Tag Archives: freedive ireland

Big smiles for 2015

Janey, I haven’t posted anything here in awhile.

So the Christmas is over and the new year is here. Last Saturday saw me with a big silly grin on my face as I drove away from the Ocean. It wasn’t that I had just spent the last few hours in it. It wasn’t that I was still toasty warm as I had a new suit and the heating left on in the van for changing. Nor was it that I had my super Stanley ultra flask with a piping hot brew ready for drinking.

The item that really brought a smile to my face was the crowd. This in itself is unusual in the surfing fraternity. I was finished though remember. I was really just astounded by the sheer volume of people making use of the playground that is our Ocean. Some were on boards others were heading out on kayaks, some were walking. Yes the sun was shining, yes the place was probably the only spot with half decent surf for a long while but still to see a busy car park in early January is a great thing to my mind.

For those of us who dislike crowds it just means we have to get off our asses and explore a bit more, it’s not like there is a shortage of coastline, dive spots, surf spots or swim spots.

Hopefully this will continue. People protect what they value and use in their lives. The more people that believe in the beauty of our Oceans and seas the better.

Hoping you all have a great 2015.

Feeling blessed to be able to call this place home.

 

Heart to heart,

picture of a heartThe heart is a pretty amazing organ. You only get one but if you’re lucky maybe you get to share it today and every other day with someone else.

As freedivers you gradually learn to control it better, mainly by slowing it down. Relaxing, breathing, calming. You can also train it to react to a form of autogenic training. The heart just pumps away, second after second. The way it evolved from when you were a foetus in your mothers womb is pretty amazing. Starting with two cavities like a fish, it further divides to three cavities like an amphibian as if preparing us for a life both above and below the water and finally to four cavities and our mammals heart. The slowdown of the heart (bradycardia) is a well documented dive reflex when we are immersed in water. This happens to everyone, even people who hate water and panic, eventually their heart rate will fall too.

A freediver simply trains to work this reflex. It makes you a “better” freediver. More relaxed and at home in and under the water. It also makes for countless hours of fun at medicals. At the end of the day it still needs care. Regular exercise gets it going faster, relaxation and meditation gets it going slower. Some people will say you only have so many beats in it anyway so whats the point? Like anything if looked after, it will look after you.

Stressing the heart through exercise is a good thing. Stressing it through stress is a bad thing. Seems pretty simple to say, sometimes harder to do in reality. If you have never worn a  heart rate monitor during exercise please try it. If you freedive, try it during a breathhold. It’s amazing to see what happens. You can listen to mine here. This was part of the Doc on ! we were part of which is here.  We could have gone lower but as you hear the Doc’s machine could have been damaged. Was really cool afterwards when he showed me the flatline too. Anyone’s  heart will do this with the right training and time. Nothing special about mine, except of course to me. Negative stress raises the heart rate and keeps it raised in our flight or fight response throughout the day. That stuff causes heart disease. Raising it far higher for brief periods during exercise helps prevent heart disease.

An amazing organ, an amazing muscle. It can catch you out of course. Sometimes when you least expect it. Walking down the street your eye might just connect with that someone special and your heart stops, even if only for a moment. Don’t worry it will start again, hopefully.

Happy Valentines Day.

The Kingdom by the Sea,

spear weekend 06.08.2011 048is one of Paul Theroux “travel” books. I loved it and recommend that along with The Happy Isles of Oceania and The Pillars of Hercules. I captioned travel because he doesn’t do travel books in the normal sense. Focusing instead on the people he meets. The situations he finds himself in and the social-geographical climate he encounters. There’s no line about what particular cathedral or castle/landmark to visit as far as I can remember.

In kingdom by the sea, one aspect that he had trouble getting his head around was this fascination of people who drive to the seaside and then stay in their cars watching the sea. I had never thought it odd but in retrospect I suppose it is unusual. Of course many get out and walk along the promenade or the beach. But others simply sit and stare. Essentially Theroux’s hypothesis is they/we are staring at infinity and the wonder beyond.

