Aftermath

I thought it time to summarise the events of the past week and plans for the rest of the year.

The Wellington Winter Champs kicked off on the coldest weekend of the year so far in Wellington. There was snow falling in the northern suburbs, and it just doesn't snow in Wellington. Luckily the weather didn't affect the arrival of our many officials joining us from around the world: Grant Graves our A-level judge from Los Angeles, Walter Steyn our women's judge from Canberra, Fran Rose a judge from Auckland, Gavin came up from Christchurch with his fancy camera to film us and of course a couple of competitors from Auckland.

I decided to have a go at the DNF record straight up. I always dive better on the first day after a break. I didn't expect to suffer from nerves so much and have had the great realisation that I don't normally have much at stake in competitions. Normally our competitions don't have other women in them and I just have to deal with me competing against me, which should always be the way anyway - I always get into trouble as soon as I start to worry about what other people are doing, and this was now the case as I was attempting to break someone else's world record, despite having done it so many times in training in preparation, to be sure to be able to achieve it even on a bad day and not psych myself out. The dive was generally reminiscent of doing speeches at school in my early teens when my thighs would shake uncontrollably whether I felt really nervous or not. I was a little disappointed as usually I feel nerves in my stomach, which is much better for freediving as you just have a lot of toilet visits prior, the odd vomit (it's only happened once) and then go and just get over it, but when it's in your legs there's not a lot you can do about it. My pulse rate was also quite a lot higher than usual. I've decided to try to simulate highly stressful situations at training. I have been trying to not worry too much about things, for example I'll finish my conversation and just take a breath and go but maybe this is too relaxed, maybe I can start to think about doing pbs more and always film the dive and have countdowns, just to put a bit more pressure on myself. If anyone else has any great ideas on how to stress me out prior to diving please feel free to leave a comment.

My build up to a competition dive consists of:

• eating something decent about 90 mins before (reduces the effects of the thigh shaking)
• about 15 mins of body stretching followed by a single lung stretch, usually followed by a huge head rush
• hop in the water about 10 mins before (especially important as I tend to overheat prior)
• visualise dive, especially those areas I struggle with: good push offs, even, calm & relaxed strokes, keep focus, hook breath at end, etc
• have all gear on and ready to go about 2 mins out
• get buddy to give me a 40s call as I need to start my inhale on or slightly before 30s to ensure a full breath

I wear 4kg of lead on my neck and 4kg on my waist. This keeps me nice and level in the water through my dive. I am currently getting a bit buoyant again and will look at playing around with my buoyancy again over the next month or so to try to perfect it again.

The Orca Apex 2 is brilliant for no fins. It is a mixed thickness wetsuit with most of the buoyancy through the chest area where is it easily controlled with lead around the neck and wasit, and of course the more lead you wear the more momentum you'll have. It is smooth so really fast in the water and super flexible so no issues with holding your arms out in front. It also has a fantastic neck seal so doesn't catch water while swimming with both arms out in front.

My dynamic has plenty of room for improvement. My fin arrived a week prior to the event and is pretty great for me. Read on further in my blog for the full saga (and still no refund from Leaderfins). I have to work on not slipping sideways in it, not losing kicks per length over the course of a long swim (I added the equivalent of 1 kick per 25m over the competition dive), not losing power from my kicks (which is related to the previous comment, but also will come from getting used to wearing a fin and increasing my leg strength), learning to love the fin (rather than hate it, therefore enjoying the dive, which is my main freediving goal), and dealing with lactic (which I just don't get without fins). To do this without fins I focussed on my dive post 100m which meant a lot of long swims (but it worked), so I intend to do the same with the fin.

I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get around to doing a static in competition as I haven't done one all year in competition and I've improved so much from last year! But I'm going to keep working on this as I'm just starting to have great realisations about how to improve now. There will be one more competition in NZ this year so I'll just have to do one then. I've been quite enjoying statics lately so I'd better use this to my advantage - I tend to go through phases with them.

I'm also going to consider doing some fitness work over the next few months (underwater of course) before summer joins us. I pretty much cut this out of my schedule when I pulled everything back mid to late last year. I like to stick to just doing what I enjoy, so I'll see how it goes and not punish myself too much with it all (or get too tired).