Finally competition season is over and I can get my life back! (Meaning straight back to the pool !) Why did I go to yet another comp just to do 80ish meters dives? I’m not sure I have a real answer to that, but I can try. But first: ⚠TRIGGER WARNING ⚠ If you are…
Not only Covid ruined my World Championship in Roatan last august, it also left me with crippled ears. In fact, I became completely unable to do hands-free for a long time after that. Note that while I was sick, I just had fever and throat ache, but zero congestion and I was never unable to…
I have been using neckweights since I started freediving, which is looong time ago. I have always made my own neckweights and I had a system to shape them the way I wanted so that there is no weight or pressure on my throat, and I assumed that is what I was always going to…
Whenever I do a poopy dive (which usually means I turned earlier due to an equalisation SNAFU) I go home and then ignore my coach Bub messages all day, which is very hard because he won’t leave me alone until I talk to him. Since he knows me well enough, at this point he will…
So far I did 26 dives (yes I counted them) between 90 and 99m but only recently I started having problems with narcosis. In fact until last month I only had a couple of slower dives where I asked myself ” did I just have a little narcosis?” but I wasn’t 100% positive that it…
It was my intention to write a long comprehensive epilogue of the WC 2023 series, but as always the IG word police cut me short and then I was so busy with work, training, home and attending to the many needs of my dog from hell. Since I got so tired of writing long Instagram…
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…
When I went home from my no-fins dive, I had less than 1 hour to announce for the bifins dive. I had previously decided to go with 98m, but after my little incident I didnt know if it was such a good idea. Despite telling myself that I wouldn’t base my announcement on other freedivers…
After realising why I wasn’t happy with my medal dive I put on the big boy pants and announced to my team captain that I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice and that I would announce 98 m on the bifins day. I easily did close to that in training and my bifins depths have…
After completing my 96 FIM dive that won me a nice fat silver medal at the CMAS world championship, I went home and cried for 24 hours straight. I was so upset with myself for not having announced more and losing the highest place on the podium. I wanted to be on the safe side…
This year I turned 50 years old and I thought I know myself like the back of my hand (or like the inside of my pockets as we say in italian), until I come to a mosquitoes infested island in the Caribbean on a medal hunt, only to realize I dont know this person I’m…
It’s amazing how fast and slow the time is passing when you are in a weird bubble as if spacetime collapsed and expanded at the same time. So while I feel that I literally do nothing all day, at the same time days are passing very fast and at the end of each day I…
I’m slowly getting to love pool training (either that or i got brainwashed). I really like dry training and i got into it very quickly when i started training last year. On dry i can push myself to states of suffering so beyond of what i can do in the pool or the sea. But…
TALENT VS EFFORT Recently I was listening to this podcast about grit and the relationship between talent and effort and which one you really need to be successful at something (short answer is both is best but if you have to pick one, effort is by far the determining factor). This resonated with me and…
A little over 1 year ago I started to do intermittent fasting. I had read a lot of literature about it and my only motivation for starting was for the health benefits and longevity (when you’ll get there you’ll know that a certain age you better start planning on how to slow down the inexorable…