Culture has moved on, now we no longer sit and stare. (as much) When the climber reaches the top of the cliff, he is no longer there just to view the awe inspiring landscape but legs akimbo, launches himself off the edge. The French of course turned it into art. When the diver meets the Ocean or the Sea he no longer stares but dives in and down. Onwards goes the exploration. The blue water sailor only happy when he has sea room and no sight of land, the silence and mystery of the worlds Oceans enveloping him. Only now is he free.

Free to what? Free of gravity, free of the terrestrial earth, free of land, free of judgement, stress or worry. Free to be human or be more than human. Free to glimpse magic of an intensity not yet known, free to experience the very fabric of life itself.

It’s nearly the end of the first month of 2014. The time when most new years resolutions fail or have failed. But now more than ever, it’s time to jump in.

 

Dancing in the moonlight

OK I wasn’t actually dancing but I was in the moonlight. It was mental bright and my feet were kind of drawn toMoonlight 011 the beach as midnight approached. Tide was out and only a small gentle pulse of a wave trickled on to shore. The air was still and cold, I think I could have shouted across to Donegal or Mayo and the sound would have carried.  It was a kind of stillness, light and eeriness that Moonlight 023Moonlight 040lets your imagination run riot without  use of any “recreational substances”. The Ocean was so calm, still, mirror like, lake like even dream like. The depths of it hiding the torrents, rage and fury it had unleashed on this same coast just a week earlier.

If the metal man was ever going to jump down off his perch and waded ashore tonight would have been the night. As it was his lantern was twinkling away, always a constant light in this watery realm, ever changing with the tide. Tripod and camera set, it wasn’t long before the hands were getting numb. But if the body wanted to go back to warmth, the mind and spirit wanted to stay and bask in the moonlight, in the atmosphere, in this moment in time that was surely fleeting. And it was.

After an hour or more and happy with some of the pictures, (you need to click and enlarge to do them any justice) I drove off thinking the other side of the bay might hold more wonders. Even as I left Dead mans point I could feel or sense the light changing. On the far side of Sligo town, it was dramatically different. It was like any other moon lit night. Nice sure , but the magic was gone. The thrill of the unknown, of the other world tinged with both fear and wonder was gone. Replaced by normality again.

Lesson learned, no matter how numb the fingers go, stay with the magic. It doesn’t last long.

 

Swim into 2014

Great northern pool comp 2012 002

 

 

OK so for any of you guys swimming more in 2014 or loosing weight etc here are some pointers.

 

Disclaimer, I am not a swim instructor but swim 2k most nights with drills and 3 k if going long so am reasonably competent. If you find it difficult to swim more than 10 lengths of a pool without stopping I would suggest go to a swim class or one to one for a few sessions.

 

1. When you are going swimming, swim. Seems pretty obvious but 80% of people talk at the end of the pool while they take a break for a minute or two. That minute becomes 10 and you start swimming when you start getting cold. Plan your rest breaks 2 mins tops and talk in the steam room or Jacuzzi when your session is finished. Don’t talk, swim

2. This one is mainly for the guys. Get tight shorts or jammers. Board shorts and baggies cause a MASSIVE amount of drag, that you won’t believe until you try the others. Let’s be clear, I am not recommending the Budgie smugglers/bannana hammocks but rather the tight fitting shorts, the length of which is up to you. Yes you will think people are looking at you etc but actually they are not ( how vain are you brah? ) and you are going to be in the water shortly anyway. As you get older you care less what people think.

3. Warm up, if you can stretch a small bit before the swim. If you feel you will look like a twat stretch before you go out.  Decide beforehand how many lengths you will do, then how many as a warm up, say 20-25% of your total. Allow about 10% of your total for a warm down. This just means taking it easy in both. Ignore the desire to keep pace or race with someone swimming in the same lane or beside you.

