Back on track

I did a hasty 7:00. Which is good, considering the amount of concentration and time I had to prepare.

For warmups I did 3:30 and 5:00, about 30 contraction each.

Then, 7:00 (5:00/50).

I clearly hyperventilated too much, since the first contraction was that late and I was very blue in the end (or so I'm told). But still, routine 7, must be happy...

Betrayed by own expectations pt 2

I wrote a long post last night, but blogger ate it. It's been working surprisingly well for a while, so it was about time I hit some big bug.

Anyway, I have it saved on my other computer and I'll try to paste it later.

But in a nut shell, I went to the pool expecting to shatter my previous record, and came out with 6:31. Disapointing to say the least. There were a number of factors that contributed, but still, going down 1:30 in one day seems crazy. But I have to keep in mind that the 8-minute hold was a freakish lucky incident, my "real level", is hitting 7:00-7:20 on average and unfortunately, on a bad day, it seems 6:30.

Edit: here's what I wrote last night

Ok, I admit it. I went in the pool today expecting to do a new personal
best. Mistake number one. I also tried a new suit, 1.5mm compared to the old
5mm. Mistake number two. My warmup was too long, I was getting cold and had to wait over 5 minutes after I felt I was "in the zone" and breathup with ne new suit proved to be a bit hard (it doesn't float enough to keep me comfortably horizontal). And
last but not least, I packed too much (encouraged by last nights result).

So, first contraction at about 4:45, all good so far. But suddenly, after 6 minutes, I felt this sort of panicy feeling that I associate with packing too much. Coupled with that I realized that I'll not be hitting anywhere 8 minutes, so I just bailed at 6:31. Would've wanted to do one more, but time was running out and I still had to balance my new suit (first time in water) for dynamic. All in all, I had too much going on. I did get my balance in order and dived a hasty 120m with samba. It was a horrible dive. Every turn looked like I've never had a fin on before and the first 50m I was swimming with a horrible technique.

The bad thing is, this was the last pool session before the competition. The pool is closed next sunday and wednesday. It kind of sucks going into the competition with these "failures" as the last thing I've done.

Well, anyway, my goal is to beat my previous results, 6:32 and 115m. At least in static, I have no doubt I can do that. In dynamic...Well, that's a bit iffy.

After this competition, I don't want to see a pool before the competitions in autum, just CW for me please. Next season I really have to concentrate on dynamics more...

I...Umm...Whoa

Ok, I'm exstatic right now, can barely type.

My D3 is reading 8:00.06 and there was no samba. I REALLY wasn't expecting that.
I'm wondering how this is possible, I've now almost doubled my pb in a year. I also realized that this must seem very suspicious to most. I mean when I first heard about the "doping scandal" of Tom, my first impression was "aha, I thought so, no one could pull progress in such a short time". But before you cast any stones, let me remind you of two things. First, I'm a very large fellow. I haven't measured my lungs, but my guess is that they're pretty big (at least after all this packing). Second, I dare anyone to try a training program so tedious as I've made since (and before) starting this and not make a huge leap in their pb.

As I was warming up, I felt like shit. I had trouble squeezing those 4-5 min statics out and was interrupted repeatedly (phone rings, etc).

I have to admit that I packed much more than usual and I felt very uncomfortable for the first 4 minutes or so. The first contraction came at 4:50, so I thought ok, I'm going for 7+ something. But the contractions that followed were really slow. Up until 10 or so, I'd say the frequency was around 10 sec per contraction, then slightly faster. At 30 it suddenly "picked up", but still they were kind of shallow. I surfed until 60 or so and peeked at the watch, which said 7:45. I just though "15 sec, it won't kill you" and kept pressing. Then stopped at 8:00.

I don't know what else to say :) I've realized my goal...I made my self a promise that if I ever reach 8, I'll stop actively trying to increase my time. That's already far in what I call "the grey zone". I'll continue to do statics, for sure, but not like this, not 4-5 times per week. But for now, I'll keep training untill the competition.

Here's the warmup:
FRC 3:00
4:00(3:00/15)
4:00(3:05/10)
5:00(3:15/40)
8:00(heh, my hands are shaking from typing that: 4:50/70 or so, lost count in the end).

