This is a post by Sanne Buurma.

Sandi Bitenc

First and foremost I’d like to say that Sandi Bitenc earns great respect from me and any freediver…actually. Last weekend he pulled off the amazing 24 hour marathon dynamic freediving for the Guinness book of World Records. Jorg and I set out to meet up with him for the event and we would do some reporting from the event. But what started as a somewhat small reporting schedule, soon grew into a (almost) 24 hour live stream of footage from the event.

Sanne & Jorg

How we did all this…
Jorg and I were at a small cafe near the pool (with some free wifi of course ;) ) preparing for the event and it popped into our minds that we had the opportunity to use live-streaming from a mobile phone to do the coverage report. As these services have been growing lately, we agreed to just go for it and see where it would go. We started reporting with the idea of just streaming the every hour the first few hours, half-way through and at the end. But it was so much fun to do and the reactions coming in from the freediving community made that we went for the coverage of the whole event.

Left writing, middle video streams, right video editing, front live stream phone

We had a seperate office from the swimming pool for our headquarters to be setup. In this office Sandi had setup the streams of 4 camera’s from each end of the pool, the whole lane and a screen featuring his progress. He needed this to record all his actions for the Guinness committee, so they can verify his record and thus this will take some time for them to go through ;). In this office along side the pool we had the perfect overview of all things happening and so we agreed to go for full coverage. Every hour I picked up the mobile phone and Jorg walked with me for the comments on what the progress of Sandi’s attempt was at that time. In between the hours we streamed the view of his total progress from the screen. This left us with just enough time for Jorg to update the shark-freediving blog and for me to shoot photo and video material to edit, mount and upload to youtube in between the hourly reports. As we progressed into the night, at some point we took turns in the reporting alongside the pool, as one of us took a small sleep, the other could report the event. In all we both did not get more sleep than 1 hour and 20 minutes maybe…but that’s worth it!

Hardcore Sleeping

Final 6 hours
The last 6 hours of the event Jorg had to be the formal witness for the event and could not walk alongside the pool anymore, so I walked the camera around and commented where I could, returning to Jorg for his comments and to relay the messages from the freedivers watching the live stream. Seeing all the responses and Sandi receiving all the good luck wishes and congratulations was great to be a part of.

From a freediver point of view to get a real good impression what Sandi was doing, I joined him in the pool to do a few dynamic laps with him in the lane next to him. I mounted the GoPro camera on my head and started freediving with him…. It’s just an grueling schedule what he was doing. To be honest after six lanes I would have to say I was getting short on breath, of course I was using bi-fins and not all to streamlines, but this is really intense and deserves my greatest respect! What an athlete!

To keep awake we've got our own branded energy drinks! ;)

Difficulties
Of course we had some difficulties as it was our first ever live reporting event. Sometimes the sound would drop from the live feed, or the feed would stutter…and of course this would happen on the most important moments ;) So for the final hour we really put all our efforts in to show you what we were experiencing and for the viewers to see the final laps from the event!

Concluding
Apart from the small problems, we had a great time reporting and we do hope everybody who’d joined us liked the live-coverage as much as we enjoyed the event.

close-up of HTC TytnII phone record 1 of the 4 live streams

Jorg and I congratulate Sandi on the very impressive performance and would also like to thank him for having us over and taking good care of us, even though he was in there doing the dynamics he really thought this thing through, organized it into detail and thus making it an awesome event with an even more awesome result! 51,1 km’s > 1022 laps in a 50 meter pool… Hard to grasp, but a stunning world record!

To find all ins and outs about the event and our stories during the live event, check out http://www.shark-freediving