3, (Radio) 2, 1, Dive Day!

It's now less than 24 hours before the 100ft Freedive Challenge for the MS Society and boy, have I been busy!

Tonight, I had the opportunity to talk about freediving and the 100ft Freedive Challenge on Radio 2 - the most popular radio station in the UK! I felt a little underqualified, having taken up freediving only 5 months ago. However, Matt, the presenter, explained that what they are looking for is enthusiasm for the sport - and I have that in spades! I hope that this came across and that I was able to express something of the freedom and beauty of freediving. Huge thanks to everyone who listened and contacted me to express their support. If you weren't able to listen live, you can listen to it here:



Graceonradio2 by samdive

If you're here because you listened to it, then thank you for visiting! This blog is a record of my training over the last 5 months as I have been preparing for the '100ft Freedive Challenge for the MS Society'. You can catch up with my journey to this point, less than one day before the dive, and learn loads about freediving from a beginner's point of view. If you're interested in learning to freedive, you can visit the websites of Saltfree and London Freediving, the clubs with which I train, or you can find a full list of clubs at the British Freediving Association website. Do it - you'll be amazed at what you can achieve!

Aside from writing frantic notes before the radio interview and texting pretty much everyone in my address book, I have been getting creative with my glue and marker pens to create some posters to put up around NDAC (because you're never too old for art and crafts). I also bought some disposable underwater cameras so that we can all take some silly photographs for the blog and to send to the MS Society fundraising team, who kindly telephoned me today to wish me good luck.

Mum can't make it to Wales for the freedive, but we spoke this evening and she said she'd be thinking of me and will have her fingers crossed. I have strict instructions to text her afterwards!

Saltfree are also organising a "Deepest Bikini Freedive at NDAC" competition this weekend - cross-dressing not only permitted, but encouraged! For every person that enters the competition, Saltfree will donate £5 to the MS Society. My amazing instructress, Hannah, has agreed to match whatever we raise as she sadly can't be there to watch. I'll also be missing my coach Mark, who is abroad, but I know both he and Hannah will be rooting for me :). I have a small suitcase-load of bikinis guys, so there will be no backing out with lame excuses!

It would be great if we could meet the £1000 target! This money will help the MS Society continue to fund research into treatments/a cure for MS and to provide specialist MS nurses - we've currently raised £750 and we're soooooo close! If you'd like to donate you can:

• visit my JustGiving page or



• text the code AEJE82 and the amount you want to donate, e.g. £7, to 70070

Thank you to everyone who has donated already!

Rather than dwelling on the fact that 100ft is approximately equivalent to a ten storey building, or 6 London buses stacked on top of one another, I will tonight be doing my breathing exercises and visualising the dive, step by tiny step.

There will be plenty of time to reflect on the last 5 months. I also have many people to thank, including the thousands of people who have visited this blog, and I will do so after the dive. I'm excited to see many of my freediving friends, who have given me so much support, in the morning. But right now I'm going to sleep, dreaming of the deep green and the challenge ahead...

Freediving, Graphs and Geekery

On Sunday night I went to a book club (don't laugh). I thought that this was a
pretty geeky evening. However, upon checking my emails I was relieved to discover that at least one other person was engaged in an equally geeky activity. Tim had lent me his heart rate monitor during our last DNF training session and on Sunday evening I received an email attaching the graphs he’d created on his computer.

If you read the previous post, you’ll know that last week at London Freedivers I joined Tim and Nick in their punishing (at least for me) DNF training. The graph below shows my heart rate over the first exercise, which involved 10 repeats of 33m DNF, leaving every 1min 30seconds. This means that the slower you swim the length (helping you to relax and conserve energy) the less time you have to recover before the next length.

Graph 1 - CO2 DNF Table

The next graph is a DNF swim of about 50m, which I did with at the start of the session. I had contractions quite early and came up 4 strokes after the first contraction.

