W. Trubridge: Cheating death in the deep

[efattah]

What William Trubridge is describing in the article is something called the 'death wish', which is a well known phenomenon that I first experienced in 2001.

The vast majority of freedivers have not experienced it, and someone who hasn't experienced it will read the article and think it is exaggeration or sensational.

Your unconscious mind seems to set a depth limit for you without your knowledge. If you try a very deep dive on a line, with safety in place, you can gradually get deeper and deeper. As your skill improves, and as your tolerance for pain & discomfort on the ascent improve, you get deeper and deeper.

Eventually, you seem to hit a wall, a depth beyond which your unconscious mind will not allow you to pass. You know that each time you hit that wall, the ascent is unbearably painful, and you barely make it back to the surface. To go beyond it is asking for it. In order to go beyond it, you need the 'death wish,' or the acceptance that going beyond that magic depth could put your safety in serious peril. Generally, the diver needs some sort of tremendous motivation to be able to break over the barrier. And it never changes, each time the diver goes beyond that depth, the death wish is required.

I know of several divers who never were able to conjure the death wish, and thus were never able to go beyond a certain depth. Women in particular seem to have 'more common sense' and thus are less likely to acquire the death wish.

I myself have only conjured the death wish on perhaps six or seven occasions.

[whucash]

Originally Posted by efattah

What William Trubridge is describing in the article is something called the 'death wish', which is a well known phenomenon that I first experienced in 2001.

The vast majority of freedivers have not experienced it, and someone who hasn't experienced it will read the article and think it is exaggeration or sensational.

Your unconscious mind seems to set a depth limit for you without your knowledge. If you try a very deep dive on a line, with safety in place, you can gradually get deeper and deeper. As your skill improves, and as your tolerance for pain & discomfort on the ascent improve, you get deeper and deeper.

Eventually, you seem to hit a wall, a depth beyond which your unconscious mind will not allow you to pass. You know that each time you hit that wall, the ascent is unbearably painful, and you barely make it back to the surface. To go beyond it is asking for it. In order to go beyond it, you need the 'death wish,' or the acceptance that going beyond that magic depth could put your safety in serious peril. Generally, the diver needs some sort of tremendous motivation to be able to break over the barrier. And it never changes, each time the diver goes beyond that depth, the death wish is required.

I know of several divers who never were able to conjure the death wish, and thus were never able to go beyond a certain depth. Women in particular seem to have 'more common sense' and thus are less likely to acquire the death wish.

I myself have only conjured the death wish on perhaps six or seven occasions.

Great post! Thank you for it...it brings so much questions... And its so true..this is why only the best can look into the death's eyes and go deeper... Honestly i hope someday i will face such a decission...

[TRITON]

I can say that I've experienced something similar to the "death wish" that Eric explained.
On some of my dives ,even in some dinamics , when i reach the faze of the dive when ,for example the contractions become VERY strong or in CWT when my lungs are crushed from pressure ,sometimes i say to myself:"what the hell,i'll go that couple of extra meters even if I don't surface......".
So, I totally agree with Eric that sometimes that's the thing you need to surpass your mental limits.

[jome]

So in less mystical terms, to get over the huge co2 slammer and feelings of doom, you need to be well attached to life and have huge motivation. It is also healthy to acknowledge that the element of water brings with it an element of danger that needs to be respected. I get that.

But looking death into they eyes? Come on...Death doesn't have eyes to look at. It's just what happens when you stop living. No glory in it, just shutting down bodily functions. About as glorified as forgetting to fill the gas tank and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere.

[fcallagy]

you can never tell what the press will say. i sent in some stuff to a paper once where i even knew the editor. It pretty much said I was going for gold at the double dip and there was a good chance i would die trying. these seemed like direct quotes from me but all i had sent out was a general press release that had no quotes in it.

[samdive]

interesting article. I kind of understand where William is coming from, and can also relate to Eric's explanation (even as a woman!) - but it would be a lot easier for freediving if people kept such thoughts away from the press.....

Feargus - you gonna go for gold again this year???? (please don't die trying tho)

S

[Mullins]

I expect Will is going to have something to say about this himself, but he told me the whole thanatos angle was a throwaway comment they picked up on and turned into the theme for the entire article. This is the sort of thing journalists often do no matter how careful you are, and it is very hard to stop them.

