The Stream
Posted By Paul Kotik on 11 September 2006
The confession by one of the world's top freedivers was... disturbing.
"I hate doing static apnea", he muttered. " Hate it."
Didn't seem to hate being a static apnea record holder, though. "Noo o o ...", he conceded. "That part was pretty good. It was the getting there I didn't like at all. It was very painful."
Hates doing static apnea. Freediving is all about holding your breath, isn't it? Well, no, not all about it. There's more to freediving than just not breathing. There's the love-dance with the pressure gradient, the orchestration of limbs and torso, the visual riot of the brimming reef and the formless mystery of the blue water. Apnea is - what is it? The key to all this? A means to these greater ends? If so, then maybe a bit of resentment is not unhealthy. Seen that way apnea's an obstacle in the way of reward.
A perfectly good woman in a sleek Yamamoto suit floats on her back in the shallow end of a resort swimming pool. Another, similarly garbed, stands by her in the waist-deep water and murmurs cryptic numbers, staring at a stopwatch. The vacationers lounging by the pool wear bikinis and Speedos. It's very, very hot. The woman floating on her back has her neoprene hood on.
An imperceptible effort rolls her over onto her stomach. The companion gently steadys her with a hand to the small of her back. Her face is in the water. It's what some call the Dead Man's Float. Time passes. One of the sunbathers sips his Margarita, squints at the motionless freedivers and nods. "Static apnea", he rules. "They call it static apnea." His girlfriend, on the lounger next to his, shrugs and delicately adjusts the filaments holding her suit top in place.
Static apnea is all about holding your breath. For time. As long as you can, if the competition flag is up. How long can you hold your breath? And why would you?
The woman floating prone in the water is by all appearances motionless. Nothing moves but the digits on the stopwatch face.
From her point of view, inside her head, it's not quite like that. Her apnea is something that flows by her, on her, through her. Sort of like, as if - as if she were in a kind of wind tunnel. It starts up when she takes her peak breath and goes face down in the water. Her eyes are closed. The apnea tunnel powers on and the Stream begins to flow. She doesn't feel it on her body, though she does sense, sort of incidentally, that her body is weightless and has no particular orientation in space. It could be spinning, could be rotating - irrelevant. It's her consciousness, her very being that's in the Stream.
- Bookmark with :
- what are these?
