The importance of building habit. As in the RIGHT HABIT, not any stupid habit (as you will see).
During last year world championship in Roatan, I missed a podium for my CNF dive because I missed the line when I surfaced. Here’s the details if you are interested in the technical stuff (and mistakes to avoid for yourself, or skip to the next 27th paragraph or so if you are here just for the gossip and the juicy stuff).
I did a dive that was right at the edge of my limits, due to lack of training, being overweighed and having unwittingly hyperventilated. Since I never train off a boat and my rope is connected to the bottom of my SUP board, I had the habit of come up and put both my elbows on the SUP for support. Of course diving from a boat/platform is different as there is an arm holding the rope all the way out of the water, and there is no floaty support on the surface, so as you break the surface you need to hold yourself on the line, possibly with your arm extended all the way up above your head (especially if there are waves), to avoid getting water over your face/head. The fluid goggles I was using then gave me a great underwater vision, but made me completely blind as soon as my head was out of the water, and for this reason (and other reasons too) if you want to be sure to grab the rope at the surface, you need to place a hand on the rope during the last few meters of your dive, so that once you break the surface you just need to close your hand and grab, et voila’.
Seems very straightforward and easy, and maybe it is: maybe it’s just me being mentally challenged when my brain is underwater and even if I’m fresh I keep doing a wide selection of the stupidest things, but let’s go with it right now, because the point I’m trying to make is a different one.
What happened is that I didn’t slide my hand along the line, and at the surface I tried grabbing it, missed it, my head dipped underwater, I blacked out, got a red card, missed a podium. And worst of all, I will forever look uber-stupid on the Diveye stream (below) (yes you can laugh).
The reason why I didn’t grab the rope in advance on that dive was that I didn’t build that habit, and when you have repeated an action hundreds of times, your body goes on auto mode and does his thing without you having to tell it to. If you are hypoxic on top of that you can just forget it and all you can hope for to save your ass is a miracle ( I certainly wasn’t blessed with one of those).
So, once I realised what I needed to correct, I spent the whole next 14 months trying to reverse this habit. Since I still do not have a set up with an arm, I had to keep diving on my set up pretending that there was a rope sticking up out of the water and since then every single dive I did, doesn’t matter if to 10 or 90 meters, I put an alarm on the ascent close to the surface as a reminder, and always slide my hand along the rope then of course I have to let it go just before it hit the board and then immediately raise my arm above the water and pretended to hold on to an invisible rope. Of course that provides no support so at the same time I have to place my other hand on the board to keep my head out of the water. Then, (and this is the vital part of this all thing, so wake up now if you fell asleep reading until now) after a couple of recovery breaths and an ok sign I would stop the pretending and put my elbows on the board and proceed to take off my goggles, with both my hands because I dont know, it comes natural to me to do it like that and I hate to look stupid when one goggle rolls over and it sits skew on my head.
I also changed my googles eventually and started using dry goggles (the kind that Evolve and Hektometer are making) so that if everything goes south and my brain farts again at least I’ll have eyes on the surface to see the rope and hopefully grab it in time.
(Wow, thats a hell of a preamble! anyhow this is an informative/teaching post, so be happy I’m taking the time and tell you how to save your own ass).
I cant count how many dives I did like that, and I was sure there wouldn’t be any more missed ropes and head dips in my future ever again.
And then it was this year World Championships when disaster struck.
But alas, you will have to wait until later to hear the rest because now I have to be a grown up and do some real work.
