Rule 10

Yesterday I made my first attempt to dive to 101m under official record conditions and failed.

It was ambitious to do it this soon but that said, we all thought I could do it and I have been to 100m in training so it was a disappointment for everybody. Still, we can try again today.

Seeing as many people will be new to freediving I thought I it might be helpful for me to explain a little about No Limits and what happens to make a dive successful. I’ll say enough to explain why the dive failed but not get too technical, don’t worry – keep reading. I’ll let you know what I got right and what I got wrong…

No Limits freediving has four important areas:

1 Breath hold (and conscious, deep relaxation is a big part of this)
2 Equalisation Technique
3 Mental ability to cope with extreme depth and difficulties at depth without stress/ability to cope with nitrogen narcosis at depth
4 Physical Technique (I am not going to mention this below)

1 Breath hold

I’ll not write about breath hold today other than to say that at the depths I am going to it is not an issue for me. I am happy holding my breath underwater for well in excess of three minutes and I will complete this dive in less than three minutes. The only exception to this would be if I lose the “mental” discipline in part 3. Then my system will start to burn up oxygen way too quickly and the breath hold time will radically reduce. This has never happened to me and I will try to explain a little about how I work on this in part 3 below.

2 Equalisation

Equalisation (in the way we generally use the term in diving) is the way we maintain pressure in the middle ear that is equal to the pressure being exerted on the eardrum by the sea. From the edge of the earth’s atmosphere to the surface of the sea is 1 Atmosphere (bar) of pressure. From the surface of the sea to 10 metres below the surface is an increase of 1 whole atmosphere again. Each 10 metres thereafter is another atmosphere. At 100m the pressure exerted by the sea upon the body is 10 atmosphere’s greater than on the surface – 11 atmospheres in total. This has a number of effects upon the body and I’ll only mention the most obvious – and the one that caused me to fail yesterday. There are some airspaces in the body that are unable to adapt on their own to the increase in pressure, notably the air space in the middle ear. The result is that the eardrum will be pushed into that space unless air is moved by the diver into the inner ear from the lungs via the mouth. Scuba divers and those with difficulty on aeroplanes will be familiar with all of this. If you fail to equalise as you descend, the pain in your ears will become so extreme that you will have to turn and ascend to relieve it. If you can bear it and you decide to proceed, you will burst your eardrums.

A freediver has a limited amount of air to use for equalisation and this limited supply is subject to two complicating factors. Firstly, as you descend, the pressure causes the volume of air to decrease. Maddie and I tried an experiment on a recent flight to demonstrate this. We drank a plastic bottle of water and then sealed it tight at 33,000 feet. As we landed we looked at it’s crumpled form triumphantly! The volume of air had decreased – the density increased. However – the size of the airspace that we are trying to keep filling as the pressure increases does not decrease – only the air we have to fill it with does.

In other words – as I descend, the air that I have to fill my ear space decreases, but I still need lots of it. When you see freedivers taking great gasps of air at the surface or “packing” air in, it is not for an oxygen supply – it is to get enough air to be able to equalise at depth.

The second problem is that as you descend, your lungs shrink. They are around lemon size, I am told, at 50m. They do not let air out in that state! If you have not got the air out by then, your dive is over. The pain in your ears will be so extreme that you have to turn as you will have no air to use to equalise that pressure from within.

So the way to deal with this is to get the air out of your lungs at around 35-40 metres and into your mouth. This is called “mouthfill”. Many pressures want to get it out of your mouth as you descend. Your mask will suck it out through your nose and your lungs will suck it back. So you seal the balloon of your mouth in three ways – leaving the fourth exit open. The mouth is sealed, the nose is pinched tight shut and the larynx and epiglottis seal off the trachea – the tube leading to the lungs. The Eustachian tubes, leading to the middle ear, are kept open and pressure is applied to the air in the mouth to encourage the air to escape – into these tubes and on to the inner ear. 

This is the area where my dive went wrong yesterday. I did not have enough air to equalise as the depth increased and I had to turn around. Why? Well, either I didn’t get enough out of my  lungs and into my mouth at 35m (this is possible and I’m working on that today) or I let some escape through inadequate control of my larynx on the way down (also possible and the other area of concentration today).

Now it’s quite tricky to control all of that on dry land in training. As it gets dark and cold – and the descent starts to get very fast – at around 70m, mistakes can happen. They get eliminated with experience but still happen to experienced divers from time to time. If air escapes into the lungs through a slight opening of the larynx, it is called “swallowing the mouthfill” a phrase which causes great hilarity for everybody except the diver who has just turned early!
3 Mental Ability to cope with extreme depth

This is a complex area. It is the most useful for many readers and for anybody wishing to engage in Tiger Taming. I will not cover it in detail in this blog or attempt to do it justice here. I will return to the subject and I will also cover it in real detail in the second edition of Taming Tigers.

Many people actively enjoy a good panic. They love to have “a stress” about something or other. They can, of course, learn to control this as anybody else can. If this is you, the first stage is to notice it. Ask yourself whether it is helpful. Then, if you feel it is unhelpful, to take a different track when the next stress stimuli occurs and the desire to seek attention begins.

Assuming that you do not actively enjoy a good panic, there is a clear and well documented path from stimuli to panic – google “panic cycle” and “breaking panic cycle” to see it in graphic form. But for the purposes of this piece, think of it is a points system on a railway. You control the lever. You hurtle along on the train and just before the points you see something scary on the track ahead – with conscious practice you choose ENTIRELY your response. You can look at 70m of water above you, at the misty blue surrounding you, feel the cold of the water at depth and think “S**t – get me out of here before I die!” or “Wow! I am the luckiest man on the planet at this moment!”

Of course, we don’t start with 70m or we’d all feel the first reaction. We take it slowly and enjoy working within and on the boundaries of our limits until our limits and boundaries expand. That may mean starting with 1m of water or 50cm, but there are many people I know who will never try that.

Also, we can practise with the “points system” in ways that are not dangerous to us in any way. I am a practitioner of Kundalini Yoga and completing my teacher training at present. In Kundalini Yoga, we often put the brain into a position where it approaches the “points” and can choose failure and defeat or to continue to success. We prove to ourselves every time we practice that we can (and often in the real world do) make the conscious choice to fail rather than to persevere through minor discomfort, or that we can push past yesterday’s boundary and explore new areas of our capabilities. Training of this sort is invaluable when choosing how to deal with potentially stressful situations such as freediving.  

And here, dear Tiger Tamers, is the thought for today.

Do we go to our limits, where the fear is, where the Tiger lurks, and experiment with the points system there. Do we exercise our ability to choose our reaction, the thing that most differentiates us from horses and dogs, to experiment with consciously expanding our limits? Or do we stay well back from that (mildly) scary place.

Go to where the fear is. That is where the growth is. That is where the answers are.

Jim