4. Drills. Don’t do the same thing every night. I do drills two nights a week and a long straight swim one night. Some drills: catch up, this slows the stroke down. Your leading hand stays on the surface of the water until the recovering hand joins it. Fists, swim with your hand in a fist using your forearm to catch more water on the stroke. Board/float, swim lengths just kicking with the float in front of you. Speed set, flat out as fast as you can, swim up take a breath or two then swim back down slowly. Repeat as much as you can. If the pool has a minute counter at the end watch that, decide on a set amount of time for two lengths. The faster you do one the more time you have for rest. Try swimming with a pull buoy for a few lengths, if you notice how much easier it seems your legs and feet are causing you drag and need to be worked on. Youtube is your friend here. Swimming instructors will all have an opinion on drills so see disclaimer above but work for me. You can lose weight swimming but you need to do it fast and have a reasonably high length count I think. Your arms should be hanging off you at the end of a good session.

5. Etiquette. Apart from the normal pool rules there are a few unwritten ones that may seem obvious and some that don’t. Don’t dose yourself in deodorant/aftershave prior to swimming, it gets in the back of my throat, you complete bastard who ever you are. If someone is swimming behind you and they are faster let them pass at the end of the next length. Some swimmers will tap your feet to give you an indication. Stay to one side at the end of the lane if resting as staying in the middle will be in the way of people turning. Think about the other persons speed if you are about to do a slow drill, don’t set off in front of them.  Don’t be afraid to use the “fast” lane. Many of the swimmers are the same as you or slower than you think and if you let people pass you will have no worries. Swimming with someone faster than you is good. It brings on your own swimming. If they are slower use them as a guide.

6. Hydrate, Unless you are swimming/training for more than an hour avoid the sports drinks. Drink water and sip between sets. Sports drinks add too much sugar so make no sense if trying to loose weight. Just be water.

7. Slow down to speed up. Work on reducing the amount of strokes to do a length, work on slowing down over a long distance so you keep that pace and a faster time overall.

Lastly and this is one I saw on facebook. It doesn’t matter what you eat between Christmas and New Year. It matters what you eat between New years and Christmas.

Just keep swimming, it will do good in your heart, your body, your mind and your freedive training.

 

 

2014, Journeyman or “The Journey, man!!”

Boat through the rocks

 

Isn’t that what we are all on here on this terrific little spinning globe of liquid and some clay we reside on ?

 

 

 

So it’s that time of year when we set out our goals, aspirations, wishlists, to do lists for the year. In order to achieve our ideal. Our ideal weight, career, relationship, life etc. When we finally get feed to the fishies does it all matter?  I’d sure like to think it does.

The Zen master said, once you achieve nirvana, all that’s left to do is laugh, he also said this could be a good thing or a bad thing we don’t know the full story so lets not get too excited or depressed about where we are right now. It’s the busy season for self development and goal setting. Worthy ideals, even if only a few take them through to achievement. It’s surely about the journey rather than the destination, right? Yes the journey is dammned hard at times but every so often you look around and see someone else,s journey that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. So like the swell studded Ocean, the peaks and troughs come marching along. Sometimes you are on the crest of the wave and loving it and sometimes you are in the trough getting the shit kicked out of you. It’s a good an analogy for life and  should be taught in schools I tells ya.

So despite our goals we may feel like we ended up back where we started or at times even further back than that, do not pass go, do not collect €200 etc. But it’s a long road and the time will pass anyway. The time will pass anyway. You may have heard it said that there is no difference between the optimist who says everything will work out in the end but does nothing about it and the pessimist who says it can’t be helped and so does nothing about it.

Research has shown that it’s not actually the achievement of a goal that brings us satisfaction ( although that’s a good thing ) but the progression towards that ideal. So we feel crap when we stagnate and good when we are making moves towards something. So with 2014 around the corner it’s time to bust a move. Grab the swimmers, the runners and the notepad and decide what 2014 will do for you rather than you for it. All part of the journey.

