World Champs

• The Freediving world champs started off yesterday with the dynamic with fins event, which I did not enter in. It was great to be able to just sit back and enjoy watching some of the world´s best perform. There were 4 people swimming at once, every 8 minutes and it was pretty hard to keep track of where everyone was and what they were acheiving. A few guys made 200m, and there were a lot of national records broken by women. The cut off for the womens A final (to get placings 1-8) overall was 150m, which is pretty huge! Men had to do about 175m. There were some pretty scary black outs too - a couple happened at the 150m turn so the safety was holding back while they were turning and then had to dive down and pick them up off the bottom. I think lane A was a bit cursed... The B finals only allow competitors a placing from 9-16, but they could perform better than people in the A final - you get another world ranking at least and another bash at records etc...
  

• The dynamics finals are this evening. They are putting results up on the website almost straight away, so you should have them by about 10:30am Friday in NZ: http://en.wch2007.h2oteam.com/results2/sta-qual/

• I had my statics heat this morning and am pleased to say that I managed to just sneak into the A final in 8th place with a time of 5:22 (people were estimating about 5:45 - 6 mins to make the A final, so I'm pretty relieved). I was a little disappointed with my result (I did some pretty good negatives in the warm up): we had to do our warm on the opposite side of the pool (the whole pool is over 2m deep and there's not much to hold onto except on the long edges) and it took Braedon about 3 mins to swim me over the 25m to my performance zone, so I didn't have much time there to get through my usual need to vomit and settle down, then I missed the 30s call and only got the 20s one, so didn't really feel like I got a full breath before my start. To top it off I got contractions from 2:40, but they really didn't get too bad until after 4:30. I came up fairly clean (little shake). I've spent the past hour blow drying and glueing up my wet suit, which decided to have it's own back from being shoved in a pack for 3 days on the way over, and ripped as I was taking it off in the shower. The tail came right off and then it ripped up along the stitching for about 15cm either way. :( It should hold together ok for tomorrow as long as I'm careful putting it on... We'll alter the warm up a little for tomorrow. I'll be trying for the NZ record, so hopefully I can calm myself down a bit better and get another good night's sleep.