DNF 171 meter

Static No

I'm slowly getting back to feeling good about Static again thanks to warm ups.
After my second competition where I did 6.11 min I thought things had to change, so I started training only with No Warm Up. Basically just breath normal for a few minutes and then I did one purge and the final breath.
It started off feeling quite ok and the contractions started coming around 3 min but never to heavy. I did a few nice tries over 7 minutes and I felt great coming up. Which is the hole idea with No Warm Up.
The unpleasent part starts quite early but is under control, and the you are very clear headed for the last fight part of the breathhold. I was never close to samba.

But then I started taking it a bit further and did No Breath Up. Basically just take one breath and go. No deepbreating, no purge, no nothing. And an amazing thing happened. I was up to 7 min easily right away and did 7.30 min even after some light exercise. It felt unbelievable.
I thought I was gonna go to 9 min in a weeks time...
Not so much..
Before I knew it contractions started coming at 2.30 min. Then 2 min. And then..
I started giving up breathholds at 3 min.
What the hell???

After some headscratching and talks with the Static king of Sweden Ulf Dextegen
(who´s always doing No Warm Ups but has also been at the same crossroad) I decided I was not ready or experienced enough for this.
So I took a little break from Static and started slowly with Warm Ups again and it just feels...like coming home.
We´ll see where it takes me but I think for the World Championship this is the right path for me now.

Air

A needed break in training. Freash air is good.

I hit a wall in the No Warm Up Static training so I went out to find some inspiration. My contractions started coming earlier and earlier the more I trained which was not the course I had in mind. And I lost a little faith in the overall breath hold. They varied way to much. So I decided to take a few steps back and start freash. It was time to go back to Warm Ups. I hope it's a wise decision.

1 month to go to the World Championship.
But first I'm off to my fishing grounds in the fjords. That is a good place to find focus and work on relaxations. And to get dinner...Now it's mackerel season.
Wet the lure..

The Wolfpack

Last weekend two friends came over for a tiny training camp and some fundiving and fishing. Coach Petter and Il Capitano Philip made the 1000km trip and we started out with the first pool session in a while. We went through the preparations and the set up for the static and we tried to make it as competition-like as possible with countdown and a busy pool with lot's of distractions.

 I have done very few wet No Warm Up Statics but have decided to give it a go, and I am experimenting with different breath ups. This time I did reugular breathing until 20 seconds to OT, then 2 purges and packed 10 times.

I did 6.45 min with a clear SP and Coach Petter did a great job. Not too much and not too little. Then we did some DNF swimming which felt good but looking back on the video...was really awful. Lot's of things to work on.

Then some food and off to the ocean where we did some cool summer dives in 7 degrees water. In July! Nice.. Il Capitanos 4/3 mm surfsuit was perhaps not the best choice for the occasion but he managed a good 45 minutes in the water, which got to be the effort of the day. Or perhaps this year...

We decided to try the ocean from a boat with warm clothes on. And get some coffee down. Il Capitano was back in good form..

Petter got the biggest fish of the day. For a while he was on fire..

It was a short camp but very useful to have a coach/buddie so I could train static in the pool. It is a different thing than doing the dry static. Not so much the times but certainly the feelings. I still feel I dare to push myself much more doing dry static during the "fight" although the feelings are pretty much the same.
This time I kept my arms in the water for 1 minute more than in my two competition statics, so at least that is a small improvement. This time I put them up around 5.40 min.
So...more things to work on

The Wolfpack