Graph 2 - 50m DNF

Unfortunately, I don’t know the exact time I started and ended the dive, so it’s a little bit difficult to draw conclusions. Bearing this in mind, I find the following points most interesting:

1. As you can see, my heart rate drops by 70bpm during the dive! It’s very cool to be able to see the effect of the dive reflex in pictorial form. If I remember correctly, I had a 3 minute breathe-up before the dive.
2. The graph shows that my heart rate is lower at the beginning of the breathe-up than it is at the end! This is at odds with what I would expect; I’d expect a gradual lowering of heart rate during the breathe-up and then a slight peak caused by stress immediately before immersion. It looks like I need to review what I’m doing for my breathe-up.
3. My heart-rate is elevated before the breathe-up even begins. I just measured my resting heart rate on the inside of my wrist sitting in the café and its 69bpm. Even this seems a bit high – I’m going to blame it on my lack of aerobic fitness (or on the hottie sitting at the next table reading Hemingway). Assuming immersion occurs just before 03:20, my heart rate is nearing 90bpm at the start of the breathe-up and it rises to 115bpm immediately prior to immersion.
4. Assuming (again) that I end the dive at approximately 03:21:20, there is a subsequent leap in heart-rate within a very short space of time – surely this can’t be good for you?!

OK, I have to rush off to training at London Freediving now! Harry's down in London doing a placement at the London Diving Centre and will be training with us tonight :). If anyone has any comments on the graphs, I would love to hear them...

Go Great Britain! and "No Fins? No Fear."

Go Great Britain!

Mike Board, Dave King, Georgina Miller, Liv Philip, Sara Campbell, Dave Kent, Ed Wardle and David Tranfield are the British athletes who will be competing at the AIDA Individual Depth World Championships, which is taking place in Kalamata, Greece from 15th - 25th September 2011.

The very best of luck to all of the GB athletes! Two UK records were broken at the 4th Mediterranean World Cup, which took place in Kalamata on 12th-14th September, so I expect that there will be some fantastic performances at the World Championships too!

We'll of course also be cheering on our freediving friends from all over the world! A full list of athletes competing can be found here. For those following online, there are some exciting action shots of the World Championships 2011 taken by Fred Buyle here. By perfect and beautiful contrast, Daan's captured some thoughtful portraits of freediving athletes from all over the world on his blog here.

As for me, pool training for the 100ft Freedive Challenge for the MS Society continues...and I seem to have inadvertently enrolled myself on a no-fins Training Schedule.

No fins is the discipline that I worried I might have a lot trouble with. Although I like swimming, there's no hiding that from a technical point of view I'm rubbish; I haven't been to a swimming lesson since I was at primary school. However, I'd surprised myself with a 15m CNF repeats at NDAC and decided to see what I could manage in the pool. I did a few lengths trying to copy the right technique and asked for some tips from Daan, which got me to 50m. I then decided to just see how far I could swim and made 70m, which was a bit of a surprise!

I was dimly aware that Tim, Nick and Ed were doing some no-fins exercises at London Freedivers and asked to join them at the next session, thinking that I might learn more that way. What I didn't realise was that they had recently started out on a Training Schedule. Note the upper case - it's relevant.

I soon realised that this wasn't just experimenting with a few exercises, this was a proper Training Plan of 12 weeks, with "easy", medium and hard targets. It has so far involved pain. Pain and comradeship, though, which makes it more fun!

One of the things I like most about training with Tim is that he assumes I'll be able to achieve anything I set out to do. He's also a great teacher, knowing when to encourage, when to give pointers, when to bribe me with Green and Blacks' Maya Gold chocolate and when to tell me to shut up and grow a pair.

This is fortuntate, because when he told me that the first exercise was 10 DNF repeats of 33m leaving every 1 and a half minutes, I was pretty sure I wouldn't get past length number two. Never mind being horribly aware of the fact that everyone else in the group had done well over 100m DNF and was much better than me.

The first week I tried this exercise, I couldn't manage ten repeats despite having lots of encouragement from everyone. I had to have a break and missed out length number 4. The week after I missed out half of length 5. For some reason the middle lengths, lengths 4, 5 and 6 are the hardest, physically and psychologically, especially when you start having contractions after just a couple of strokes. The last two sessions I managed all ten repeats - it's really motivating to see the difference that even a few weeks of training can make!

