Congratulations to Sanne! He turns 27 today, so almost turning into an old grey man with a long beard.

Have a good day!

A good day to look back what you accomplished in the last year… and especially what you want to do for the coming year.

Good news for all freedivers in the region Eindhoven. We made some constructive deals with swimming pool the Tongelreep which will be a first step for other swimming pools to follow in their footsteps. Since 1998 the Tongelreep has been the place for me and a lot of other freedivers for their regular trainings, competitions and even world records. In all these years I had close contact with all the staff about what exactly we were doing underwater. Every time we had to explain again why it wasn’t dangerous when you know what you’re doing. We almost had to cancel our national championship competition on the day itself, because of the unawareness of the personal and wrong ideas they had about the sport. In all these years I tried to make some deals with the pool so we could freedive and do our thing without every time explaining what was going on, or renting the complete pool to ourselves.

Recently we made a big breakthrough that we are very happy with. The Tongelreep had in mind to forbid freediving all together in their pools (of course not when you rent completely the pool, but we can’t do that always). So we had to make some clear steps to prevent that from happening. After some good talks with the staff, and explanation about freediving education, safety and many other aspects we have now a clear deal with them.

From now on in general it’s forbidden to freedive in the Tongelreep, which we are very okay with, because more and more people are practicing this sport without any education and understanding of the possible dangers of the sport if practiced un-educated. We got some hours from the Tongelreep were they allow freedivers to do their thing, so that all freediving activities during the recreational hours will be concentrated together. On Tuesdays and Fridays between 21:00 and 22:00 certified freedivers of AIDA and the NFDB can come do their freediving training in the pool. Most of the time this mean that we can use 1 lane of the excellent 50 meter pool to do dynamic. Serious static training is not really possible, but for us also not a must.

If in the future the number of freedivers will grow to a pretty big group, we got some other options ready to use the swimming pool and extend the water time extensively. So hopefully in the coming months the group will grow to such a number that we can take the next step. And hereby we welcome all certified freedivers to come freedive in the Tongelreep. Even the non certified freedivers are welcome, which we will provide with a very interesting education program for a very special price. If you got any questions about this then let us know so that we can try to answer them.

In the last two weeks our ideas and trainings methods were confirmed by some excellent performances by Sanne. This shows that we definitely took the right road and I’m fully convinced of what the future may hold for Sanne and some possible new Shark blood.

First of all, before we disclose anything about the training techniques, it’s important to know that we had a clear definition of what a competition freediver should be like. Too many times we see freedivers who are waiting for their lucky day, hoping that everything fits correctly and really depending on so many factors before they ‘believe’ that they can do what they want to do. Another factor which clearly gives troubles to some are the immense long trainings and long warm-ups needed before they can pull of a good performance.

So the whole idea is to create an all-round freediver who can compete in all disciplines and can ALWAYS come close to his best performances with a minimum amount of preparation time.

To give an example; if you look at Sanne at a competition he’s relaxing and waiting for his official top, just chatting with some other people, enjoying the surroundings. 15-20 minutes before his time he puts on his freediving gear and slowly walks to the performance zone. He arrives 3 minutes before official top at the place to be and presents himself to the judges and sits down on the side of the pool. 2 minutes before he starts his breathing pattern and around 30 seconds before his start he drops into the water, waits a little, last breath and there he goes.

The beauty of it all is that what he does in competition he can do every week, without warming up. The competition results are already done many times in training, so we know for a fact what his body is capable of and he just does what he does every week. Put him in any pool and he’ll always be capable of going to at least 80-90% of his maximum performance with no warming up. Due to hard work he can trust his body and that gives confidence!

We disclose some more details in part 2 of our training methods.

After a good performance at Dordtdive 2006 last week, this week in Huy was the next challenge in showing a constant performance curve. So the goals for this competition were the same as last week; 5:15 static and a 110m+ in dynamic with fins.

The static performance was pretty easy and felt quite good, although I couldn’t get my mind totally relaxed. As agreed with my coach Jorg, I got my taps at the times we discussed in training. I surfaced clean after 5 minutes and 16 seconds and I received the white card from the jury, meaning an approved performance.

In between the static and dynamic performance was about 2 hours resting time. My coach thought I had to start in 1st lane, but as we both saw somebody else sitting on the edge of the pool, we took my dynamic to the 2nd lane. The shallow part of the pool made my turning slightly difficult as I didn’t want to make the mistake of surfacing a fin or bodypart. Swimming towards the 125m and surfacing clean, waiting for the white card from my judge…and the performance is my new personal record!

As the competition was a Belgian Cup, us dutch couldn’t compete for the overall ranking price, but my position would have been first in overall ranking. I received a silver medal for my static performance and a gold medal for the dynamic performance.

Overall two good competitions with good performances made myself, my coach and my support pleased and curious about future performances as this is the benchmark we’re going to be working from…

Link: Movie clip 125m

Dordtdive being one of the leading events in the Netherlands, turned out to be succesful for me. With the goals already set before the competition, I was on a mission to perform my set goals. I had to do a static of 5:15 and a dynamic of 110m or more. The performances on both disciplines exceeded the set goals, doing a static of 5:20 and a dynamic with fins of 120m.

With these performances I set new personal records in competition, previous bests were 5:13 and 109m in Heemstede last month. Not only did I set new personal records, it turned out to be enough to take 3rd place in the competition, succesfully ending a good competition.

Next Sunday I will be at the competition in Huy, hoping to set the mark a little higher…

Links:
Video-clip 120m DYN
Dordtdive 2006
Freedive Central Dordtdive Event