See you out the back.

 

Competitiveness

monfin

 

 

That sure is a tough one. Where do we draw the line in competitions?

 

 

The line is always part of a balancing act. If we are not pushing ourselves are we progressing?

This runs amok in all sports I suppose, well maybe not darts. Train too much and you get injured, don’t train hard enough and you fall behind other team mates or the competition. It’s a very difficult one in freediving. The pressure, pardon the pun again seems to build and build as we chase that ever elusive number. Our freediving mentors tell us to relax, train thoughtfully and slowly and the numbers will come and they do. But easier said than done.

Sometimes it’s trying when you see someone effortlessly do in a day what took you months or even years to achieve. That’s talent but it will only go so far without proper training. Like any discipline after a while we hit a plateau and need to change some part of our regime to start noticing improvements again.  The experience of others has shown us that our bodies adapt to the stress and pressure but sometimes we do push them too far. The samba, blackout or squeeze for the freediver, the crippled knee for the footballer or runner.

Mentioning football brings me to a pet hate that I suppose is mostly apparent in team sports and while I am sure it is also the case in some individual sports I can’t ever recall seeing it in the freediving world. That is armchair critics. I really do want to jump down the radio and smack the head of the commentators or now they have fans that are allowed ring in and vent their spleen on why such a player or manager is crap and what they should have done. I have tried but I can’t seem to get my arm down the speaker and into the radio station to smack them around a bit. It’s unusual for me to be listening in the first place I suppose. I have never seen anything remotely like it in freediving but maybe I have been living a sheltered life. In competitions I have gone to, all I have mostly seen is encouragement, often with competitors coaching each other to possibly beat each others positioning. Many derive a great pleasure in helping even if it means they lose their own “record”. Yes it’s a comp so sometimes things are protested if required and the professionals have their sponsors to think about so it’s often at the smaller competitions that you see the greatest spirit. The one thing I have never heard is from a spectator saying they should have done this or trained that way etc.

In the end the competition is always within ourselves anyway and what we could do yesterday may not be possible to do today. We really need to listen to our bodies and see if it’s fear or common sense holding us back. It’s a long road traveled alone and like our seasons and our dives, sometimes you have to plunge into the cold darkness in order to return to the light.

 

Keep swimming towards the light brahs.

Happy Christmas to you all. Feargus.

It’s working.

Blackfish

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peer pressure or activism whatever you want to call it.

The first Ocean documentary that really impacted me was Sharkwater. Rob’s cinematography is stunning but the storyline starts to take on a  life of its own when he tags along with Paul Watson from Sea Shepard. You can watch it on the link above on youtube. Sharks are here since the dinosaurs and now we are wiping them out for their fins. Thankfully this is beginning to change.

The next one to really have an impact was The Cove about the slaughter of Dolphins in Taji, the abusement parks of Dolphinariums etc. It got huge coverage in the freediving community as not only do we feel a connection to dolphins in particular but also they used freeedivers to get some of the footage from the Cove.  The slaughter still goes on and not just in Japan.

Blackfish seems to have hit the ball out of the park. Since it’s release Seaworld’s stock has plummeted, popularity for the show is waning and major musicians that were booked to play there are canceling. It is having an impact. It is changing and it’s picking up speed. Orca’s are such an intriguing creature, I ‘d love to try to swim with one in the wild. On a separate show about them they have recorded behaviour that shows an unrelated Orca looking after/feeding what can only be described as a disabled Orca. Wild animals, we have always been told depend on survival of the fittest but not so with Orca’s in this case.  Small wonder then the size of their brain given to emotions is far larger in relative terms than our own.

You may have time over the days off at Christmas so when you have got your well deserved fill of “Its a wonderful Life” and overdosed on “Elf” for a while, please take the time to watch some or all of the films above. They are entertaining in their own right but with a message that’s as clear as can be. See cetaceans in the wild if you are lucky, end captivity of these majestic creatures and encourage others to help make that happen.

