I fucking love freezing. It makes me wish I grew up near a reef or on the coast of Oman or France or something and was one of those guys that can hold their breath for several minutes while spearfishing for dinner. Just fucking incredible! I can last about 45 second to a minute before I have to come up for air. I use my arms too much and end up wasting oxygen. Need to get better with the flipper feet!
I grew up on the west coast of Canada and began freediving at 11 years old. When i freedive in canada i need to wear a 7mm wetsuit and a weight belt to counteract the buoyancy of the wetsuit. I hate the cold but love the ocean its my one true love, thebiggest highlights in canada for freediving are the pinnipeds, im talking seals and sea lions. Ive freedove with them many times in BC and the interactions are unreal, they are so playful and curios for wild animals they come right up to you, nibble on your fins, play games with you, some of them i can pet, etc. Ive never been attacked, but i had a huuuuugggeeee bull sea lion give me some hostile encounters once which scared the shit out of me especiasly since i was a 20 minute swim from shore. He was making lots of fast, close, aggressive pass bys i could tell he wanted me to fuckoff and i was trying but he followed me for a good 10 minutes but never made physical contact. He was probably 3-4x the size of me, couldve killed me in a heart beat if he wanted. Thats the scarriest encounter ive had freediving.
These days i live in SEA and the water is piss warm so no wetsuit no weight belt, but make no mistake once your like 30+ feet deep its ice cold down there. Now i freedive with various sharks, manatees, stingrays, turtles, manta rays, and whale sharks which are my favorite because they are so friggin massive its like swimming next to a submarine.
Its a really cool hobby, it does take balls to do because fear of the unknown is so prevelant in the ocean, you never know whats going to suddenly come out of the blue abyss, but thats what gets me off as im an adrenaline junkie. When sharks randomLy show up my heart starts racing yet i swim towards them not away from them, its very thrilling and i come out of the water high on life.
Theres alot of discipline to it too, skys the limit on progression, discipline you learn in bodybuilding totally transfers over to freediving. If you keep challenging yourself you keep progressing. Personally i can freedive to 100 feet deep on a breath of air, i can hold my breath for 4 minutes if static apnea (not moving my body). The world record for submerged static apnea is like 22 minutes (how the FUCK?) but its totally amazing the human body can be adapted to do that its mind boggling what training can achieve.
You can likely hold your breath twice as long as you think, when you reach the point where you feel your diaphragm begin contracting every few seconds, your only half way through yoir oxygen. But by that point of contracting your brain is ansolutely scream8ng at you to get air (it tells you with 100% certainty you are going to die in a few seconds, but its wrong), from that moment on it is a battle against your brain not your body, the really good freedivers go into a deeply meditative state where they can turn off that screaming in their brain and they drop their heart rate to literally just a handful of beats per minute. Its impressive as fuck the control they have over their body. Im a decent freediver but the pros are on a level so far above me they seem like gods.
