One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  One would think, considering humans have been freediving for millennia, that someone would have already hit the physiological limit in all six disciplines by now. But that’s not true. Today’s competitive freedivers are swimming deeper and longer, and holding their breath for a greater amount of time than anybody ever has in human history. In that way, competitive freedivers aren’t just watermen, they’re Aquamen.

  Most serious freedivers play a variety of roles in their sport. They might compete in an event, judge the next, and act as a safety diver in the one after that. Several top athletes are coaches and almost all are teachers. Two early schools jump-started freediving education worldwide: Umberto Pelizzari’s Apnea Academy and Kirk Krack’s Performance Freediving International (PFI), which he founded with former world record holder Martin Stepanek.

  Winnipeg born, Kirk Krack was a tech diving instructor and owner of a scuba shop in the Cayman Islands when he discovered freediving. Soon after, Pipin Ferreras and Audrey Mestre approached him to organize a world record attempt—though not the fateful one. Kirk was one of the first to bring high-octane performance philosophy to the sport when he designed apnea exercises and breath hold sequences, as well as pool and depth workouts for Brett LeMaster, an American from New Mexico who broke the Constant Weight record in 1999. At that time Pelizzari and Ferreras were at the top of the sport, and nobody had ever heard of LeMaster. Kirk helped him hit 81 meters and shock the freediving world, and would go on to train his wife, Mandy, Mestre’s contemporary, to seven world records.

  Kirk, who these days trains Red Bull athletes, US Navy SEALs, and movie stars like Tom Cruise, who he trained to a 6:30 breath hold for an underwater stunt in the 2015 film Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, launched PFI in part to stem the epidemic of spearfishing deaths. It’s estimated that at least a hundred people die from spearfishing accidents each year. Almost all of them die from surface or shallow-water blackouts, a natural physiological response to hypoxia that competitive freedivers often experience as well.

  Oxygen is the brain’s fuel, and on a deep freedive, the overall amount of oxygen in the system burns as the diver kicks and freefalls. However, at depth the brain is duped into thinking that there is plenty of oxygen available because when the lungs compress thanks to increased barometric pressure (remember that balloon example), the remaining oxygen molecules take up a greater percentage of the available lung space. The illusion is over as the diver ascends, the pressure reverses, the lungs expand to their normal capacity, and the true percentage of available oxygen registers in the brain. That reversal is at its most intense during the last 10 meters of an ascent when barometric pressure is cut in half. As the now buoyant diver accelerates toward the surface, there is no hiding that the tank is empty, and if oxygen levels are too low, the brain will shut down to prevent damage. That’s why a diver blacks out.

  “Ninety percent of all blackouts happen at the surface,” Kirk said, “9 percent happen within that first 10 meters, and .9 percent happen below 10 meters.” Freedivers call that the “rule of nines.” But blackouts aren’t what kill spearfishermen. Competitive freedivers black out just as often if not more so, and Nick was their first death in over 35,000 dives. Spearfishermen die when they black out alone. With no safety divers or dive buddies to bring them around, they sink and drown. Safety protocols are integral to PFI courses and those given at newer schools like Mike Board’s Freedive Gili and Ted Harty’s Immersion Freediving, where Nick studied. But with a profusion of new schools come even more students, and some arrive on a quest to get as deep as possible, as quickly as they can.

  A fundamental sea change in the sport began with the publication of an equalization document from Eric Fattah, a former world record holder considered by Will Trubridge to be one of competitive freediving’s top innovators. He was the first to attempt a depth record with a monofin and he invented fluid goggles, swim goggles adapted to withstand pressure at depth. But his most significant and controversial impact on the sport came in 2001, shortly before he set his world record, when he published a document online entitled “Frenzel-Fattah Equalizing Workshop.” It spelled out the deep equalization technique, known as “three-stage mouthfill,” in an easy and user-friendly way.

  “Everybody laughed because they didn’t know who I was,” he said, “and I’m not entirely certain it was a good decision [to publish it]. It’s become the bible of equalization, I’ve never made a penny on it, and instructors aren’t even teaching it properly.”

