The Quest for a Personal Best
Pekka,
Good luck with your training! I've written some general thoughts down for you to consider as you progress below 30m.
One of the things I remember Eric Fattah saying was that the depths most conducive to blackouts and sambas was the 35m-50m range. People in the 30-50m range are still working on the best ways to dive (including me), whereas people in the 50+ range have had the experience to learn how to make the decision to "keep on sinking." The depth is significant enough to make "experimentation" dangerous.
Humans are designed to dive to about 40m. That's when our residual lung volume is reached. Sure, we can SURVIVE deeper dives, but many things have to be perfect for it to be possible. When you start pushing things beyond the 35m mark, you aren't used to the pressure, the psychology of going deeper and the relative ease of going deeper once you're that deep. It doesn't take that much more physical effort (except for equalizing) to go from 35m to 50m, you just sink a bit longer. That holds true for deeper depths as well. But your state of mind, your body's state of tension/relaxation, your overall physiology, and technique become crucial.
Eric also has said that for him a dive to 60m or 70m is not much different than a dive to 85m. Things still have to relatively perfect. It is still a deep dive. Many things can go wrong, especially if he "under" prepares for the dive, assuming it will be easy. It is interesting to watch Eric breath-up for a 25m recreational dive. It's the exact same breathe-up as he does for his world record depths... You might want to adopt that same focus for all dives, especially anything below thirty metres. Better to have gas left in the tank if something goes wrong.... Once my mask slipped off at 15m on the ascent from 51m. Luckily, it was a dive within my limits and I had no problems on the surface. Nasty feeling, trying to get the water out of my sinus and nose while trying to re-oxygenate myself!
For me personal bests count when they are done in relative comfort and confidence. My personal best is 51m which I've done four times. After that comes 48.5m, 48.0m, 47.7m, 46m, 46m, 45m (a few times) 45m-40m (15 times), 30-40m (50+ times) (these depths are not in order of how I reached them).
A friend of mine did a pb of 40m for the first time. His recovery on the surface was borderline (no shaking but he was staring off into space and not responding to verbal stimulus). He was happy with his "new pb" and I asked him if he felt confident that he could do it again clean. He paused for a minute and shook his head. Wouldn't you rather have a pb you would be confident that you could repeat on a good day? The next weekend, he changed his technique and reached 40m twice in a row with no problems recovering.
You can never be absolutely sure on any given day that you can do a depth. You can be confident, but I like to leave that doubt open so that I will listen to my body when it's important.
A note on quick gains: At one point my pb was 35m because I was having a heck of a time equalizing at depth. We had a long weekend and that gave me the opportunity to dive for three days in a row. I dove twice to 36m on the first day, then to 37m on the second and then on day 3, I dove to 47.7m. Obviously, I had figured out the equalizing problem. But I got a good dose of lung squeeze and coughed up blood. My rib cage and lungs weren't ready for the depth I had gone to. (I didn't know it at the time). The following weekend I did 46m at Nationals and again had a bad lung squeeze. My air was fine on both dives but had I been a little more nervous or tense, maybe it would have been a problem. Looking back, it was a foolhardy way to progess. I had no inner "gauge" to know if I was doing well on the way down, having skipped 10m. These lung squeezes continued as I hit 48m then 51.7m for the first time. Then I started to recognize that something was wrong. I started over again, with better preparation and training at 35m, 37m, 40m, 42m, 44m, 45m, 48.5m and so on until I made a clean 51.3m dive with no trace of lung squeeze.
I think one of the best things you can do is go for a pb in 2-4m increments. Say next dive you reach 33m, then set out to reach 30-35m several times in the next few weeks if your access to water allows it. Each dive will give you valuable sensory information to evaluate your deeper dives. Use this depth as a warm-up dive for your dives to 35-40m. This will give you a sense of how the day is going. For example, at the Canadian Regionals last weekend, I had a horrible start to my dive with many distractions and a poor breathe-up. When I finally reached 35m, I checked my lungs and general feeling. My lungs were already burning (they usually start to burn at 35m on the way UP!) and I felt awful. So I turned around, perhaps avoiding a blackout. It's a hard thing to do in a competition but I much prefer to give my instincts the benefit of the doubt and live to dive another day.
When I watch Eric dive to extreme depths, I often have to remind myself that he didn't just jump from 60m to 70m then to 80m and then 88m. He has made several hundred dives between 45m and 70m. This has given him a profound sense of his own body. That's something I plan to develop, too.
Hope this doesn't all sound discouraging.
What I want to say is that for the time being, I consider myself a proficient 40m diver, even though my pb is a solid 51m. Even if I make 60m in the next few weeks in preparation for Ibiza, I won't upgrade my "rating" or whatever you want to call it to 50m until I have made several confident dives to 60-50m.
Good luck with your training, trust your instincts and learn how to listen to your own body. Oh yeah, and dive with a buddy who knows what to do if you black out underwater or on the surface. If he or she doesn't know, find out! One of the most important things while training is having confidence in your buddies as you push things.
Oh, and treasure your own personal bests. Who cares how deep the experts are, it's a "personal" best. As you go deeper, they become more rare so celebrate them.
I apologize for the length of this post.
Pete