Now, the trick is to repeat that...:)

Full steam

Ok, I just got off the phone with the doc. I do have some anomalies in my heart, but those are quite common for a young man who is active in sports. Better yet, the same anomalies where present years ago, when I didn't even know what freediving was.

I posted a longer rant in deeper, check it out if interested fromhere.

So now hopefully I can get my head around for some serious training for the remaining few weeks.

Quickly

Don't have much time, here's some quick data:

4:00 (2:35/35)
4:40 (3:20/20)
5:11 (3:30/20)
6:45 (4:45/40)

Explanations and excuses will follow tomorrow :)

Edit:

Ok, here's the blurb.

As you can see, I was trying a similar warmup. I allowed my self to go around 5 minutes, because that still is around or above 80% SaO2. Anyway, I usually do my dry statics right after work and plan my eating around that. But today I had so many things going, I only had time to do them in the evening and the only things I had eaten was 2 bars of chocolate and a hamburger...Not your ideal diet for statics. And also there was only 1 hour between eating and this. That alone would explain the "sub 7" performance. But I had to do something just to get my blood buffers up again. Looking forward to tonight and some proper statics.

We tried to go diving yesterday. We drove to this lake we usually dive in, but it was still partly frozen, so we changed plans. I had heard that this small lake near where I live has some 8-10m of water, so we decided to go there for some light recreational diving. Sheesh was I wrong. The most water I could find was 2.4m and the visibility was literally 20-30cm. This was easily the shittiest diving I've ever done.

I'm finding it hard to keep motivation up for training for a pool event, since the lakes are clearing up. I should be doing CW or something. But I got my new suit today, so hopefully that will give me the boost I need. I've never had a suit for dynamic before so it'll be exciting to see if it makes a difference. I just hope I have time to balance it properly before the competition.

Sorry to hear that the Coca Cola Open in Spetses is cancelled. That was really the only CW competition I was planning on going to this year. Since the Finnish nationals have also been cancelled (or moved to Sweden on a time I cannot attend), that leaves me with plenty of time to practice and not stress about competitions, which is kind of good in a way...

Back again

I restarted training yesterday at the pool. I tried a new warmup, 3 statics of max 4:00 and then go. I was reading some old DB posts again and picked up the idea from (who else) Eric Fattah. The hypothesis is, that if you do warmups that are severly hypoxic, your "deep tissues" will become hypoxic. These tissues (ie. the water in your body) react much slower thatn blood etc, so if you then try a max static after that, your tissues will actually be still hypoxic and "robbing" oxygen from your blood. Makes sense, even though the supposed difference isn't much.

I hit 6:45, so I can't say it was a huge leap. However this was the first static after a week and also I had some other distractions (mainly training my girlfriend to be my assistant at the competition), so I consider it a promising start.

If all goes according to my plan, this week I will concentrate on trying to find the ultimate preparation for static. Then next week, rest the beginning of the week and then 2-3 days before the competition, start doing max statics again and "peak" on saturday. We'll see...

A slightly disturbing topic is the "is freediving dangerous" thread in deeperblue. I won't go into detail here, but a paper claims that heavy freedive training may cause pulmonary hypertension and changes in the right ventricle. I had an EKG taken by my girlfriend (who's a med student) and sure enough, there was very clear anomalies that would indicate right ventricular hypertrophy. I don't take that as scientific proof though, since she's also just practicing taking and EKG, so I had a proper one taken today. Will know the results tomorrow, so stay tuned. But also keep in mind 2 things: I've had some "athlete's heart" types of anomalies before and I may suffer (or have suffered when I was a bit chubbier) from sleep apnea. Both of which might explain these changes, so do not consider this as final proof. However, if you're someone who trains apnea very hard, I suggest you get that checked. It's not very much money to put your mind at rest...

Re-evaluation of things

I've decided, that instead of breaking my balls with "no-warmup"-training this week I will take a complete break. The fact is, I'm not feeling up to it both physically and mentally at the moment, so I'll salvage what I can and rest. Better to rest now than notice a couple of days before the competition, that I need a weeks rest.