We've also been doing some other exercises to improve stroke technique, such as lengths using arms only and swimming exercises using just one leg. This is quite funny to watch; I was genuinely shocked by the difference between the strong kick of my right leg and the ineffective flailing of my left. I've struggled to get my weighting right but have almost got it sorted. Even though it's not quite perfect, the number of strokes I use for each DNF length has decreased and the time it takes me has decreased by about 10 seconds.

I haven't set any targets but I'm looking forward to seeing how much I can improve over the coming weeks.

The 100ft Freedive Challenge is approaching alarmingly quickly and although I can't do any CWT training between now and the day of the 100ft dive, my pool training is helping me to remain positive and focused. The MS Society have been helping me out with fundraising for the Challenge and have even been following the blog! I've been really touched by the donations that have been made by my Mum's colleagues at Durston House School and I know that Mum has been too - thank you!

Mum's been completely supportive of my decision to raise money for the MS Society but highly disapproving of the means by which I've chosen to do so (she suggested sponsored knitting instead). However, I've noticed that Mum's initial refusal to talk about freediving (on the basis that I was going to end up dead - it's the only time in my whole life I've ever heard her swear) has recently transformed into a kind of wary acceptance. She says she's now enjoying my blog - "Hi there" if you're reading, Mum!



My Yia Yia (Greek for grandmother), Mum and Me.

In which I consider a career change, have a dress rehearsal and make friends with some perch.

This week I've been busy preparing for the start of my Bar Course; doing work experience, trying (and failing) to do some revision and painstakingly sorting out the mounds of paper balanced precariously on my desk.

I've spent 1 year studying, 1 and a half years working and 6 months interning in order to put myself in a position to take the Bar Course. As I marked the start date of the course on my new academic calendar, I suddenly realised that this halcyon summer of freediving will soon be drawing to a close. After The 100ft Freedive Challenge, I won't be able to train at Crystal Freedivers because I will need the time to study. Similarly, I can't be traveling to Wales every month for Saltfree meets at NDAC.

I was feeling a bit down about this when an email pinged into my inbox... 'Freedivers Required for UK Film Shoot at Pinewood Studios'. "What the hell", I thought. It can't hurt to consider an alternative career as a freediving stunt double! So I've applied. I'll let you all know what happens!

Sunday was the last scheduled Saltfree meet before the 100ft Freedive Challenge on 2 October and the last chance for me to do any Constant Weight training. It was a beautiful, if cold, day on the platform and it was great to see Hannah instructing some new AIDA** divers. Here they are doing their stretching... and at the end of the course! Harry, Tim, and Ryan were the regular Saltfree-ers in attendance and Chris joined us from Up North for his first trip to NDAC. Here's Chris with his home-made freediving rig, which looks to me to be extremely saleable! Ryan said that he doesn't have any pictures of himself underwater. My camera's rubbbish but I took a few snaps. They're not great, but they do convey the "cool as f***" demeanor that Ryan has ascending from a freedive, no matter the depth (and he's hitting some pretty impressive depths). Come to think of it, he maintains this demeanor above the water as well... When he wasn't being a boy racer... Harry was working on his no-fins, which is already very good...

On Tim's advice, I did a full "dress rehearsal" of the dive; countdown, surface protocol, everything. The main thing that was different was having to grab a tag at the bottom of the line. The tag is attached to a carabiner with an elastic band, and the carabiner is clipped over the rope. We sent the tag down the line, holding the rope to feel the vibrations as it fell to the bottom. It seemed to take ages to get to the bottom plate, which didn't help my anxiety. I'd already been in the water a while and it was quite cold, so I was an interesting shade of blue before I even started the breathe-up!

The "dress rehearsal" went mostly to plan, except:
- with all the nerves, my duck dive left much to be desired;
- my turns at the bottom are still rubbish, when I remember to grab the rope at all - thankfully there's no-one down there to see; and
- most amusingly, I had a bit of a struggle trying to snap the elastic band which releases the tag! It was really stretchy and while wrestling with the damn thing I was giggling and thinking how funny it would be to do all this training, just to be beaten by a bit of rubber!

It wasn't really a full dress rehearsal, though, as I only yesterday received my MS Society running vest, which I'll wear over my wetsuit on the day. Here it is - what do you think?!



