Dynamic Training and All the Stages of Despair

Dynamic training and all the stages of despair

Not too long ago I wrote a post about staying in the moment, and I constantly speak about it to my students, but I can tell that the concept doesn’t often go through when it is explained in terms that are too abstract for people to grasp and put into real life practice. So here I’m trying again.

Recently I was talking to someone about freediving (what else!) and specifically about dynamic training and the 16 x 50m, which along with the other bitch 10 x 100 is not only an effective training for CO2 tolerance, but I find they are especially good mental tools to practice “toughness” which is really the wrong word for it, but it is the word that is most commonly used.
To get to the end of such training sessions you will have to find your way to stay in the moment and practice some form or mindfulness because there is really no other way to go about it.

So usually this is how it starts and I think it is a fairly common sequence of events for many other freedivers, I call it the stages of despair in dynamic training:

dive 1: oh this is kinda nice:)
dive 2: oh, was that a contraction already?
dive 3: oh fuck
dive 4: I think I’m gonna die – first mental breakdown
dive 5: I’m definitely gonna die – second breakdown
dive 6: I can’t take it anymore

This is more or less what happens to me on a good day, but for some all this happens already before the end of dive n.1.

So what happens next?

Outcome 1 – QUIT. You give up in the middle of the set. This is the least desirable outcome and you will spend the rest of the day feeling like a loser (rightly so).
At the end of the day let’s be honest, no one other than you gives 2 shits about how successful your training session was, so as long as you are at peace with quitting when things get hard, it is totally ok to do so.

Outcome 2 – CUT SLACK. You make it easier for yourself by making the rest of the set easier (for example by taking much longer recovery times) to reduce the suffering. This is much more desirable than outcome 1, because at least you get to the end of the training and only marginally give up. Cutting slack is totally acceptable when it happens now and again, maybe you had a horrible day at work or you just murdered your wife and you are not 100% focused on your training assignment, and showing up and do something is 100 times better than quitting or hitting the bar (unless you did murder your wife in which case go spend the precious time you have left to cover your tracks and DO NOT google “how to get rid of a corpse” even if your VPN is on).

Outcome 3 – COPE. You accept the hardship and deal with it (which is not the same as fighting your way through). This is the most desirable outcome but also the most difficult to achieve. The sense of accomplishment you feel after is always worth the struggle. Fighting or pushing through may even work at times, but it is mentally very hard and never a long lasting solution because it will lead you straight to mental burnout.

Training (in any field), growing, and improving are all things that imply accepting a degree of discomfort (ever heard the saying “nothing grows in the comfort zone”?). Yes, there is a small number of people who actually seek discomfort and even thrive it in, especially risk-taking personalities, but most of us don’t particularly desire nor enjoy it. But some of us are willing to accept it and are able to navigate through it to find a way forward.

Others are not, and that is completely ok, provided that it is a conscious decision on your part: if you say, “I don’t like to feel like this and I’m ok to give up and be at peace with it” then sure, no damage is done, you can freedive just for fun and splash around during pool days.
But I’d guess most of you reading this don’t want to be that person or you wouldn’t have been reading past the title.

So how should you go about it? And is the ability to cope something you can learn or you either have it or you don’t?

Despite freediving competitively and relatively deep for over 20 years, I only started “real” freediving training 3.5 years ago when I found my coach Bub. He threw me straight away in the pool and that’s when I understood that what I did until that point was just “splashing around”. I also learned that the reason I wasn’t able to dive below 80 meters was because I wasn’t able to push past my comfort zone. We all have a certain degree of ability for any given activity, some are naturally better than others, which is what we call talent. Past that point you need to work for it. Some people reach a wall at 20m, others (fewer) get to 100m without so much effort. But at some point you will hit that wall, that for me was 80 meters, and that’s where I sat for so long that I gave up many times (last time for 4 full years) and took up other hobbies, but then in the end I always came back to it because freediving really stuck with me.

To be fair, training with Bub started rather gently for the first month or so but then things got real and very early after that Bub sent me to do 10×75 meters dynamics with 30” rest times. I thought it was outrageous and it was, because at just dive n.2 I was through all the stages of despair and I gave up right then and there.
I was so fucking upset, with both him for giving me an impossible task and with myself for having a total breakdown and quitting before even trying, and that was the first and the last time I gave up in the middle of a session. Bub says, “pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever” and it is so true: 3 years later it still stings.
This is also part of the reason why Bub’s style really works for me: he often teaches you lessons with facts rather than words. It is much more painful to hit a wall face first and have to figure out how to get yourself through it rather than being sweet talked and handheld along the way, but that lesson will stay with you forever. (Unfortunately, this style doesn’t work for any of my students: they all need to be cuddled and pillow talked for forever when they come back from a hard training or they’re just having a bad day :))

Often our idea of being tough is to be unbendable, hard, cold and able to “push through” pain and hardship, but that’s really not the winning strategy. You want to be flexible, supple. Don’t fight, but rather cope. Adapt. Find a solution to overcome the next 2 seconds (vs. thinking about getting through the next 50 meters). When a feeling of despair is coming at you don’t attack it (it will bite back) or ignore it (it will scream louder) but rather acknowledge it, accept it and ask yourself: is it really so bad that I cannot do 3 more kicks? Can I get to the next wall? Now that I’m here, can I turn? Now that I turned, can I push off? What is that I feel is so hard? Is this pain real? What and where do I feel it? Is my neck tensing? I need to loosen it. My legs are lactic, that is good, it means my dive reflex is working! I have contractions, that is good, it means my dive reflex is working! My kicks are too wide, let’s make them smaller. My back is arched, I need to be more streamlined. Are my arms straight? Am I too close to the surface? Let’s try to speed up a little. And just like that, before you are through the first half of the above questions you are done with another long rep.
And now that you are taking your second recovery breath you are already thinking “Ok, to be fair that was not so bad, I think I can try do another one.” And so on and so forth. A step at a time. And then you get to your last swim and you completed what half hour ago seemed like an insurmountable task.

When you master this thinking pattern, doing maximum dives will become much less stressful, because you will apply the same approach there. But practising on multiple/shorter dives is incredibly helpful.