We went CW diving yesterday. We found a new spot that looked very promising on the map. About 200m swim from the shore and over 50m of water. Sure, but what the map doesn't tell is that the water is just slightly above mud in terms of visibility. I made one dive to -29m, but I don't think we'll be returning to that site any day soon. We've got a good one with 30m water and great visibility. I'd rather dive there and maybe pop at the 50m if I for some reason feel I need to break a pb. Just seems kind of pointless diving there, even if it is great training mentally :)

Wrapping up contractions training

Phew, finally. I tell you, this training has got to be the toughest I've done, both mentally and physically. Tomorrow I rest, on sunday pool and then next week no-warmup statics. That's a hard one as well, but not a tough as this.

Today I shortened the routine a bit, just to make it, you know, tolerable. So here's what I did:
FRC 3:00
2:57/84 (beat previous count of contractions)
3:15/76 (beat previous time of contractions)

After that I was simply so pooped that there's no way I can do a third one.

Resuming...

Ok, back on track today:
FRC 2:20
FRC 3:00
3:10/85
3:00/70

I deliberately didn't push the FRCs, better to save the strength for the actual attempts. I managed to push the time a few seconds, as well as the contraction count. Good...

Samba strikes

I had a really bad samba today in dynamic. I don't recall ever having such a bad one except the time when I blacked out over a year a go. The strange thing is, that I only did maybe 105m, which should be pretty routine for me.

I think a few things contributed
-I was doing FRC dynamics before the attempt, about 1 min bottom static, followed by a 50m swim. I did 3 of these and actually had a slight samba on the last one.
-I was getting very cold
-I was not very relaxed. Too much commotion at the pool plus I was trying something new.

I wanted to see if "hard core" FRC diving would work as a warmup for dynamic. I guess it did not. In retrospect, I should've stopped diving after the first samba. I mean what was I thinking?!

Well, it's a good reminder of the risks involved. I just hope it doesn't eat my confidence too much. I still believe that under normal coditions, I should be doing 115m easily...

The 1.5mm elios suit that I ordered well over a month a go would help. Let's hope it finally gets here :)

Too much

It seems that this hard core tolerance training is too much for my body. I haven't been able to sleep properly for 2 nights now. Therefore I will take a break from that today and only concentrate on dynamics at the pool.

We went diving yesterday. The lake was still frozen, but we found a hole left by scubadivers that had widened nicely. So we suited up, dropped a line and went diving. It was cold, visibility pretty much 0 and only 8m deep. At some point the thought occured to us, that we must really like diving, going through all that trouble just to drop into a zero vis water that is only a couple of meters deeper than the pool. But so what, all in good fun :)

Continuing contractions training

Very quickly:
FRC 3:00
FRC 4:00
2:55/70
2:15/40

I think I strained my self too much on the FRC. I just felt good and kept going, but then could not find the will to do 3 of the "contraction surfing" statics.

Still, 2:55 is ok. Not good, but acceptable...

Now I'm going to see if we have big enough holes in the ice for some CW :)

Preparing for the competition

Ok, my sights are now set on the competition on may 7th. This week I'll train only contractions. I start the time from the 1st contraction and try to hold as long as I can. I'll do 3 of these per day (I've noticed that if they're max effort, any more is useless) and try to increase the time over the week. The idea is, that I'll be able to determine an average "good" time that I can withstand contractions. I will then try to optimize my ventilation so that my target time (let's say 7:00) will be "time of 1st contraction"+"average fight time". Today I could hit 3:03, but only 2:30 and 2:40 on the other try's. So now it would look like this: 4:30+2:30 = 7:00. You get the idea. I'm also doing these without any packing for 2 reasons. First, I want to give my lungs a rest from packing, and second, it gives me a nice safety margin: what ever I hit now without packing, I should be able to hit with ease with packing.

Data:
FRC 2:18
FRC 2:48
(following are not total time, but time in contractions):
2:40/70
3:03/80
2:30/55

Clearly visible is what I noticed in the last time I did these experiments. All trials being max effort, the second one is always the best.