I’ll leave you with this great passage from Douglas Adams.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Saving Private Ryan.

saving-private-ryan_400

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s an epic film.

I usually cry (wait boys don’t cry) get a lump in my throat at two points in the film.

The opening scene where Ryan is literally struck down with grief as he visits the graveyard. That emotions are actually that strong, that not only can they stop you in your tracks but actually cut the legs out from under you. The action scenes and story takes over after this. The last scene then is the next one, where he is back at the graveyard and asks his wife ” tell me I’ve lived a good life”. This post obviously isn’t about the film but about a “good” life. The definition of that is up to you.

Yesterday the world lost someone who had truly lived a good life by any which way you measure it. Mandela showed us the power of forgiveness. He didn’t tell or try to instruct us, but lived and showed us so many lessons. His book is a hard read but a rewarding one. Talk about seeing change in your lifetime. Imagine the contrast of living/existing for so long in that cell, going on to lead your country and in essence lead the world.

It’s kind of hard for any of us to compare ourselves to someone like that and try to hold a candle to them but I don’t think that matters. The old cliche of, if you make a difference in just one person’s life it’s worth it, holds true. I suppose cliches always have some truth in them. I used to use them all the time but now I avoid them like the plague.

A short time ago the freediving world lost a brother in an incident during a competition. It was the first time a competitor lost their life in an AIDA run competition. You can read about it here with a good article by Sara. Lung squeezes are nothing new in deep freediving but probably have not being taken seriously enough. The speed at which people progress is phenomenal but worrying at the same time The freediving world is a small community that straddles the Oceans so while I had never met Nick I knew people who had. Their updates on FB etc allowed us a little glimpse of the guy and like so many others in this sport I know I would have liked the guy. At the end of the day he was a brother lost to the sea. The competitive push of many people is so strong  and sometimes it can lead to very dangerous places.

It’s a fine line between living the life and losing the life but surely still better than just existing, just waiting till its over, the last sorrowful breath. Why not plan or better still do something today to make it beyond “good”.

 

 

Inspirational!

Gleniff Horseshoe, waiting for Gandalf.

 

 

So this will be old hat to some of you. Went to see my sister in law complete the Dublin city marathon a few weeks back.

 

 

I was literally bowled over. Spectating at Mile 16 or thereabouts near Terenure so the runners were well in the thick of it. So, so many personal battles going on in front of you, you can see the pain, frustration and every so often joy on the faces as they pass. You only get a fleeting glance as they whizz pass. So many running vests emblazoned with their own name, their own charity or in memory of someone close to them. They pass in the hundreds and thousands. The encouragement from the crowd is infectious and it’s no time before you are shouting out the name of some one you never met nor will see again or calling out their county if sporting their county colours. Hopefully you’ve added something to their thoughts, taken their mind off the pain even if only briefly.

The other thing that struck me was the shapes and sizes of all the competitors. There were a good percentage that to my mind didn’t look like they were runners but were on course for a sub 4 hour run. Goes to show what i know and the old chestnut of not making assumptions based on appearances. You never see the passion, drive and commitment that precedes all that of course. No one just decides to run a marathon. I have written before about my own running exploits and I suppose a marathon is the ultimate run of runs, then you read about ultra marathons and well, where does it stop really? I’d love to think about doing one, just once but the fear of injuries, training schedules and failure is daunting. Then you go see one and it’s “oh ok time to get my shit together”

January is fast approaching and so all the gyms and pools all over the world will be inundated with new years resolutions only to be finished by mid February. But good health is for life and not just for Christmas so maybe start before the maddening crowd get in.

The main things is to do something active, run, swim cycle, surf whatever, anything to get the heart racing, the muscles tired and the brain concentrating on healthy physical stress instead of man made modern pace of life crap stress. It’s such a good buzz for body, mind and soul. Especially if you can get out into nature while you are doing it.

As the famous running shoe company logo said, “Just get it done”. I think.