This past weekend I participated in the Canadian national freediving competition. Morgaine and our friend Heather came out to cheer me on. It was great to have a fan base!
The static apnea event was held on the first day of the competition. Static is possibly my favourite event of all. If you don't already know, it simply consists of holding your breath while floating face down in the water. I have aimed for a six minute hold twice before in competition and blacked out both times. (Don't worry, there's lots of safety people and procedures.) But this time I finally managed to hold my breath for six minutes and four seconds -- my personal best time ever! Let me tell ya, six minutes is a pretty long time if you're not breathing. I placed second in the static event as another competitor was able to hang on seven seconds longer for a total time of six minutes and eleven seconds. But I can't complain about coming in second. I mean come on, personal best!
The dynamic event was on day two and I swam a respectable 75 meters in the pool. I think I could have gone farther, but one my goals for this competition was to pull off perfect performances and not black out or get disqualified.
On day three we hit the ocean. As you may recall, I had a minor injury in training a couple of weeks back and I was unable to dive to the depth that I wanted without risking further injury. So I did a short, clean dive to 15 meters. Unfortunately, doing such a shallow dive kept me out of the running for a medal. But I still had a great time and it was a beautiful day to be in the ocean.
And then to finish off my AMAZING weekend, I broke my fin. Yup, I broke my specially ordered from the Ukraine, took months to get here, hand-made fiberglass, rather expensive monofin. It now looks like this:
Note the large tear right up the middle. I'm hopeful that I can repair it though. Anyone out there good with fiberglass?
Anyway, it was a great weekend and Morgaine took some wonderful photos which may show up on her blog, but I'm guessing we might have to wait until wedding season is over...
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