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Click on a day for the events of that particular day.
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 |
David Comments:
 We are graced with beautiful weather and the lagoon visibility is about 15m. Not very good but good enough for what we needed to do. We all rotate on the platform taking turns with the dreaded negative pressure dives. First dive to 16m and the second to 20m completely empty. Makes for a nice chest squeeze and a difficult time equalizing. Yasemin was up first with a line assisted dive to 50m. She completed the dive in 120 seconds and came up fresh. We all did two dives each to 50m with no problems.
Yas Comments:
Finally we are diving again. It's really amazing that the last real diving I did was for the record attempt in June 2004 and since then we never got a chance to do diving training. I was looking forward to the dives and being in depth again even tough we are limited with the 51 meter depth of the lagoon. The first two negative pressure dives were tough as I expected but I reached the necessary minimum of 1:45-1:50 dive times at least. Then I did 2 dives to the bottom, first one line assisted and second one with the monofin. My muscles were tired a little bit but this usually is the case in my first dives due to the drastic transition to diving again. Also I realized that I was too fast on the descent, having applied the kicking technique I use in the pool workouts, which is like a double kick on every stroke. Looking at the fast descent time and physical effort that it takes I decided to go back to my usual kicking which is a full single stroke that I will use for vertical dives tomorrow. Dives overall were 5,5-6 difficulty over 10 was a result I was happy with.
Rudi's Comments:
Well, here we are again, ready to see whether our training is yielding the results we need, because our record attempts are only about 6 weeks away and we're going for deep depths this year. The lagoon's 51 meter depth will be a problem, because as it turns out, it is too "shallow" for our needs, but we'll make do with it. This is the year when I thought I would retire from freediving training altogether and, instead, we even have a new team member, Olga, our 2-time synchro swimming Olympic champion, so I have to keep track of 3 people now, all of them with very different strengths and weaknesses and specific things to work on, which makes my life very interesting to tell the truth.
First and foremost, I am a strong believer that proper technique is what separates the really amazing divers from the rest, not being able to hold your breath for 9 minutes or withstand hundreds of contractions or whatever. At the end of the day, my job as a trainer is to get my divers to reach their planned depths in the shortest possible time, with the least amount of effort, and bring them back to the surface with air to spare, so from my point of view, this trip is all about technique, technique, technique. Therefore, today I will be looking at all 3 of my "kids" and ascertain where they need to work, so that by our last day, their dive times, number of strokes, speed of descent and ascent, efficiency rates and difficulty levels are all at the exact number that will be required for their records. So far, everything looked good but all 3 divers looked a little slow and their form a little rusty, though not to worry, this is normal for a first day, and I am actually happy that after almost a year away from deep diving (incredible, isn't?!) they were all able to do a couple of 50 meter dives like nothing, so right on!
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