Another 6:50

I hit it again, with samba, but less so and with pretty much the same pattern. What I'm thinking now is, with such heavy warmup hold, I should be left somewhat hypoxic to begin with, so my potential should be over 7 minutes now, if only I could get rid of the overly hard warmup. Still, this or that way, I'm sure I will hit 7 minutes quite soon, if nothing disasterous happens. I promised myself that after reaching that important goal, I shall return to more experimenting and especially shortening the warmup. But just now, I'm just too damn close to let it slip away.

I tried some holds yesterday, but just could not get it off the ground. I did 3 holds to about 4:30, but each time I would get contractions in 2-3 minutes. Two factors come to mind that could've caused this (and earlier experience seems to concur). First, I had tons of candy on sunday. An unfortunate slip, but it's pretty hard to resist when watching a movie in good company and the other half is munching away. Kind of comforting though, that the effect seems to go away in a couple of days. I also had a banana almost right before the holds (maybe half an hour), which was definently too close. It seems that eating makes a huge difference.

Today was completely different. On my first warmup FRC I hit 2:00, which is very unusual for a first hold. Right after it a 2:40, I knew I was in control. I then did a 5:20 and 6:30. Thinking back, maybe I should've pushed that 5:20 a bit further and then made the max on the next hold.

I was actually quite happy at 6:30, but it seemed so easy and I wanted to try if I could reproduce the result from the last 6:50. It seems I could, and it's a very nice feeling ;)

Ok, here's the data:
2:00 FRC
2:40 FRC
1:20 Empty
5:20 (10x5:0:5, 20 packs, 13 contractions, 1st 4:40)
Pack stretching, 23 packs
1:10 Empty
6:30 (10x5:0:10, 20 packs, 30 contractions, 1st 5:20)
6:50 (10x5:0:10, 15 packs, 22 contractions, 1st 5:40)

Notes: on the 6:30 I almost passed out after packing, I could feel my conciousness fading, but I kept telling my self (I'm still here, I'm in control) and so I was. Still, pretty scary and worth noting that almost the exact same thing happened the last time. Now is this due to the empty lung right before, hyperventilating or too much packing? Or all combined? I'm pretty sure now that my packing technique has gotten better. I can seem to put more than 20 packs in comfortably, no matter how much I stretch. The limit used to be over 30...

On the 6:50 packing was no problem and I seemed to be able to handle contractions very well. Note that in the 6:30 I had 30 contractions in 1:10 and on the latter 22 in 1:10. I just felt I could control them more on the 6:50 (slower frequency).

My contractions as a whole have gotten quite different from what they used to be. I do get sort of semi-contractions from about 4 minutes onwards, but I can suppress those mentally. I start counting from the first one I cannot control.

Also played with "image streaming" today, which is proving to be a very cool thing...