Finally made it to the diveshow

For some reason, the largest watersports tradeshow in the world (called "Boot", as in boat) is happening once a year in Germany. Amongst fancy yachts and tons of beach bum gear, there is an entire hall full of diving related things. It’s a big and quite famous event in the German scuba diving calendar, and, so far, I had never been there. This year, I was invited by Johnson Outdoors, who run Scubapro, Subgear and Uwatec, and have recently provided me with lots of fun when they gave me the Galileo computer to take down on the sled. The idea was, I should give some presentations over the weekend and hang out on the Scubapro stand to chat to people and answer questions, and, preferably, turn them ALL into freedivers! I’m working on it.

It quickly became apparent what a beginner I am at this kind of thing when somebody asked me for an autograph card. I don’t even have a business card! Why anyone would want my autograph on anything beats me. The show was great, lots of fancy stands with shiny gear, which my tech diving heart loves. I also got to meet famous tech diver Mark Ellyatt, fellow Scubapro guest, and have bored him to tears all weekend by asking him endless questions, probably exactly the same ones any fool who has ever been below sixty meters asks him at every show. He was very patient, though, and smiled sweetly at all the bearded divers who came up to him to ask, in German, where they could get their free mug. That’s what you get for wearing a name badge and looking friendly and aproachable.

All the talk of diving aside, it is still snowboarding season, so I am off to Aspen, Colorado, on Sunday – sore legs are sure to follow. I am so excited to be going, I am even looking forward to the 17 hour journey. I fear I might be a little addicted. I tortured fellow freediver William Winram, who used to own a snowboardshop, by sending him a nice carving picture, to try and convince him to join us on the slopes. He said he needed to see that photo about as much as a hole in the head. Sorry Will!

Snowy season

Right, it’s been a while. This is due to the usual winter season zero training situation. I am happy to report that nothing has changed: against all plans to better myself, I once again stopped pretense at physical activity six weeks before Christmas. That is, if you don’t count the eight hour a day giftwrapping marathon at the bookshop. Water? Pooltraining? Freediving? Memories from a distant past.

An ominous feeling of trouble ahead (in the shape of the snowboarding season) got me out of the house for a lovely snowy Christmas run on the 25th, but after that: nothing. I was very nearly saved from bruises and pain by a blizzard that moved in in time to stop airplanes from getting out of Berlin for two days (see above), but in the end I made it to the Dolomites last Saturday, to face up to Joerg Egli’s relentless and brutal week of Pure Boarding punishment.

Waiting for me in Wolkenstein were not only Joerg and 29 other riders, but my new weapon of choice: the black Diamond. This is what Joerg created out of the prototype he let me ride in Aspen last year, and which he wouldn’t sell to me, arguing that he still had to tweak it a bit. And boy, did he tweak it. It simply is outrageously fast. I spent the first day trying to master the beast, which one can only say was riding with me rather than the other way round. I stuck to the back of the group, trying to avoid being seen messily crashing around the mountain by my fellow riders, who were all looking intimidatingly good already.

Come to Wolkenstein and one thing is for sure: you will soon regret every day spent without exercise. This is how the pure boarding carving week works: get up at 7:00am. Be outside the lift at 08:15, waiting for the doors to open so as to be on the very first chair/gondola. Make the first tracks down the freshly groomed slope by 08:35. Don’t ever stop on the piste. RUN into the next lift, ride up, ride down, RUN into the next lift...and so on. If Joerg feels gracious, you are allowed a sit-down lunchbreak of between 30-40min. If not, it’s standing outside a Kiosk to have a piece of chocolate and some water. It’s snowboarding bootcamp, with a lot of laughs thrown in, especially at the bar in the evenings. This deceptively peaceful picture shows the only coffee break we had all week: on our final afternoon!

After the first day, I was unable to walk down any stairs. I tried my best to hide this, but Joerg caught me navigating the three steps down to the dining room and instantly knew what shape I was in. Rarely have I known such a level of self-induced pain. To top this, the toughest day of the week was next, where we covered an incredible amount of distance and never stopped, since it became quite clear that we were chancing it for making it back across all the valleys. Fact is, we didn’t – a ride down to the last gondola in the gathering dusk brought us to a stop when the lift guys wouldn’t let us on anymore. So it was a hike back up and a 100Euro taxiride! Thankfully split between nine of us. To give you an idea: we set a new pure boarding record, riding down just over eleven thousand meters of altitude in one day and covering a distance of 100km. No surprise the legs were aching. Fortunately, there is such a thing as muscle memory, and I got progressively stronger over the week. I even began to feel that I might yet master the board, which has the most brilliant edge hold on ice I have ever experienced. This is a backside turn I accidentally got right, on a seriously icy steep:


Bliss. Now my muscles are recovering, but I have a large range of bruises. At least freediving is a no-contact-sport!

Lessons learned and aching legs

This is it: the freediving competition season is finally over for the year. I cooked dinner for Daan, Eric and Martin on Friday night (we were all in the long night of apnea the next day), which was very nice, since I was able to do all the moaning that is part of my preparation, and they listened to my growing list of excuses with calm and understanding. I won’t say much about the competition itself, except that it did not go as I wished, since I had a splitting headache and a fever. I did learn from previous mistakes, though, and came up safe and clean at 107m dnf.