Eric - calling it a death wish seems a little melodramatic. I think for deep CW dives you need to be willing to put yourself in a physically unpleasant and seemingly (but not really) dangerous position from which there will be no opportunity to bail out. To describe it as a state you have to 'conjure' brings in a whole lot of metaphorical (and metaphysical?) baggage. I'm not saying it's not like this for you or others, but I prefer to view deep diving in simpler terms.

[Haydn]

I agree with Dave. There comes a point in a dive when you are prepared to go deeper and then have to trust yourself to get you back alive and if you fail you rely on your safety team to do their job. I believe the wrongly phrased 'death wish' is that point where you accept you might need a rescue and are prepared to allow it to happen just so you can go deeper. You have faith in your own ability and you exercise that faith every time you dive deep. In the end, your faith turns into a perfect knowledge. You dive deeper still and one day you exceed the depth of your faith, the faith is then transferred to your safety team...you continue the dive to your best ability but after all that you can do, you rely on them. You dont rely on your self.....you resign.... you are at total peace....it no longer matters if you cant get back. But you do get back because you make your deep turn alert and aware, because you are only half way through the dive. You face death in the eyes somewhere near the surface as your air runs out because you turned too late. It doesnt matter, you knew you were turning late and you patiently and calmly approach death......knowing that without your safety team, you wouldnt have turned so deep.....but you have passed your faith to your safety, you will rely on them to do their job and because of them you can dive in total peace and serenity....you build a brotherhood with them. The reliance on them allows the serene dive, and the serene dive makes the dive good, you surface and have perfect protocols.

[NiallFlinn]

They definitely lean a little heavily on the death side of things, but what he says about the thoughts that go through your head during a dive are definitely true. When I set my own PB (a very feeble depth compared to someone like Will Trubridge!) it was in the blue hole near Dahab, and I can still remember the weird mixture of excitement and calm on each dive as negative buoyancy takes over and you count those little marks on the line slipping smoothly past your face, feel your lungs shrinking, the temperature dropping, the light fading to dull blue, and realize that all you would need to do to stop living is nothing, and that it will take a conscious effort to grab the rope, swing your body head up and start the long swim back to the surface. It's a psychological state that I've never experienced before, and one which is certainly compelling. I guess it's the same thing that vertigo sufferers report: not so much a fear of heights as a fear that one might jump.

I suppose that in my other sport, mountain biking, I've been in similar circumstances a few times, where the failure to take a corner well on some high altitude trail would have resulted in death or serious injury, but in those situations, there's never been the time for contemplation, or the same certainty of death, just a blur of events and an instinctive response.

Niall

[efattah]

Originally Posted by Haydn

I agree with Dave. There comes a point in a dive when you are prepared to go deeper and then have to trust yourself to get you back alive and if you fail you rely on your safety team to do their job.

I guess I was going deep in a different era, when there wasn't really a safety team. In those days (1999-2001), there was no such thing as a lanyard, and no scuba divers were used (except during record attempts) since it was thought that the only problem could be a blackout just below the surface. At least that was what everyone told me.

And so when I was coming up from 88m and was in total blackness at 53m, unable to see even the line, unable to kick due to paralyzed legs, unable to think due to narcosis, I just started sinking again and it was clear that there was nothing that was going to save me. No lanyard to save me, no bottom diver. If I did nothing I would just sink into the black abyss at 120m+ and that would be it. My safety freediver was over 100ft above me.

Somehow I made it, but it became clear that going beyond a certain depth required a 'death wish'. At the time, I pushed AIDA for stronger safety regulations, and I boycotted the Ibiza 2001 championship because I felt the safety was inadequate -- still based on problems only happening at the end of the dive. People told me (including AIDA vice president), that if I had problems during deep dives (at depth), then I had 'unique physiological problems that were specific to me', and I should avoid those problems by simply not diving deep (verbatim!)

[ADR]

"death wish" what a load of rubbish and I trust it was media nonsense rather than Will's views that got it that sort of air play. For sure there is an element of submission or letting go in the case of going deep but I think this is more a life wish and a trust in ability than a death wish. If freedivers really had a death wish we would see a lot of deaths. Very easy in a narced state to just keep going or overstay your bottom time. A sub conscious "life wish" is what gets you to turn and head up when it doesn't seem to matter that much when narced at depth. Lets not fall back to the early days of freediving metaphysical mumbo jumbo. I for one prefer the sport to have an image of serious athletes than mystics - my rant!

