waterman and Hawaii transplant named Charlie Beede, who spotted him whenever Will needed it. Charlie had a granddaughter from Daytona Beach who was a student at Florida State. When he introduced her to Will in 2008, their worlds merged. They were inseparable for three days, exploring beaches and bays together, talking for hours, falling in love. But she had another year at school and Will had to go back to Sicily. They kept in touch and Will went to Tallahassee to visit. In 2009, they bridged the distance and married on Long Island.

  Will is very much an island man. He and Brittany built a modest but charming house on a patch of land, ten-minutes drive from the hole. He rarely wears shoes, spearfishes fresh catch for dinner, and cracks his own coconuts; Brittany ferments their own kombucha tea. When an island festival is on, they attend, eating barbecued pigeon—shot or caught on the island—if it’s on the menu. In fact, the only time he eats meat is when it’s locally sourced, which means beef is out of the question. Once in a long while he may eat goat, if he’s invited to a friend’s ranch for Sunday lunch. But flavor is secondary to Will.