How to Mess Up Your Competition Plan Step by Step

How to Mess Up Your Competition Plan Step by Step

My biggest revelation of 2024: Having a plan doesn’t help you if you don’t follow it.

So I just recently come back from Poland, where I went to take part to the Deepspot Challenge.
They should call it “This challenge is a bitch” so that people would have a better idea what to expect, but this is actually beside the point and we will not wander off the main topic, except I’ll have to explain briefly what the main competition objective or you won’t get the picture.

Since the pool’s depth is only 45m and theres no point trying to do a traditional depth competition there, the essence of this comp is to have a mix of depth and static, so the salient rule is that you have 3 minutes to get to the bottom and then ascend to 2 meters where you will stop for a lovely static for as long as you can tolerate. That means that you will aim at doing a relatively slow dive and make sure that at 2:59 you are no deeper than 2 meters .

Doesnt it sound easy and fun? Well, its not. First of all because my (and probably yours too) perception of time and depth in such a different environment is completely messed-up, and most people who aren’t used to dive there get easily confused, and secondly because doing a static at the end of a dive is literally the closest thing to hell for a freediver.
Any other combination would be better, like doing a long static at the start and then dive, or doing a super slow descent and ascent, or go down at normal speed and hang at the bottom, literally anything would be better than do a hang where you are the most buoyant and at the end of a dive. If you dont believe me go to the pool and compare how easy is to do static followed 100m dynamic, versus doing a 50m dynamic followed by even a short static at the end.
But of course, that’s the whole point, they want to see you suffer, even if the official excuse for the static at 2 meters is “because of safety concerns”. Safety my ass!

But anyhow, I decided to go because, why not, and some of my friends were there too and I thought it would be fun, but at the same time I didnt do any training for it because I didnt want to stop my pool training which already got interrupted many times this winter due to travelling, being sickly and other annoying distractions. So basically I’m in the worst part of the year to hold my breath for long dives, especially nasty ones, but that’s the beauty of base training, you gotta suck at something to improve at something else.

And honestly I thought it can’t be as bad as it sounds (spoiler alert: it is!), and with only 1 practice session prior the comp to figure it out, I told myself “I’ll wing the shit out of it” and it will be fine (spoiler alert: it wasn’t).

Fun fact and short digression: the first day I dived at Deepspot was also my very first time in a deep pool. When people heat that they make faces and ask “WHAT!?! How is that possible? why?”. Dude, I live literally 15 meters away from where I train, why would I want to spend good money to get on a plane, stay in a hotel and pay to enter a narrow tube containing a mix of water and pee that is not even deep enough for any significant degree of training?
How does this not register to people before they ask the question? I hope at least they feel slightly stupid after they received my annoyed answer, but who am i kidding, I know they don’t (sorry people who have asked me this, I hope you take no offence). End of the digression.

So, let’s try to stay on topic and get to the point of the article!
As I do before any competition, I make a plan. Not only a plan for the actual dive (this alone may be the subject for another long post), but for literally where to be and when the whole hour+ before my dive (or longer if I need to travel to reach the location).
In this specific case, since I was staying at the (very lovely!) accommodation inside the Deepspot (in the “underwater room” with the view inside the pool, at a 5m depth, which is super trippy except for those times where my slightly obsessive-compulsive mind kept telling me the window would break and I would drown to death), so no travelling was required.

 

Here below my plan, followed by the story of I focked up every single step and then some.

Step 1-2:25pm leave room
Step 2-2:30pm at changing
Step 3-2:45pm at the pool
Step 4-2:50pm packing routine
Step 5-3:00pm dry FRC static
Step 6-3:25pm in water
Step 7-3:28pm warm up dive
Step 8-3:40pm top time and shine.

How I focked up step 1, 2 and 3

Went to pool way too early because I was restless. In my defence I can only say I find it very unsettling to dive in the afternoon after a whole day of fasting and waiting around. But luck wanted that I was the last start of the day. Since I was there with nothing else to do other than stressing I started my routine almost half hour earlier than planned. This is a very stupid beginner mistake and I have no excuse for it.

How I focked up step 4

I didnt look at my hand-written piece of paper and I forgot all about the packing routine. Yeah, what can I say other than #facepalm

How I focked up step 5

I’m the middle of doing FRC static when I realized I will end up doing double of what I have planned because of how early I started. So I made myself stop, go fill my water bottle and take a precautionary bathroom break which made me waste than I planned because every time you stand up and move from point a to point b you meet lots of chatty people who need to strike a conversation.