  Before Eric Fattah, athletes were already funneling air from their lungs into their mouth using what’s known as a grouper call, storing it there for the rest of the dive, and using it to equalize their sinuses through the soft palate. But they weren’t grouper calling until at least 50 meters because they were worried that if they brought their air up too soon, they’d swallow it before they reached their goal depth. Eric knew that there was a lot more air in his lungs at 20 meters than there would be at 50 meters, and hypothesized that if he grouper called at 20 meters, he could store more air for equalization. The trick would be keeping that air in his mouth without swallowing it, so he added exercises, which enabled him to close off his throat effectively and maintain his 20-meter mouthfill all the way down.

  It was as if he’d cracked a code. Until then the only thing that stopped divers with long breath holds from going deep was equalization. For years, athletes experimented in the dark, attempting new techniques on their own, slowly adapting to pressure and inching their way down. Eric’s document threatened to change everything, which is why he included an important disclaimer:

  If your diving depth is currently limited by equalizing, the techniques explained in this document, if properly learned, may dramatically increase your depth potential in a short time. Please take care in your progression to new depths as all the risks normally associated with freediving deeper without proper preparation will still apply!

  At first, Eric’s document largely benefited only elite athletes because experienced teachers knew not to share the Frenzel-Fattah technique with new students until they were better adapted to pressure. Even Will Trubridge and his main rival, world record holder Alexey Molchanov of Russia, progressed deliberately. It took Alexey two years to get to 80 meters and another three years to get to 100. Will dove to 40 meters in 2004 and to 89 meters in 2008. But soon something would go terribly wrong.

  Marco Consentino, the Vertical Blue safety diver and longtime Apnea Academy instructor, can pinpoint the year the freediving community lost perspective. “There is a kind of line from what was [competitive] freediving in 2011, and what [competitive] freediving became after that point,” he said. “Until then people who were competing had adapted to the depths. They were people with a lot of experience, with hours of depth behind their shoulders. So everything was much more under control. Since then I’ve seen lots of newcomers doing incredible depths without any knowledge about their physiology and how it adapts.”

  The trouble was that freediving schools had opened everywhere. Anywhere there was deep water—Hawaii, Egypt, Indonesia, Greece, Russia, Slovenia, Tenerife, California, Florida, Israel, and, of course, the Bahamas—there were newly minted freediving instructors spreading the gospel that it didn’t require years of training to go deep. Humans were born to do it, they’d say, which is why the mammalian dive reflex is a hardwired genetic response. All someone needed was a decent breath hold, proper instruction, and Eric Fattah’s technique, and they too could go from everyman to Aquaman.

  Like Marco, Will Trubridge sees a direct link between the wide dissemination of Eric’s technique and the proliferation of lung squeezes in competitive freediving: “The [three-stage] mouthfill has enabled divers who don’t have a great deal of flexibility in the diaphragm to equalize to 70, 80, 90, 100 meters, and because they don’t have the flexibility, their system becomes brittle and any small tweak will cause damage to that brittle structure. For example, maybe you are a little too panicky on the bottom and pull a little too
hard on the rope in Free Immersion or you have a contraction that’s a little too strong. Anything that deviates from that perfect beautiful fall down to depth, slow turn, and cruise back up will start to incede on those structures.”

  “I love the sport and I love to go deeper and deeper, but meter by meter, year by year,” Marco said. “You need time, you need experience, and you need hours of training. Newer generations want it all and they want it now. Something has to change. I’ve seen too many guys spitting blood. I’ve seen too many guys going down without proper preparation. You cannot just go for more depth because you want. The sea is listening to you, and if you are doing things without proper preparation he will not forgive you.”

  For decades the limiting factor separating the deepest freedivers from the rest was almost always equalization, which took patience and dedication to master. After 2011, there was a new limiting factor in the sport: the lung squeeze.

  Nick Mevoli took his first formal freediving course in 2011.