[Mullins]

Eric - to continue to dive deep knowing that your existing safety system is not equipped to handle the problems you know you are likely to encounter, as per your example above, is reckless. I do not see this attitude as essential or even desirable for deep diving. If you forsee problems on a deep dive, either don't do it or improve the safety. It seems you did both of these things in turn, thankfully.

I'm willing to put myself through a lot of pain and anxiety to dive deep. I am not willing to put myself at extreme risk. Those are two very different things. The term 'death wish' conflates them.

[jome]

Many people seem to consider death as the opposite of life, but I don't think of it like that. Death is simply the very last stages of life, not some kind of "counterlife" or much less some romantic force acting as a personality. Kind of like the opposite of 1 is -1, not 0. Death is 0. It is cold, impersonal, and in it self meaningless. It's not something you can look into to the eye and tell it to "stuff it".

Kind of like water. You cannot fight the water, because it doesn't care, or feel - it just is. If you dive too deep and get hurt, the water or sea didn't do that you, YOU did. I hate it when people say “the sea wasn’t ready for me”, when they mean “I wasn’t ready for the sea”.

At some point life ends for all of us, but there's no reason to be all weird about it. Death is the unimportant end of the life arch, not in it self worth of worship. Life is everything, the only thing. Worth conserving.

For me the whole “mystical side” of freediving is a huge red flag. That’s why I also reacted to this article a little strong (which as we might have guessed is not probably even close to what Will actually said).

To me freediving really is “just diving” just as death is “just dying”. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate diving, or life, on the contrary, these things are very special to me.

I can see where Eric is coming from (maybe). It’s a very different thing to do something as the first in the world, and in those conditions, than to do the same years later in good conditions. In a weird way I kind of agree, the “death wish” probably made the dives possible, giving you such an intense flow experience…But would I be right in guessing it kind of burnt you out too? That's the important difference in diving without the death wish. The aim is what ever you did you can reproduce, even improve. More importantly, you WANT to do it again, not killing your will to dive. There once was a diver that might have used the metaphors of "light side" and "dark side". I'm not saying this is what happened to you, it would be hypocirtical of me to claim I understand what you went through...

But what bothered me in the article and this discussion was the strange glorification of death. Like it was something to seek for or somehow an essential part of the sport. That flirting with death was somehow required, or cool…I don’t think it is.

Like Dave said, bearing extreme physical and mental uncomfort and putting your self in deliberate extreme danger are (to me) two different things. There is a difference in having an accident and asking for one. The kick comes from taking part in a potentially hazardous activity and doing it right, so that it becomes not hazardous. It is true it’s sometimes a fine line, but I really do hope we don’t see more and more people diving with a “death wish”. Of course to the outsider we all probably are “asking for it”, but I think there’s a lot of shades of gray in there.

[Haydn]

The phrase 'at least he died doing what he loved best' , goodness I hope that is never said of me. I dont want to die freediving, I want to live a long rich life and die an old man in my bed.

The way I see it is that either we die and that is the end of everything. Or, we die and its just the beginning of what comes next. It really is a simple either/or question. And we place ourselves in one culture or another and live out our lives.

If there is a God, then it has to be really important to live this life right. We must put our lives in order. Live according to principles outlined in scripture. Look forward to eternity as the greatest adventure.

If there is nothing more. Crumbs, it may be even more important to live this life right. Its all there is. If we can only live for here and now, then I want to make sure I live it right. Live it once, but live it well. Experience the richness and good things of this live and die an old man in my bed.

For me though, freediving helps me feel that there is more. I cant really explain it in words (and they probably dont belong on Will's thread, so I apologise) but when I dive I feel more in touch with hope. We can take a peek through life and deaths windows and wonder what lies beyond.

Its not a wish for death, but an aid to experience the fullness and value of life.

And Jome, for the record, I think death is very important. Certainly a thing to be avoided whilst life can continue, but not neccesarily a thing to be frightened of or resigned to. I hope there is more and live my life accordingly.

[TRITON]

I think we've brought too much phylosophy into this.....
The thing is that we are all individuals and have different thoughts during freediving and everyone has his way of overcoming some boundaries.
At the end all of us WANT to come out of the dive alive and stay as safe as possible.