IT HAS BEEN AGES since I took – or shared a photo of me showing my last personal best, but this one deserve a place here because I really had to work for it. Last year when I started training again after 5 years of mainly walking into forests I picked bifins and no-fins as disciplines to train because I didn’t want to deal with all the logistics with deep diving that we need here in Tenerife.
But then depth came anyways and I dropped CNF (no-fins) because I’m just too lazy for that and kept going with bifins.
2021 ended and the new year started and my dry and pool training was going so well that I hardly have any urge to breathe during my deep dives (thanks to my cruel coach who I call Bub – short of Belzeebub), so then finally I got to the mid 80’ies without much drama, until I got really stuck with my equalization.
I often run out of air in my mouth but that was never an issue because I can reverse pack at depth without any problem…until past 80m, and then that was it.
Until then I never really made a big effort to correct the issue because I didn’t need to, but now I had a problem and instead of spending the warm water months progressing with my depth, I spent the whole summer trying to break that wall, which was very frustrating because the dives felt very easy, but only rarely I would get at the bottom plate with any air left. Then I finally listened to Bub and did a lot of laying on my bed and visualising my descents and how I handle my mouthfill, and maybe it worked – or maybe I just had a good day.
The other day I put the rope at 90 as usual but this time I landed on the plate, actually a little deeper, which was very surprising. Swimming up from 92 was actually a bit more challenging than 85, and a 7m jump at these depths is usually not the way to go, especially since I did heavy weight squats only 2 days prior and my legs were still burning, and I had to do a bunch of arm strokes at the end!
I guess I’ll do a few reps and find out if my equalization is fixed or if I just got lucky once.
See you in the deep blue 😉
