Sink Faze: But Seriously...
Posted By Paul Kotik on 2 April 2006
In Association with PFI
Kirk Krack has always placed a heavy emphasis on understanding the freediver’s most important piece of equipment. It isn’t sold by dive shops, or even by Deeper Blue’s online Shop, but one cannot dive without it and, in fact, it’s the only piece of gear one needs. Improvements and upgrades are sometimes available for varying outlays of cash, along with the time and effort required to implement them.
The human body has, of course, been studied inside and out since the beginning of, well, human bodies, and few who are reading these lines lack appreciation of the state of the medical art and progress in the related sciences and technologies. If we know of an event, process or state in the body of a living human being, more than likely we can measure it with terrific precision and even see it – often in real time and non-invasively. Be that as it may, when Kirk launched his career as a pioneering freediver, he quickly found out that pioneers don’t get a lot of help from road maps or signs. That’s how come they’re pioneers. The same medical and scientific culture which could replace the heart of a living person had precious little to say about apnea diving, and much of what it did have to say was at odds with Kirk’s experience and observations, and with the lore passed down to him by his own guides such as Pipin.
As Kirk’s Performance Freediving initiative developed he made heavy and ongoing investments in science, which in the context of a struggling and often impoverished enterprise was nothing less than visionary. It takes a lot of belief and no small courage for a struggling entrepreneur, one often lodging on students’ and colleagues’ sofas, to sink time and money into projects which have no immediate prospect of an economic payoff. Kirk’s own curiosity, the same unquenchable thirst for exploration and adventure which took him from the Saskatchewan prairie to a global oceaneering career, is certainly part of it but more importantly he understood from the beginning that there’s a vital symbiosis between freediving’s vitality as a recreational and competitive sport, on the one hand, and the empty shelf he’d discovered in the great Library of Science.
Freediving needed science, and science needed freediving.
A goodly number of physicians and scientific researchers have, over the years, passed through the Performance Freediving world as clinic students, each adding new knowledge to Kirk’s growing database but also taking away observations that have fueled new academic research and analysis.
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