This is a post by Jorg.

It was a beautiful day today, so Sanne and I decided to do some lake freediving. As the rest of the Netherlands was in heavy thunderstorms and rain our diving lake was in full sunshine. However, the waves on the water were even bigger then last time.

After we changed into our gear we stepped into the water and I immediately noticed that the water temperature at the surface is way up again. But the visibility in the top was down a lot!

As always we started with a first dive to 10 meters to test equipment, body and mind and as normal everything felt great. I did a static at the bottom of around 45 seconds making it to a total time of 1:35 minutes. Sanne also did well with his first dive reaching 1:40 minutes.

After the slow long swim to the 23 meter line I still felt great and decided I would make the first dive. It was excellent conditions with warm top water and a good thermocline at around 5 meters. Big diving reflex today so I felt pretty confident about my dives that had to come.

First dive free immersion style down and I counted to 15 before coming up again from 23 meters. This felt sooo easy. As if it was the new 10 meter warmingup dive. Second dive I decided to count to 20 seconds when I was at 23 and it still felt good. For sure time for our own diving buouy so that we can set the line somewhat deeper.

Third dive was again competition time. Sanne  did a countdown and I did a constant weight dive. I managed to come up after 51 seconds and I had no lactic acid in my legs. That was probably due to the fact I used a very small but high frequency kick to come up again. I’ll do some more experiments with  this later on.

Alternating between my dives, Sanne was doing his as well. Sanne set down some impressive dive times and made it look very easy as well. He can do  double this depth for sure! Again: we need the new buoy!

Then it was time for the FRC and empty lung dives. I managed to do a good 18 meter FRC dive, that I had to really work for in the last few meters. I was pretty tired when I came up but in the end it felt fantastic. The empty lung dive brought me to 10 meters depth and also felt okay. Strange thing is that as long as I keep below 5 meters I have no urge to breath with empty lungs, but when I get above that I’m almost always out of air within 20 seconds. The empty lung dive to 10 meters lastet 40 seconds.

Sanne did a good FRC dive to 16 meters and he finally has solved his equalization problem. The empty lung dive brought him to 7 meters and he had to stop because of the equalizing and not  because of the low o2.

After these exhausting dives we decided to swim back to the 10 meter platform and swim back to shore underwater from the platform on. I followed Sanne, or should I say dust cloud. It amazes me how fast Sanne swims underwater with his bifins. I almost had to sprint to keep up with him!

At the shore the water still felt so great we decided it was time to do some diving without wetsuit. In our swimming-trunks and with our mask and snorkel we swam back to the 10 meter buoy. Sanne prepared to go into the thermocline to 10 meters but got stuck because he couldn’t equalize because of the cold. I also tried to do it in constant without fins style, but the cold made it really hard for my diaphragm but I managed to touch the 10 meter platform anyway.

After these first no wetsuit dives the game was on and we did all kind of crazy dives to 10 meters. Head first, head up, free immersion, constant without fins. Free Immersion upside down coming up was my favorite of today.

All in all a great outdoor session! Depth is going great. Equalization power is getting stronger and stronger and the fun factor is very high! I want more!

This is a post by Jorg.

We just came back from a good pool training. We decided to make it an all out monofin training session and it was great fun and we learned a lot!

First we started with a static at 5 meters depth to get a small warming up again. I started out and was very glad that on the first dive I made it relatively easy to 2 minutes and I was pretty amazed about this time, because I expected it to be much less. And once in a while Sanne does something amazing as well and he did a nice 3:05 minutes static at 5 meters depth and made it look awfully easy. I’m wondering what he can reach when he starts to train seriously again.

Testing the 3 monofins on the left

After the good warmup it was time for monofinning. We brought our collection of 3 monofins and as they ranged from bad to good monofins we decided to test them out and see what the real difference is between each of them. In the end it was pretty clear that the most expensive and heaviest one was the best. For the first time in my life I did a 50 meters as if it was a 25 meters. Really no problem with it at all. Even with such a bad technique as I have.

Sanne and I continued using the monofins  for some time and I think that if we keep using them for the next months maybe something nice will come out of it. Who knows!

After the monofinning I decided to do a quick dynamic without fins, because my feet were already hurting too much from the monofin work. I still managed to do a very easy 1,5 laps and I got my first contraction on the way up. Really have to work on my co2 tolerance, that’s for sure! We will see how it goes tomorrow when we go into the deep with our bifins again.

This is a post by Sanne.

Sandi Bitenc

First and foremost I’d like to say that Sandi Bitenc earns great respect from me and any freediver…actually. Last weekend he pulled off the amazing 24 hour marathon dynamic freediving for the Guinness book of World Records. Jorg and I set out to meet up with him for the event and we would do some reporting from the event. But what started as a somewhat small reporting schedule, soon grew into a (almost) 24 hour live stream of footage from the event.

Sanne & Jorg

How we did all this…
Jorg and I were at a small cafe near the pool (with some free wifi of course ) preparing for the event and it popped into our minds that we had the opportunity to use live-streaming from a mobile phone to do the coverage report. As these services have been growing lately, we agreed to just go for it and see where it would go. We started reporting with the idea of just streaming the every hour the first few hours, half-way through and at the end. But it was so much fun to do and the reactions coming in from the freediving community made that we went for the coverage of the whole event.

