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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:
 The sun is out in full force and I can see we all have a nice red tint from the day before. Started to boil up in those black wetsuits which made you want to dive into the cold water even more. Today my first dive was unassisted to 50m with a dive time of 115 seconds. The goal for me is to focus on technique 100%. This was never my strong suit in the past but it is getting better with each day. The second dive was about 20 minutes later and was line assisted to the bottom. The plan was to do some bottom time. Rudi said to do 15 seconds to see how it felt. I got to the bottom and I guess time just flies when you are having fun because I ended up staying 47 seconds on the bottom. My third dive was to work on equalization. For most of you who have followed my Freediving career you will remember that equalizing is not my strong point. The idea was to do a negative pressure dive to as deep as the ears would let me. I made it to 40m and both ears locked up and wouldn't let me go any deeper. This is great as it pushes you to work on difficult equalization at a shallower depth. The day is over for me and I am even more sunburned and feeling a little fatigued. Really started to get that super lazy feeling. By the time I got home all I wanted to do is sleep. But of course we had to do the mandatory dive footage critique and dive time / seed review before going to bed.
Yas Comments:
I started the day without a restful night and an exhausting morning, due to not having AC, the heat and the high humidity. It's amazing how weak these factors can get me. The plan for me was to do the same as yesterday, one line assisted and one monofin dive so that I gauge the muscle difficulty of the dives to find out if my muscle fatigue yesterday was because of it being the first dive or that my muscles need more work for strength. The negative pressure dive shape was already back today. I was able to get over 2 minute dive times without too much discomfort. Then the real dives went as we expected, I was a lot less tired this time. However I seem to have overdone it on the relaxing and the dive times are a bit longer than we want. We have been working more on my apnea capacity which is my weak point due to my blood problems but I realize that we are quite on track with the apnea capacity but still a little behind with the strength on my quads. So we now know what to work on. My last dive was a negative dive to 40 meters. Everything went well on this dive except a tremendous lung squeeze of course. I had been able to dive to 50 meters in Turkey some time last year but at that time I had not been this long without diving. So the lung pain on that dive was similar to the amount I got it on the 40 meter dive this time. This was the last dive and we are back to downloading the dives, watching the videos and the reviews ending with a before bed time movie.
Rudi's Comments:
Jamaica is though in the summer, it is hot and very, very, very humid, which can get you really tired, and this is something we need to keep track off with the guys having to spend such long times breathing on the platform. And, as I suspected, all 3 of them felt tired and fatigued today, so I was worried that I could not push them to do long bottom times, but it all worked well in the end.
David did well today, his times are already on par with his excellent 65 meter record form of a year ago, and that's good, but we still need him to be totally streamlined and polish off those very few rough corners in his technique here and there, which will allow him to reduce precious seconds from his dive time. Now, since he will be attempting a new Unassisted record to over 80 meters, which by the way I know he can do, I want him to do it in the shortest possible dive time, and him and I have agreed that a dive time below 3 minutes is possible, which is something amazing, but that's what I want him to shoot for, which means that before we leave, he should be doing these 50 meter dives below 1:48 min time, from which he's only a few seconds away.
Yasemin did really well on her technique as usual, that has always been her golden point, and as far as I can tell, the 50 meter dives are feeling easy enough that we can expect her shape to allow her to go for 80 meter dives in both line assisted and equipment assisted. We have tried some tough anaerobic workouts with her before coming here and they have worked well it seems, her sickle-cell anemia ridden blood not hindering her otherwise perfect performances, so this bodes well. I have also set a lofty goal for her, which is to do the monofin dive to 80 meters in under 2:30 minutes, which means we need her to do 50 meters in below 1:40 min times consistently, which she did on the first day, but not today, so we need to do some more work here.
As for Olga, we have all been surprised of how apprehensive and stressed she is before the dives, thinking that someone who has reached static apnea times of over 6:20 minutes in training several times, or who has weathered the pressure of competing in 3 Olympic games and winning 2 of them, should not be concerned about a "mere" 50 meter dive, but she proves once again that diving deep and doing well in the pool are two separate things. Olga could be the next superstar in freediving and we all have high expectations for her, but her progress is very slow though constant, and this shows that she has a healthy dose of respect for the depths, which I like very much. However, Olga's times are still slow and she needs a bit more strength on her strokes, both in line assisted and unassisted. Otherwise, she is very quick to implement all the corrections I suggest to her and her progress in terms of technique is the biggest one of all, she's making big strides forward as a rookie compared to David and Yas, who are after all, veterans of many years and must fight very hard to shave a few seconds of their dive times.
So, all in all, a good day today, everybody performed well even under the heat, the dive times and speeds are beginning to approach what I want them to be and they are strong and ready for more, what can I say, divers like these make my job so easy and enjoyable.
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