Training at my first pool worldchampionship

It is time to put all the training I did in chlorinated water to good use, and to make all the beers I did not drink work for me. Martin and I drove to Aarhus on Friday, with a car miraculously filled up to the top with random items. Saturday we went straight to the pool, and I got my first taste of a 50m lane in about two years. It’s a bit odd, like it just seems to go on and on forever, but fortunately for me the middle is marked, so I can work my small blond brain halfway, then to the end, then halfway, and so on. All seems to be well, except my monofin technique, which athletes watching from across the pool could spot as still requiring some work. I’m on it.

Sunday morning we did some static, my favourite. Amazingly, instead of reverse training this (i.e. getting worse by the day) as I usually do, it has actually been improving and I have been consistently over five minutes, which is a nice surprise. Even better, it seems that I have finally found out what the problem with my static has been all along: According to Linda (who is here to judge) what makes me come up is not the urge to breathe, but the urge to talk! So I have been training all these nasty CO2 tables, wondering why nothing was ever getting any better, and it was all a total waste of time. I am very grateful to Linda for finally solving this mystery for me. She (together with Lotta) was my freediving instructor at the very beginning, so she is really the reason why I am here at all, doing horrible statics. She is still the best at spotting anyone’s problems and recently helped me realize that I am a muppet and need to pretend to have a mask on my face in order to equalize with a nose clip, but that is another story. Back to static: it seems that all I need to do is figure out a way to have convincing conversations in my head, thus overcoming the urge to come up to talk to people, thus getting over 6:07 to break the German record. Simple.

The German team of Ilka, Barbara, me, Ulli, and Martin (Legat) has been joined by a new member: Sergio Martinez-Alvarez , who has brought along his lovely wife Olga. She is busy doing safety for all of us, plus a few other athletes, such as Carlos Coste and the rest of the Venezuelan team. Sergio is a bit excited at the moment because there are so many fancy freedivers around everywhere. Unfortunately he will soon realize that we are all no more fancy than he is, and then he will not be impressed anymore by anything I tell him. At the moment, he is still listening to me, so I have had a little talk with him and told him to let go of the brake (advice Stig once gave to Jesper, and look what happened), so he did a pb in static by almost forty seconds right away. I am sure he will have a great competition, and most of all, a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, I have been training with Elisabeth, who has been doing some very nice statics, too. We decided that I would coach her in the competition, since I know exactly how to lie to her convincingly. I still need to figure out who is going to tell me that I am at four minutes when in fact I have gone past five, and will be hunting around for a coach at the athlete’s meeting later on. Performance announcements for dynamic no fins have to be made in a couple of hours. I am going to spend some time on my bed now, figuring out what to put down and quietly getting nervous. I think I will go for 105m, thus forcing myself to turn at hundred.

By the way, I forgot to mention that Linda is of course the best looking judge around, by a long way.

Oh shit. Nervous already.