  On his first day at Lincoln High School, Nick Mevoli wore what would become his uniform: a secondhand flannel shirt, jeans, and a studded black belt crowned with a fat vintage Americana belt buckle. He rode to school on his BMX and coasted to the front gate across the brick plaza in front of the auditorium, where students gathered in groups beneath the sycamore trees.

  Set in Florida’s western panhandle, Tallahassee shared more traits with the Deep South than it did with South Florida. There were sprawling oak-shaded streets, rolling green hills, antebellum homes with wide front porches, and like most small Southern towns, a legacy of segregation. The black kids and white kids mostly kept their distance.

  Justin Pogge noticed Nick ride up, standing in the saddle, weaving between students. Justin was skinny, with a bookish, pale complexion, bright blue eyes, and a mop of dark brown hair. Compared to him and all his friends, this new kid looked like a grown man. He was tall and strong, with massive sideburns, olive skin, and a thick brown mane. Maybe he was an escaped felon posing as a student, or worse. A narc. Justin enjoyed conjuring possible past lives for Nick as he locked up his bike and disappeared into the low-lying complex of brick buildings that made up campus.

  When Belinda and Fred told him they were moving, Nick bucked and kicked. He didn’t like the idea of leaving his friends and girlfriend, and switching high schools midstream, but the decision had been made. They had two daughters of their own at that point, and Fred had left teaching and become an attorney. When his meth-head client stole his car, they decided to ditch the Tampa area and its rising tide of crime. Fred landed at the Florida Department of Revenue in Tallahassee and his family landed in a cramped two-bedroom apartment where Nick shared a small room with his two baby sisters.

  Later that day Justin found himself sitting next to Nick in his English class. Justin grew up outside of town in an intentional community called the Miccosukee Land Cooperative. It was a commune of sorts, founded in the back-to-the-land, free-love daze of the early 1970s. This one had a private property twist that enabled its sustainability. Families owned their individual plots, but there was a mix of shared property too. Most of it designated as open space. Roads were unpaved and named for Beatles songs. There were organic gardens and ancient oak trees, and trails winding through ninety glorious acres of woods and wetlands. There were also lots of parties. It was the kind of place where new people constantly blew through.

  Perhaps that’s why Justin was a “connector,” attracted to anyone and anything new. He offered to show Nick around town after school. Justin seemed harmless enough, so he agreed. After the bell rang, they swerved streets shaded by mossy oaks, cut corners through mini-mall parking lots and gas stations, hopped curbs and ran red lights. They talked about music. Nick had started to enjoy straight edge punk bands like Minor Threat, which was precisely what Justin was into. Minor Threat’s song “Out of Step” summarized the straight edge scene:

  I don’t drink

  I don’t smoke

  I don’t fuck

  For kids like Justin and Nick, that song felt like an anthem of rebellion against the excess and indulgence of modern life. Unlike almost all rock, pop, and hip-hop acts since the dawn of the music industry, straight edge bands were antihedonistic and yet engaged in the world. Their most fervent devotees got the letter X inked on the back of their hands, inspired by the X stamped on the hands of underage kids at shows. It was supposed to mean they couldn’t drink, but straight edge kids adopted the mark because they had no intention of drinking. Justin had the X tattoo, the first iteration of what would be a mosaic of ink on his left side traveling from his hand to his collar. Nick noticed. The new friends discussed straight edge philosophy and their favorite bands as they lapped the state capitol and made their way to the Civic Center, an arena complex where Florida State’s basketball team plays their home games.

  Still a block away, Nick spotted a house on a small rise above the sidewalk with a fifteen-foot slope running toward the street. He rode up the driveway without warning and bunny hopped off the slope, sticking the landing and coasting into the Civic Center parking lot with ease. Justin was stunned, but Nick was just warming up.

  Nick had been riding and competing on a BMX bike since middle school. Back in St. Pete, he’d won races and moved up the Florida rankings, but didn’t care much for the spoils. The day after winning a race, he’d ride over to the post office and ship the shiny trophy to his Grandma Josie in New Jersey. He had no use for it and figured it would make her happy. To him it was about the win itself and the thrill of the ride.