I've also received balloons, stickers, and posters and I'm fully intending on decorating the pontoon in bright orange on 1 October!

Since it was a cold day most of us were finished early. I think Tim started mentioning a burger even before lunchtime, although I did manage to persuade him to dive the bus, which was sunk only a couple of weeks ago. As it was Chris' first time at NDAC I couldn't let him get out of the water without showing him some of the attractions in the lake. Like me, his favourite were the containers and tubes... here he is coming out of one of the tubes...


I decided to take a quick video of the containers and tube, and was delighted to see a couple of large perch handing around the end of the container, who posed beautifully for the camera. Here they are showing off their green-gold colours.











40 minutes later, we were both exhausted, and headed up to the picnic tables, where we found the others. One of whom had nodded off...
It's a bit scary to think that I've done my last constant weight training session before the 100ft dive. I can't wait for the big day to come around and am pouring all my effort into fundraising as much as I can in the next couple of weeks. If you meant to donate but it slipped your mind, do it now! Theres a blue donations box in the top right hand corner of the blog which will take you to my Just Giving page. Thanks! Right, I'm off to training at Crystal Palace now, expect another update on Friday :).

Mermaid in Mytelini

I had to make a rather shamefaced confession to Mark at training on Thursday...

Mark obviously noticed that I have attended pretty much every training session and meet since the '100ft Freedive Challenge' began in May, since a couple of weeks ago he decided that it was time to have a few words with me about the importance of rest. Rest is important in any sport, including freediving, and actually helps to improve performance as well as reducing the risk of physical and mental "burn-out". Thing is, I'm not very good at it. I can't seem to get my head around the fact (and it is a fact) that improvements can be made by anything other than hard graft.

Mark suggested that an upcoming trip to Greece with relatives would be the ideal opportunity to take a break from apnea training, and I agreed. However, as the date of departure drew closer, the thought of being in the blue, warm Mediterranean without my monofin was keeping me up at night. I bubblewrapped my monofin, borrowed a good fin bag and flew to Mytelini...

I did rest in Mytelini.

I watched the sun come up...

Gazed on beautiful views...

Read lots of books...Blood and Sand by the BBC's Security Correspondent, Frank Gardener; Empire of the Summer Sun by S.C. Gwynne about the rise and fall of the Comanche Indians; The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, for about the 10th time; and the rather less exciting Contract Law by Ewan McKendrick.

And ate lots of delicious Greek food. Yum.

However, I also did some freediving! I joined Lesvos SCUBA, and we made two trips to the waters surrounding an island that lies just off Petra. Despite the Mediterranean being sadly overfished, the underwater landscape was stunning. As I was breathing up through my snorkel, I watched the shoals of black fish congregating above the pinnacles. I spiralled down the pinnacles, which were studded with black sponges and red starfish, and led down to a mosaic of huge slabs of rock. Following their dramatic countours to the sandy sea bed, I swam around the patches of sea-grass, watching the fish darting in and out and wiggling my fingers at the clams to make them snap shut. Lost in the experience, a few light contractions reminded me that I couldn't stay forever, so I kicked a few times before drifting slowly to the surface, watching the sun's rays flicker through the blue water...

I know some people who feel that this is the only kind of freediving worth doing, and who cannot fathom why anyone would spend time lying motionless in a pool or swimming up and down a line. It was certainly very different from static or line diving, but the experiences were so different that I don't think they can be usefully compared. I can't imagine giving up either. The freediving I did in Mytelini was a rest in one sense, since it allowed me to freedive simply for the joy of exploring the underwater landscape, without concentrating on reaching a target, or improving my performance.

You can't keep me away from training for long though, and I was back at the pool a couple of hours after my flight landed, sheepishly confessing to Mark that I hadn't taken his good advice. "I knew you wouldn't be able to do it", he laughed, shaking his head at me! Sorry Mark!

The pool session was fantastic - I've joined Tim and Nick's punishing dynamic no fins training schedule and am just about managing to keep up - more on this later... I'm off to Saltfree tomorrow and I'm really motivated to try and perfect the 100ft dive, since this is likely to be my last session before the challenge.

See some of you tomorrow - hope you are all enjoying the end of the summer :).