We had this training camp over the weekend in Paimio. It was pretty good. I got some good tips for dynamic and hopefully gave some static tips to others. We had a pulse oximeter there and it was fun to see what happens during a breath hold.
Some highlights:
-My pulse is about 55-60 during a max static. It drops clearly after contractions start. This was observed with other divers as well
-Without packing, sat02 was 90% at around 3:00. With packing, over a minute later
-On an FRC hold, my pulse dropped to 35! Propably would've gone even further, but I stopped at around 2 minutes.
-Timo Kinnunen (the undisputed static champion in Finland) had sat02 of 97% after 3 minutes. So it hadn't even begun falling. His pulse was surprisingly high though, around 80 bpm. He quit after 6:20 or something, saO2 at 65%, looking very very fresh. Sadly the pulse oximeter didn't really measure lower that that, but freaked out.

I made one 7:02 static, which was good considering that my warmup consisted of just playing around with the oximeter, preparation was non-existent and I had a crowd of strangers wathcing...It gives me confidence that I can pull at least 7 minutes in the competition...

7:30 dry

Just a normal dry day today. I've decided that starting from next week I'll start this kind of a last month training cycle for the competition.

Next week I'll do no-warmup static, timing only contractions
Then just normal no-warmup statics on the following week.
The penultimate week I'll do mockup competitions and fine tune my preparation (ie. normal statics)
The last week, I'll rest the beginning of the week and then on wed, thu do some max static and on fri, some nice, cozy statics, not near the max. That should bring me to my peak both mentally and physiologically by saturday of that week (day of the competition).

Ok, so today's stuff. Pretty standard:
FRC 2:00
FRC 3:15
5:00 (3:00/50)
6:23 (4:00/55)
7:30 (5:05/70)

7:30 on the second day after a break. Not bad...

No-suit 6 min static and other tales

Back from a break again. Yesterday I didn't even bring my wetsuit, as I had decided I won't do static, because I had a new mono and wanted to break it in. But in the end of the day, I just couldn't resist, so I asked a buddy to time me without a suit. I did about a 2 min static quickly to "warm up" (but in reality, it was more like a "cool-down" as I got really cold), the hastily breathed up and started. The weird thing is, I got relatively early contractions, before 4 minutes, but they just didn't feel bad at all. I guess that was due to the cold. As I started I thought 4 minutes would be a good time, but as I reached 6 minutes, I came up just because I was scared to go on. I have no idea how being so cold affects my performance, so I didn't want to black out or anything.

Well I then proceeded to do some empty lung dives practicing equalization. I was then asked to spot someone else, so I threw on my mono. I didn't feel like putting on the neck ballasts, so I swam to the other end of the pool on FRC. But at 25m I realized I have absolutely no need to breathe what so ever. So I turned and swam back. At 50m on FRC and still absolutely not any kind of feeling of having to breathe. Now that was just scary. What the hell happened? How close was I to bo? I don't know but I don't recommend that you try this without very careful watching for your partner...A good reminder even if you feel allright, you might still be close to your limit...

Preparing for a break again

I'm taking a break for the weekend, but not totally dive free. I'm headed for a trainers "workshop" thingy, my first step in hopefully becoming a freedive trainer.

Did some basic dry's again. Very interesting day today. I felt very strong. In my warmup, I did 3:00 and 4:00 FRCs and after a 5:30 no packing warmup, 7:20. I was feeling very good and propably could've pushed much further. But just at 6:00 or so, my girlfriend came to my apartment and I was distracted. Somehow, I never can push to the limit when she's around. Somehow I become more conservative, propably because she doesn't think what I do is really healthy and I subconciously become aware of that.

Still, very good. This is actually a bit surprising, because I was expecting to be much more acidic after such a long streak of statics. On the last hold, my first contraction came at 5:20, ie very late.

Anyway:
Empty lung 1:00
FRC 3:00
FRC 4:00
5:30 (no packing, 3:40/45)
7:20 (5:20/48)

I have no doubt I'll reach 8 minutes some day. Propably within weeks or a few months. I've also made a pact with my self, that after I reach that, I will slow down considerably and start concentrating more on dynamic and constant...But let's wait and see...