Left writing, middle video streams, right video editing, front live stream phone

We had a seperate office from the swimming pool for our headquarters to be setup. In this office Sandi had setup the streams of 4 camera’s from each end of the pool, the whole lane and a screen featuring his progress. He needed this to record all his actions for the Guinness committee, so they can verify his record and thus this will take some time for them to go through . In this office along side the pool we had the perfect overview of all things happening and so we agreed to go for full coverage. Every hour I picked up the mobile phone and Jorg walked with me for the comments on what the progress of Sandi’s attempt was at that time. In between the hours we streamed the view of his total progress from the screen. This left us with just enough time for Jorg to update the shark-freediving blog and for me to shoot photo and video material to edit, mount and upload to youtube in between the hourly reports. As we progressed into the night, at some point we took turns in the reporting alongside the pool, as one of us took a small sleep, the other could report the event. In all we both did not get more sleep than 1 hour and 20 minutes maybe…but that’s worth it!

Hardcore Sleeping

Final 6 hours
The last 6 hours of the event Jorg had to be the formal witness for the event and could not walk alongside the pool anymore, so I walked the camera around and commented where I could, returning to Jorg for his comments and to relay the messages from the freedivers watching the live stream. Seeing all the responses and Sandi receiving all the good luck wishes and congratulations was great to be a part of.

From a freediver point of view to get a real good impression what Sandi was doing, I joined him in the pool to do a few dynamic laps with him in the lane next to him. I mounted the GoPro camera on my head and started freediving with him…. It’s just an grueling schedule what he was doing. To be honest after six lanes I would have to say I was getting short on breath, of course I was using bi-fins and not all to streamlines, but this is really intense and deserves my greatest respect! What an athlete!

To keep awake we've got our own branded energy drinks!

Difficulties
Of course we had some difficulties as it was our first ever live reporting event. Sometimes the sound would drop from the live feed, or the feed would stutter…and of course this would happen on the most important moments So for the final hour we really put all our efforts in to show you what we were experiencing and for the viewers to see the final laps from the event!

Concluding
Apart from the small problems, we had a great time reporting and we do hope everybody who’d joined us liked the live-coverage as much as we enjoyed the event.

close-up of HTC TytnII phone record 1 of the 4 live streams

Jorg and I congratulate Sandi on the very impressive performance and would also like to thank him for having us over and taking good care of us, even though he was in there doing the dynamics he really thought this thing through, organized it into detail and thus making it an awesome event with an even more awesome result! 51,1 km’s > 1022 laps in a 50 meter pool… Hard to grasp, but a stunning world record!

To find all ins and outs about the event and our stories during the live event, check out http://www.shark-freediving

This is a post by Jorg.

My not so good friend mister Co2

In the last weeks Sanne and I did some tests to see where I’m standing and how to continue with training. The big thing that came out during researching this, is that I’ve got a pretty low Co2 tolerance. So, I think I will dedicate some time to train my Co2 tolerance and increase it. I’ve reserved 3 sport of around 20 minutes in my schedule per week to do this, so hopefully in a few weeks I will notice a difference while freediving.

Today I started with the first exercise. I was going to do 8 breath-holds of the same time with between them one breath of recovery. As I had no idea with which time to start, I took the beautiful number 40 and set the timer to 40 seconds. After 3 holds it became clear this was a little bit too low, but I would continue it anyway, to see where I would end. The last hold still felt good and instead of holding it for 40 seconds I took it to 1:30 minutes.

Conclusion was that the exercise is good, but that I really need to up the time. Next time I’ll do the same schedule but this time with 50 second breath-holds.

Anybody else has some good ideas on how to improve my co2 tolerance? Let me know in the comments.

This is a post by Jorg.

That was a good freediving session! Today we went for some outdoor freediving in Panheel. Weather wasn’t looking to promising when entering the water, but fortunately it stayed okay. The wind was pretty hard and there were even small waves in the lake!

Still, the visibility stayed pretty good and the first dives at 10 meter felt good. So we swam the long road again to the 23 meter buoy. Sanne was going to try to do some dives with his eyes closed and I planned to do a constant weight dive, competition style, to feel how my legs were holding up.

First dives went by pretty easy. Visibility at the bottom was even better then the last time! If the sun was shining you could lay down on a perfect beach down there. Instead we managed to do some bottom statics of around 10-15 seconds before coming up. Truly showing to each other that it’s time to go deeper again.

My last dive to the bottom was going to be an constant weight dive. Sanne counted from 2 minutes to official top and after +16 seconds I was down. Did a few kicks to around 8-10 meters and after that the freefall. I felt pretty perfect. No problems what so ever, but that was to be expected. At the bottom I did a shitty turn, totally not using swing momentum for turning. The way back up began!

First few kicks felt good, were it normally would start to fill with lactic acid, now it didn’t, probably due to the big freefall. But even after some more kicks, the legs stayed okay. They felt a little tired, but for sure not pumped up like the old days, where after a few meters of kicking they would be useless and I had to finish the swim by armstrokes alone.

After analyzing the dive it’s clear that equalizing isn’t the problem as is the o2. My problem is the low tolerance of Co2, but that’s probably the easiest part of getting used; just doing a lot freediving will change this big time already.

Next was FRC time, or in plain English diving with neutral lungs. You first breath in, and then you let yourself relax, including your lungs. So you exhale some air and your lungs are half full now and you dive down. Equalizing in this way is much more difficult, but it trains you big time! We both did 2 FRC dives. I got to 14 meters or something like that. Felt pretty good, without pushing.

We ended the dives with some no fins dives at the 10 meter buoy. Damn, it’s hard to have a good technique in this one. Duckdive was shit, first strokes and kicks were shit, everything felt like shit. But it was fun to do anyway! Practice makes perfect, so soon I will be trubridging my way down!

In total we stayed in the water for 90 minutes and it felt great again. Next on the agenda: making a buoy so we can start training with a lanyard and increase the depth 3 meters more until we feel comfortable doing statics at that depth as well.