Picking Your Brain
Posted By Paul Kotik on 10 July 2006
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The human body has been studied inside and out since the beginning of, well, human bodies and few who read these lines lack appreciation of the the medical arts, or of progress in the related sciences and technologies. If we know of an event, a structure, 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 Krack launched his career as a freediving pioneer , he quickly found out that pioneers don’t get a lot of help from road maps or signs.
Uh, that’s how come they’re pioneers. The same medical and scientific culture which could nonchalantly replace the heart of a living person had precious little to say about apnea diving. Much of the conventional medical wisdom could be summarized thus: No, you can’t do that. It’s impossible. It is beyond the capabilities of the human body.
But… we were doing it, and had been doing it.
As Kirk’s infant 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 (a guy living 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, was certainly one motivator but more importantly, Krack understood that there’s a deep 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. Both are in the business of boldly going where no-one has gone before, and there sure is where to go.
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