How I focked up step 5 a little more- I got back to my spot and Jakob (my coach for the day) found me and suggested that I move to the meeting room which is much cooler so I dont have to do static in 40 degrees hot dry air (this was literally the only intelligent thing I managed to do all day and it wasn’t even my idea). We moved and at this point I was still pretty relaxed. As I settled down on my mat my phone started ringing. That when I totally lost the plot.
My phone is always on silent (if you ever tried to call me you’ll know) except earlier this one morning I was waiting for a call and then I forgot to kill the sound again. As I take the phone out of my bag to turn it off I looked at it and see it’s my husband calling. I picked up, and snapped about being in the middle of my warm up and hang up.
I laid down again and started panicking, because he never ever calls me when I’m out doing my own stuff especially when it’s freediving related. I got so stressed about what may have happened at home for him to call, and my stomach started churning with dread and it was obvious I couldn’t put it to rest until i knew, so got up again and call him back to know if the volcano erupted or did someone die or what else made him call me 30 minutes before my dive.
And sure enough was the most mundane of things. I hung up the phone and I was furious, mainly at myself, for losing it so quickly after having spent the whole day focusing on staying chilled and unperturbed. Now my heart was racing up my throat and diving was literally the last thing I wanted to be doing. I told myself to do the last couple of statics but now I was getting contractions in no time and if I had a little dive reflex going earlier, that was gone. And on top of that now I was late.

How I didn’t entirely fock up step 6 & 7

Since I was late, Jakob tried to convince me not to do a wet warm up but I wouldn’t hear of it, because I only ever did 1 dive before in this pool and it felt like being on the moon, it felt so weird and alien and all my senses felt distorted. I had to get underwater at least once more before I could do my comp dive.
So I used the official countdown of the diver before me to practice timing (the rules here are a bit different than a regular competition, as your whole body must be submerged completely before top time so you have to leave the surface a few seconds earlier to make sure your feet don’t stick out of the water as you put yourself upside down.)
I’m happy I did that dive because I did manage to calm myself down a little and my furiousness dimmed and left room to a more mellow sense of frustration and even though I was fighting tears back it was still better than anger.

How I totally focked up step 8

I got to the line about 5 minutes before my dive and tried to breathe-up and forget about my misery.
I reminded myself of how I managed to do big dives before with almost no breathe-up and that this was just a qualifying dive and that I didn’t need to do a big dive, but that this was just a practice dive for tomorrow competition.

I went down and I managed to keep my timing right, until I didn’t. In fact I heard my 2:30 time alarm and told myself “you’re going too fast” and then 3 seconds later (or so it felt) the speaker announced I only have 10 seconds to be at the 2 meters zone, at which time I opened my eyes, and saw the 15m mark on the pool wall a few meters above my head.
At this point confusion set in and I figured no matter how much I rush I won’t be there in time and even if I do, I won’t be able to stop there for a static after a sprint. So I finally came up at 3:20, the judge showed me a bright red card and I was out.

Is there a point to this story, and what is the takeaway?

Yes, there is, and even if the main point of this post is to upload all the amazing 360 photos I took, there is a morale to the story.

Later that day I started thinking about the dive and about what happened and I realized all the mistakes I made, or actually the one real mistake I made which started a sequence of mistakes, namely, trying to regain relaxation after having a mental breakdown was my main fockup.

You can’t relax when you have to carry out a very detailed plan for a dive that you actually have never performed before other than during your visualization. I should have spent the last few minutes going through my dive plan over and over rather than trying to forget all my woes as I forgot everything else alongside with that. I had a bunch of instructions to follow, such as the timing of the descent and ascent, listening to my alarms to adjust speed, and especially keeping my eyes open on the ascent not to lose track of the depth I was at, and finally if everything failed, remember to speed up when the -10″ countdown started. Instead I went down as if in a dream and I let my “dive instinct” take over when it was the last thing I could trust in that unfamiliar environment. And like me many others make the same mistake and got themselves outed not because their dive time is too short, but because they relax and go too slow.

Anyways, as always the good thing of messing things up is that it keeps my mind busy for a while and I kinda enjoy (in a messed up way) musing about all the shit I did wrong so that I have something to ramble about in my blog. Because how boring would it be if all I had to say was “Went to Deepspot, won the Challenge and went home”? Yeah, I almost feel bad for the winner, winning the expensive watch and the money and going home with no new wisdom to spread to the masses.