  These were the so-called dark days of BMX. X Games were rising, and even the best track riders were abandoning the race circuit to freestyle in the streets. They rode rails, jumped stairs, and worked on tricks on half-pipes and jumps they built themselves. Nick and his pal, Ryan Cullen, took after them. Although riders are pulling 540s these days, back then a 360 was the Holy Grail, and only the great Todd Lyons was doing midair back flips. Nick wanted to accomplish both.

  He and Ryan scouted a grassy embankment off a freeway extension near Ryan’s house where the slope was steep and abutted a deep channel linked to a bayou. This was Florida, after all, where swampland was the new suburbia. Nick brought his dive gear to the channel—he had it all by then, weights, tanks, mask, and fins—and cleared it of rusted shopping carts and stolen bicycles. He made sure nothing dangerous cluttered the drop zone, and only then did they build their jump.

  “He was so creative and always pushing himself to the limit, with whatever he was into,” said Ryan. “I remember he had to build the biggest, craziest jump. It wasn’t necessarily built correctly, but he made it work.”

  Their plywood ramp was six feet high, eight feet long, and about four feet wide. They called it Lake Jump, and when it was finally ready, Nick took the first run. He duct-taped two-liter water bottles to his handlebars and frame to make the bike float, and hiked to the top of the embankment. At the apex he could feel the draft of hundreds of cars whipping down the interstate in a blur and see the channel meet the bayou in the distance. When he came charging downhill, his buddies cheered. He flew twenty feet in the air, higher than any of them had ever been before, and came splashing down in the murky channel, unscathed.

  Before long he was pulling the tricks of his dreams. He mastered the Superman, where he’d grab the seat and the bars and kick his legs straight back in a flying position; landed a “no-footed can can,” with both of his legs kicked out over the top tube, like a Rockette; and one day, he even pulled a 360. Soon it became easy for him to do it over the water, but he never could land it on solid ground. Whenever he launched at a skate park he would hit the back wheel first and flip over the front of the handlebars. Afterward he’d be livid, scream and curse, and brood about it for hours.

  His best trick came when he rode over to Lake Jump on his mom’s bubble-gum-pink beach cruiser. He pushed that heavy mess to the top of the embankment and flew downhill, pulling a back flip over the water. Ryan and Nick l
aughed their asses off, then hosed it down, so he could ride it home before Belinda knew a thing.

  There were injuries. One evening when Jen was home from college, Nick snuck in the back door with a wad of bloody napkins over his left eye and found her in the bathroom applying makeup, getting ready to go out.

  “Oh my God! What happened to you?!” Jen shrieked.

  “Shhh! Mom’ll freak out.”

  “Fine, let me see it,” she said. Nick peeled the napkins away, revealing a three-inch gash centimeters from his eyeball. The white of his eye was clouded with blood.

  “Is it bad?” he asked. Jen nodded. She could barely speak it looked so terrible. It also looked painful, but Nick didn’t seem to be in pain. She’d picked up on Nick’s tremendous pain tolerance when he was a small child, and as he’d grown, his tolerance for pain and discomfort had grown as well—traits that would eventually help him achieve greatness underwater, but might also become his Achilles’ heel.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” she said sternly. That evening, Jen, in heels and big hair, dressed to the nines; Nick, in his bloodied, muddy bike gear; and Belinda, in sweats and flip-flops, spent six hours in the ER. His next hospital visit came when he was sixteen, after breaking his wrist at the BMX track. His mother forbade him from riding until the cast came off. Nick waited four days before sawing out the wedge between his thumb and first finger, so he could duct-tape that hand to his handlebars and practice his tricks with a broken wrist. He had X Games ambitions, after all, and couldn’t miss any training time. A few weeks later, when he felt even stronger, he sawed the remainder of the cast into two pieces, rode with both arms free, then expertly duct-taped it back together before heading home.