Oxygen by William Trubridge

Author:William Trubridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

With freediving world record holders Herbert Nitsch and Sara Campbell at Dean’s Blue Hole during Vertical Blue 2009. (Franck Vieljeux)

Nonetheless, the event that year belonged to Herbert. He had also made an attempt at 88 metres CNF, aborting it during the descent, but on the last day he sent shockwaves around the freediving community by announcing a depth of 120 metres in Constant Weight. A jump of 6 metres beyond his still-fresh world record was an unprecedented increment in the sport, and there were discreet conversations about whether such an announcement should be allowed to proceed. No one dared deny him the opportunity, however. The next day, Herbert filled his voluminous chest with Caribbean air before slowly meandering downwards, his arms by his sides, at such a slow speed that the idea of a dive to 120 metres seemed absurd. After a full minute he was still only at 40 metres. However, from that point on he started to accelerate as his lungs compressed and negative buoyancy took over, and by 70 metres he was freefalling at 1.2 metres per second (4.3 kilometers per hour or about normal walking speed). Just over 2 minutes into the dive he turned at the plate and began finning powerfully upwards, but by halfway up he had exhausted most of the energy in his legs. When he met his safety divers at 35 metres, they were presented with a bizarre sight. Herbert was ascending with arm strokes only, his legs and fin trailing behind him. There was still plenty of oxygen in his body for him to complete the dive, but his leg muscles had become fused with lactic acid. After a dive time of nearly 4 minutes, Herbert broke the surface and completed a quick protocol to take his twenty-fifth world record and cement his position as the world’s number one.

*

The conclusion of Vertical Blue 2009 left me feeling cut short. I was happy with the no-fins dive, but had been hoping for 90 metres; and in the other disciplines Herbert had blown me out of the water. It was now May, and that year the World Championships would be held in November at Dean’s Blue Hole (Vertical Blue had made a successful bid to host the biennial event). I was determined not to be shown up again in my own backyard.

My plan was to spend the summer pool training and teaching in Europe before returning to the Bahamas at the start of October to resume depth training before the Championships. It was another summer of criss-crossing the Mediterranean, but I tried to reserve chunks of time in Verona, Sicily and Tenerife, where I could build momentum in my training in the pool. For the first time I swam 200 metres (eight lengths of a 25-metre pool) in dynamic apnea without fins, and all other indexes of speed and efficiency were at their highest.

Towards the end of the summer I was visited in Sicily by my girlfriend of one year, Brittany, an American girl whose relatives on Long Island had introduced us.

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