I'm back!

I can't believe 5 months has passed since the 100ft Freedive Challenge! It's been a really busy 5 months for me.

I've mostly been reading these...

Studying these...

All in the hope of becoming one of these...

My course of study doesn't finish until June and, if I'm doing things right, I should have at least a few interviews over the summer.

Meanwhile, the rest of Team ** (Harry, Tom D and our instructor Hannah) visited the Only One Apnea Centre in Egypt over New Year for some warm water freediving. I *wish* I could have gone with them - they said they had an amazing time! Here they are:

So...the question is: What now? The freediving season has started and Harry's already been down at Saltfree for depth training.

Well, I feel a bit like I'm back at square one. The kind of hours I spend studying means that I'm i) overeating (mainly Jaffa Cakes) and ii) totally sedentary. I haven't been to training at the pool for about 4 months and I haven't been depth training since the day after the challenge. The less said about my gym (non) attendance, the better.

My initial plan was to continue pool training over the winter and enter my first freediving competition next weekend. - the Great Northern pool competition. My lack of training and the pressure of exams means that I won't be competing. Harry will be competing and I'll be cheering him on!

Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that all these negative thoughts are actually a cunningly disguised Diving Demon. I'm going to have to check with Mark, who is the expert on such matters. Perhaps I could make some progress this season. I have to accept that I will have limited time to train and must therefore make the best use of the time available.

With that in mind, I'm heading down to Saltfree on 14 April for my first depth training session since the challenge.

I've really enjoyed writing this blog. It's even inspired me to start blogging in my 'other life' as a wannabe lawyer - here and here. I've connected with people all over the world, made some new friends, learnt a lot and received incredible support and encouragement. While the 100 ft Freedive Challenge is over, my freediving journey has just begun. I'm going to keep writing the blog but we might have to rename it - any suggestions gratefully received.

I'll sign off with a TED talk by Tanya Streeter on redefining limits in freediving - and in life.

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.

No Tanx - but plenty of Guinness!

I love my training with London Freediving. However, since it only runs once a week, I have been looking around for another training session - training once a week just isn't enough for me right now!

Having conducted a quick internet search, I discovered that NoTanx run a session on Tuesday night at the Kensington Leisure Centre, which is just around the corner from Goldhawk Road, where I currently work.

I emailed Sam Still, who runs the Tuesday session, and he replied inviting me to attend the session and find out more about the NoTanx approach.

In the pool cafe, I was spotted by another NoTanx newbie, Boris, and we had a good chat about how we both got into freediving - he's from Croatia and got into freediving through spearfishing. The NoTanx regulars started arriving shortly after and I was struck both by the friendly welcome they gave us newbies and how well they all seemed to know each other. To my surprise and delight, I was introduced to Simos, a member of NoTanx who has given me a lot of great advice on Deeper Blue!

Sam gave us a safety briefing, a short introduction to the NoTanx approach and informed us of the structure of the club. We were also given some information about the courses offered and learned that the club had organised some incredible holidays, including to Egypt and Iceland! Sam explained that the session was split up into dry exercises, stretching, and then an hour of training in the pool. The emphasis was firmly on relaxation and having fun in the water. Sam told me that I might notice some differences from my training with London Freediving but that I should feel free ask him as many questions as I liked and reassured me that I should do whatever felt best for me.

Sam kindly expressed his support for the 100ft Freedive Challenge and, like many other people I've spoken to, told me that knows someone whose life has been affected by Multiple Sclerosis.

Having changed into my swimsuit (and feeling rather envious of the snazzy NoTanx rash vests sported by the members) I headed to the pool. Us newbies were taken through some basic stretches of the chest and shoulders, and I was deemed “very bendy”, which I can only assume is a good thing!

We all jumped into the pool and began a warm up, which consisted of underwater lengths of the pool in relay. Simos took me under his wing, making sure I understood what I had to do for each exercise and occasionally giving me hints and tips to improve my enjoyment and performance.

The hour simply flew by! Sam’s exercises were really fun and were as challenging as you wanted them to be. He provided lots of encouragement and advice to us newbies. The exercises involved plenty of interaction with your buddies; I particularly liked being towed on a rope while doing static – it was surprisingly relaxing! There was a collaborative, rather than competitive atmosphere, especially considering that there was such a wide ability range within the group. At the end we all did a length of the pool together – and I came up grinning!

To finish the session, we headed to the pub, where I was given perhaps the most memorable piece of advice of the evening… Sipping my diet coke, I looked incredulously over at Simos who was rapidly dispatching a pint of Guinness and ordering a sausage roll and chips. “Didn’t you know?”, he said, raising one eyebrow, “Guinness is excellent for freediving – and you can quote me on that”!

The 100 ft Freedive Challenge Begins!

A couple of days ago the 100 ft Freedive Challenge was just one of those amazing ideas that strike after one too many glasses of wine but promptly depart your brain once the hangover has faded. Thanks mostly to Sam Kirby at SaltFree Divers, it's become official and I have a blog and fundraising page to prove it! Since the euphoric high of putting a plan into action has now worn off, I have decided to make a level-headed assessment of the challenge ahead.

Potential Obstacles include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Having spent the winter replenishing my fat stores, I am currently more "walrus" than "mermaid".


2. I only stopped smoking earlier this afternoon.


3. My Mum, whose own experience of MS is the reason I set myself this challenge, is so convinced that I will end up in a watery grave that she's forbidden me from talking to her about it. Ever.


4. I'm scared. 100ft is a long way down...

Enough of that. Now for the Motivating Factors:

1. I get to train with SaltFree, learn lots about freediving and hopefully dispel some of the myths about it, e.g. it's really really dangerous (see point 3. above).


2. Raising lots of money for the MS Society, whose work I wholeheartedly support.


3. Having something non-law related to talk/think/stress about.

If you'd like to follow my progress, this blog should keep you interested and amused in the run-up to the challenge, which will take place in October. I'll post diary entries, photographs, videos and much more!

I also hope that I can convince you to make a donation to this very worthy cause. No, not the comedy sight of me in a wetsuit - the MS Society! Please donate here: www.justgiving.com/Grace-Capel

For those of you who don't know what freediving is, here's a video that will give you some idea. Obviously it hasn't been filmed on a single dive, but the reason I like it is that it's beautiful and gives a real sense of the feeling of freedom you get.