Firm and Fit
Posted By Nicolas Danan on 20 May 2007
Martin Stepanek is a quiet man until you question him on his favorite subject. Then you find yourself sitting in a Fort Lauderdale bar drinking an insane amount of lemonade while your car gets towed away…but that's another story. I was in Florida for a few days last week, and since Martin had alerted me ahead of his press release to his planned departure from PFI to start is own company, I'd asked to meet him and try to understand the ins and outs of his bold career move.
DB: So, why did you leave PFI?
MS: I started working with PFI because I liked the structured teaching techniques they were using at the time. It wasn’t like “Alright let’s go freediving, I’ll show you some tricks and tips!” PFI was organized like a school, with a big focus on safety. They emphasized physiology so that the student could fully understand the relationships between what was taught in the classroom and what they felt when they were in the water. PFI was successful at giving students the tools to later evolve as better freedivers even after the course.
But as the years went by, I felt that PFI was stagnating. All these things that we dreamed up -Mandy, Kirk and I …that we would teach to people, they weren’t happening. The focus was going somewhere else. This is when I realized that if I wanted things to move my way, I had to take matters in my own hands. Although one could believe that PFI was a collaboration between three people, it wasn’t really happening that way. Kirk had the upper hand in the decision-making process. Even Mandy did not have much to do with it, when Kirk decided on something it was accepted as “PFI decision”.
DB: PFI is behind you now, and this new company, Freediving Instructors and Trainers (FIT) has come to life to carry out your ideas on freediving education and philosophy. So what are those ideas?
MS: I feel that freediving and freedivers are a bit stuck in their ways of thinking about the sport. We are too much introverted. We are complaining that our sport is not growing, not recognized, even though it takes as much effort (even more!) as any other sport that is well-recognized. It is the fruit of our own doing because we keep it so much enclosed. It probably comes from back in the days when Pelizzari and Pipin where thought to be half-dolphin, half-god creatures to be able to accomplish what they did. It made the sport an exclusive club and therefore marginalized it. I believe we should open up freediving to the general public. That is the cornerstone of the Freediving Instructors and Trainers (FIT) philosophy. Freediving is not just a sport - it's a great recreation. It's not all about breaking records, it's about having fun. You do not need to have the best physiology to be able to enjoy it. It is something we are all born with. Whether you like it or not you have the mammalian diving reflex. I also would like to extend to the scuba divers market, which still look at us as the “stuntmen” of the underwater world. There are a couple million of scuba divers and hundreds of millions of snorkelers…snorkelers are freedivers, essentially.
I also would like to introduce to scuba divers how they can benefit from freediving and vice versa. Back in the 1960’s there use to be a skin diving -freediving- course as a part of the scuba diving course.
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