We had fun watching Daan do a beautiful 169m Dynamic, taking the Dutch record from Eric. After that, I went on to coach Jesper in the evil discipline 16x50. Since Jesper had made a tactical error earlier and had not checked what Polish man Robert had done in dynamic, he was now behind in points and needed to give it his all to try and still win the competition. My job was to make him dive every 48 seconds. He took around 35 seconds per 50m, leaving him less than 15 seconds to breathe. After the fifth dive, he started to look kind of bad, so I switched him to 50sec intervals, and then pushed him as hard as I could – amazingly, he did what I told him to and came in at 12:59, looking a bit dead, I have to say. After all that, he still lost, which I (no mercy) teased him with as much as possible for the rest of the night.


Coach Martin, in a moment of boredom and, one might say, madness, had had a bright idea a few weeks earlier and entered us under the team name “Hypoxic Runners” into the Berlin Team Marathon for the day after the competition. This took place at the beautiful old airport, Tempelhof, and had a total of 1100 teams entered.

Here are four of the five hpoxic runners: Elisabeth, Martin, Jesper and I:


Thinking that Jesper is a fit athlete and seasoned runner, we had asked him if he would like to join us and take a 10km section of the run, and he said yes without hesitation. Then, after having done a killer 16x50, he announced that he had not run in twenty years! A 3km on the running machine a couple of weeks before left him unable to walk the next day. This was not encouraging news for our overall result. In fact, we were getting worried about making it inside the 4.5 hours maximum time allowed. Still, my offer of swapping my 5k section for his 10k was instantly declined. It’s a man thing, I believe.

Having jumped out of bed far too early, we established our team base at the Tempelhof airport and got ready to send Martin off to run the first section of 12,195k. He returned in 1hour2min, which was a great start, and handed over to Steffen, who discovered his competition gene and pushed himself to run 10k in 52min.

Here I am with Steffen, hypoxic runner number five


I was next and need to write a letter of complaint to Polar: minutes before I was due to start, I discovered that my nice new training watch does not have a stopwatch function! So I arrived back at 30min8sec, passed over to Jesper, who was nicely nervous by now. Getting ready, Martin watched him in amazement as he removed the price tag from his brand new running shoes! He arrived back after the first 5k round looking like it was hurting, but in a good time of just under half an hour. Here he is, passing the plane in his shiny new shoes:


This had us all thinking that the second round would surely finish him off, and we would not see him again for a long while. There we did not count on quite how competitive he can be, since much to our surprise he crossed the line, close to death but breathing, after just 1hour1min. Elisabeth had the last 5k to run, and stayed just under 30min, taking us to the finish in a total time of 3:56:and a bit.
It was a fantastic event, with a total of 1100 teams entered. Since we all have the competition gene, we immediately decided to do this again next year, and are hoping to have at least one more freediver’s team to compete against – so get your running shoes ready, guys!

Jesper says his legs are fine. I don’t believe a word of it.

Sled and rain in Athens

I finally had to give in and face the truth: I was not going to make it to the world championships in the Bahamas, much as I would have liked to go. Fellow sad no-goers Liv and George managed to talk Stavros into rescuing us from the approaching winter blues and organise a mini training week near Athens. We were joined by Dave Tranfield and Greg, whom Stavros recruited during a course, and who had thought freedivers were reasonably normal people until he met us lot.

I was so looking forward to seeing the sun, I happily packed my bag full of all the items a girl needs during such an occasion: a range of bikinis, denim miniskirt, shorts, assortment of flip flops, several pairs of sunglasses, sunscreens, aftersuns, skimpy tops, etc etc. I was just done with all this when my friend Jens called me, to complain about me going off to sunny shores while normal people were stuck back in the rain. He asked me what the weather would be like, and I said, no idea, sunny, of course, what else? Ha! Shouted the man and went to check the forecast on the internet. Well. I detected a hint of glee in his voice as he read out the bad news. They involved such things as rain, clouds, storms, and freezing temperatures. I put the phone down, unpacked my bag and filled it with fleeces and woolly hats.

The week was wonderful, in spite of the rather accurately forecast weather conditions. There was not much to do in the afternoons, so we had nice picnic lunches, hung around drinking tea, read, slept. Stavros and Giota took fantastic care of us, driving us around, cooking us lovely dinners, and generally making sure we were having a great time. Most days, I dived with the sled, doing head down variable to 60m, to practise equalization. This was the fastest I have ever gone: I reached 60m in 27sec the first time round! What was most beautiful, though, was diving the mini blue hole they have near Athens. It is more like a black hole, really, as it looks completely dark from above. There is a down current which means the descent feels amazing, simply effortless. At the bottom, the current disappears into a tunnel that has been blocked off to stop stupid divers from going in there. Foivos, who was looking after us lot with amazing safety diving, made me do statics down there, since he has promised to take me spearfishing next time and this was part of the training regime. I stayed for up to one minute, which was a lot nicer than doing a static in the pool, I tell you.

Here is a video Stavros filmed:


Next weeend it’s the Berlin long night of apnea. I have announced DNF. I do not want to do anything at the moment, in fact, I have been overcome by a great feeling of laziness. Anyone want to come and give me a cold? Please?