EPILOGUE
The most relevant thing of this whole trip for me was the amount of things I learned.
Things that I learned about my own diving, competition mistakes I made and that I will never repeat (well, never say never), but especially things I learned about myself, my motivation and what drives me (and what drives me mad). Also, after 21 years of freediving, I learned I can squeeze too. Where to start! Oh dear, I can see how this epilogue is not going to be contained in one single post. Nor two.
For example there is much to be said about the importance of building a (good) habit and automatize crucial movements.
Whenever I see freedivers missing the rope at the surface I always think, “what an idiot!”, then I watched myself on my CNF dive and thought “what a triple idiot!” and immediately wanted to punch myself in the face. But I know why it happened: I only ever train using a SUP (using a buoy would have the same effect), which means that when you surface from a dive you cannot slide your hand along the rope and exit like that, because you will have to let go of the rope and bring your arm above the buoy (or SUP) to hold yourself up (the photos below are self-explanatory)
This is very different than diving from a boat or platform where the rope is hanging above the water from an arm (not a human one). This way you can place your hand along it and use it as a guide (it’s very useful when you are blind from not wearing a mask) all the way out of and above the surface and just grab the rope at the highest point and hang on to it for support.
Of course when I started to dive in Roatan I did do that, but I didnt have nearly enough training dives to make a habit of it (a quick google search told me it takes 30 repetition, or 66 , or 10000, or 8 months, or 21 days, so dont even waste your time to try finding the answer to that). So because of that I had to think about doing it right every single time. Which works well when you surface all fresh and dandy, but when you dont, then well, you saw what happens.
So I will make the biggest effort to forgive myself and try to refrain from punching myself in the face.
END OF EPILOGUE N.1
