Preparing for the Coupe des Dauphin

New job and some family stuff prohibited me to write anything serious for some time over here. Still very busy with a lot of things, so I decided to put some Shark.nu tasks in the closet and concentrate on the urgent and good stuff first.

With regards to Sharkbait the most important task for me is to be in the water myself and have fun! And this is going perfectly the last few months, so from now on I try to up the level a little bit and sometimes even hold my breath for an extreme period of 3 contractions instead of coming up after the first contraction I receive.

Coaching Sanne is still a lot of fun because we have some clear goals defined and we’re entering new territory every trainings session. The main goal we’re still working on is the mental part I wrote about earlier. As we ended the second phase project 13 end of December, I took all the data from the preceding 13 weeks and lay them out and found some interesting stuff to work on. Breaking mental barriers isn’t easy but we’re getting there!

This weekend it’s time for the 7th Coupe des Dauphin in Geneve, Switzerland, and we will drive over there with our crew to have some fun. That means Sanne is tapering down on the fitness and intense freediving specific exercises and focusing more on technique. Tomorrow is dynamic without fins training sessions again and at the same time the last pool training before the competition, so we take it easy. The body is ready, the mind is better then ever, so I’m pretty confident that Sanne will reach his set goals.

On Saturday evening he must do at least a dynamic without fins with a distance of 95 meters, which should be no problem. The fun part is that we decided that Sanne will never come closer then 5 meters from the end of the pool in training and competition. This to break the turning-mental-breakpoint. So if he decides to go further then 95 meters, he has to do at least 105! Hehe, funny me…

Next day is time for static, and as it’s been a long time since he has done serious static work, I don’t know what to expect. Furthermore we’re going to do an experiment during that official attempt, so I’m very curious what will happen. As you have to set goals, we set his static to 5:34 minutes. More about the experiment later.
After that it’s time for dynamic with fins and after last Friday’s training we decided to put the goal distance at 110 meters. Last Friday we went to the pool to find out that our training pool was being used as a warm up pool for the swimming competition that was going on in the Olympic pool. So the pool crew decided that all the people who came for their recreational swim could use only 1 lane instead of the normal 4. That was not exactly what we had planned for! So while everybody was preparing to jump in the water, Sanne grabbed his fins, jumped in the pool and started preparing.

While taking his last breaths, standing at the end of the pool, around 5 people jumped from the start block over him into the water. So with a total of 1 minute preparation during a very busy jump in, he started his dynamic with an end goal of reaching 105 meters (remember: he could not stop less then 5 meters from the end). Confident start and swim made a very easy 107 meter dynamic with fins which he recovered from within 2 breaths. Clearly there is much more in there, but let just put the goal for next week at 110 and be satisfied with a clear and conscience decision to do a certain distance that is in reach. Mental training, remember!

I guess the other freedivers, who were still preparing on the side of the pool, didn’t even notice that Sanne did this dive… fun stuff as usual!

All in all I look forward into going to Geneva and have some fun and see Sanne do what he does two times a week in our own pool.