There's a sport for people who enjoy suffocation. It's called Apnea. There are a various disciplines of it: Static, Dynamic (with or without fins), Constant Weight (with or without fins), Free Immersion, Variable Weight, No Limits.
Basically, you hold your breath for a long, long time and either measure how long you can hold your breath while not moving (Static), how far you can swim in an Olympic sized pool (Dynamic), or how deep in the water you can go using just fins, weight, or standing on a sled (No Limits). The records are incredible...
Free diving
Static Apnea: 8 min., 58 s. (Tom Sietas, Germany)
Dynamic Apnea with Fins: 200 meters (Peter Pederson, Denmark)
...and most impressively...
No Limits: 171 meters (Loïc Leferme, France)
I couldn't imagine holding onto a sled and letting it drag me down 600 feet in the water. I can only hold my breath 40 seconds, and I feel like my head's going to implode even when I swim to the bottom of the deep end in a pool. The deepest I've ever swam was when I was at BYU and I was volunteering to look after some elementary school kids at the pool. They decided it would be funny to throw a plastic ring into the platform dive pool and, instead of getting a pole or something smart like that, I decided to dive after it. It was just under thirty feet deep and I only managed to reach it by diving in from the side and then thrusting my way down using frog kicks and my arms. By the time I reached the ring, there was a pain in the middle of my forehead and the water had forced itself into my sinus cavities. I was blowing water out of my nose for a week.
...I couldn't imagine going 20 times that deep.
I understand that these people are disciplined (in fact, Chrissa says they have ways of slowing down their heartbeats while they're diving) -- But I hate the feeling of suffocation and I don't get how they do it. Doctors say pretty soon people are going to start dying if they go any deeper -- from physiological effects.
What a horrible way to go.
5 comments:
Don't get me wrong: I still love the idea of being deep underwater. When I was younger I had my heart set on becoming a marine biologist and living in an underwater habitat. It's kind of like the feeling of being by a fire on a winter day: the feeling of security despite your surroundings...sublimity. The feeling of isolation would only magnift it. The danger, possibly, as well.
Maybe that's what these people are going for. I wonder if any of them climb Mt. Everest on their free time.
i had the same dream when i was young.
i always think of the little girl in the movie "mermaids" who held her breath under water. its strangely sad. i always wanted to breathe underwater when i was a kid... i wanted to be a mermaid. i was absolutely disgusted with the little mermaid (disney), though, for giving up her exotic undersea life to join some stupid prince she couldnt even talk to. i even tried to invent a wax to coat my skin in, so that it would not shrivel after being underwater for long periods of time.
My dad suffers from sleep apnea, which, as the name suggests, means he stops breathing while he's sleeping. Of course, that version is involuntary, and I doubt anybody's tracking world records.
There are actually two forms of sleep apnea, obstructive and central. They have similar effects, but the obstructive variety entails physical symptoms, i.e. the literal collapse or obstruction of the throat, while central sleep apnea occurs when the brain stops telling the body to breathe. The former's more common, but the latter's creepier.
Sleep apnea was the only form I'd heard of until I read this.
I can't believe some dude held his breath for eight minutes.
I've been practicing, the past few days, holding my breath underwater. My whole life I've never been able to hold me breath more than a few seconds--not even for a minute. The other day I held it for 49 seconds. That was with Chrissa counting--not "official" time--but I think I might be able to hold my breaf up to a minute. That would be cool.
I had a book read to me, in 4th grade, about a British kid vacationing in the French Riviera and how he watches the tan French kids hold their breath and swim through a narrow tunnel under a neck of land and out the other side. The Brit ends up training himself to hold his breath 2 minutes, then he goes through. I couldn't help but feel claustrophobic at the thought.
Story #2: A friend of mine would go spellunking down in AZ and told me about a cave where you had to climb down and then up through a shoulder-width hole to get from one part of the cave to another...only the hole is always filled with water. So you end up climbing headfirst into a narrow passage and, if you don't make the turn, you'll drown (unless someone can pull you out somehow)...No thanks.
Someone mentioned to me, just the other day, that these people have to suck water into their sinus caveties in order to pressurize them...otherwise, they could hemorage [sp?].
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