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David Comments:
 Woke up feeling exhausted and wanting to sleep more. But I guess I can sleep when I am dead so we will push on. Not even the cold water of the lagoon could wake me up today. We decided to make it an active rest day with only two dives instead of three. My first dive was unassisted and again was meant to work nothing but technique. My main problem in this category right now is that I need to stay streamlined to gain more speed and be able to glide more on each pull. So the few things I was going to work on was keeping my arms closer to my body and making sure to touch them above the head and stretch before the arm stroke. May sound confusing but it makes complete sense to me. Now if I could actually do in the dive that would be great. I managed to improve the previous days' unassisted dive by four seconds so I guess something is working for me. In addition of the ascent and descent times I spent 16 seconds at the bottom to increase the difficulty of the dive. Even with the bottom time the difficulty was still less then 6 out of 10 so I think the previous 4 months of training is paying off. My next dive was again a deep negative pressure and I was to try and improve my previous depth. I managed to squeeze only 4 more meters out of it at a depth of 44m at 115 seconds.
Yas Comments:
Because of feeling even more tired today and our decision of taking it easy on the dives, our goal was to work even more on technique. We had decided to do two dives, again one with the monofin with a bit of bottom time and another line assisted dive. I did a 15 second bottom time with the monofin, the dive was still easy except that I had an 'all over' weakness today which made the dive physically more demanding than it should be. But I've been making great use of these training dives, making minor adjustments on my monofin technique on every dive, trying different things. Only problem was that after being so tired of carrying monofins back and forth between Miami and Turkey for years, I had decided to bring one of my less favorite monofins to Miami and just leave it here and use that one. It's a carbon fiber Brier Brut which had sounded like a great idea years ago when I first heard of it, but the non carbon fiber layer at the bottom is so thick that with just a little heat the fin bends out of shape. This takes a bit out of the technique efficiency and makes the freefall very difficult since it's hard to keep my body streamlined when the fin is bent. The only good but important thing the fin has is the efficiency on the kicks, it's not worse than my favorite Waterway fin. Today my dive time is more on track for what we're shooting for, being 1:40 without the bottom time.
I finish the diving session with another relaxing line assisted dive. This is a category I enjoy tremendously, since staying on the line you can just relax, close your eyes and enjoy the dive the whole time.
Rudi's Comments:
Another hot and humid day and everybody is feeling tired, I can see it on their faces and we are all yawning on the platform, but the show must go on and so we dive. Today I want to take a closer look at the kids underwater and I wait for them at 40 meters on scuba so that I can have a better perspective about their form down there and make suggestions on the all-important free-fall period. Also, I enjoy tremendously being down there, checking my air gauges and my buoyancy and my regulator's performance and then, out of nowhere, there come these people past me with no tanks, no fins, nothing, eyes closed, peaceful faces, bodies relaxed, and they keep going down! Still impresses me so much, even after seeing so many freedives, what an awesome feeling! Also, because I wanted David and Yas to do a couple of deep negative pressure dives today to work on equalization and pressure adaptation, I want to be there for them, diving to 45 meters with empty lungs feels lonely and difficult enough, and whenever I start yelling encouragement at them, I can see a smile, and that's great!
David did a very solid Unassisted dive, and after computing his rates of descent and ascent, free-fall speed and efficiency of the strokes, he is already on the pace we need him to be to do 81 meters in about 2:55 minutes, and that is great news, but he was still a bit slower than needed. I know that as long as he can stay underwater for no more that 3:30 minutes, even if all of it is full working time, he will come back to the surface in complete control. But I don't want us to get too confident, and there are still a few minor flaws with his technique so we review them extensively on the post-dive critique both on the video and the Suunto dive graphs and make a plan for tomorrow's dives.
Yasemin also did great today. I know that, strength wise, she is the weakest and most delicate of the team, so I really try not to push her much, but she is hanging right there with the super fit specimens that are Olga and David, while her technique has gotten even smoother if such thing is possible. Today she tried her monofin ascent with her arms stretched over her shoulders in the typical monofiner position, something we had avoided until now, and the results were amazing. She did the 51 meter dive in 1:40 minutes, a very good time, considering how tired she was and how ineffective the mono she is using is, but I still want her to do 1:30's all the time on this depth and I impress upon her that tomorrow I expect a couple of those faster dives.
Olga has kept her steady progress on track, and today her stress had either disappeared or gone down to logical levels. Having said that, however, her times are still too slow, and watching the video repeatedly, we confirm that her technique is about 95% right, so basically what she now lacks is strength to power those long arms and legs quicker through the water, and that's actually the easiest thing to fix. She did a 43 meter unassisted dive today, after having done a 40 yesterday, and she was definitely much more comfortable underwater, so we have decided that tomorrow she will try a new unofficial unassisted world record to 51 meters, which I want her to do in a max time of 2:10 min.
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