Lubomir Stefanoff | freediving and UW photography

Two weeks till the next freediving trip to Greece… This weekend we had to settle with an outdoor swimming pool (in Sofia) which was a good place for training.  Despite the parties held on Friday night, 6 freedivers/spearfishermen appeared at the pool on Saturday – it’s a good number, considered tha fact that freediving and pool training for spearfishermen are not very popular in Bulgaria…yet. One of the pools is 5.6 m deep and in the morning wasn’t crowded. We did many dives and static apneas there – you can see the clear water on the pics. I wasn’t able to do longer apneas because of the cold – I was shivering in my surfing wetsuit after an hour in the water.

Mitko was doing great and logged several good dives on my divewatch. He even broke my humble 2:20 record (done at 10m last summer), so I decided to wear a full wetsuit ot Sunday and log a better time – it’s my watch…and I had done much longer static apneas without it! I thought for a while about my approach to freediving – I do it for fun and for my own pleasure, but I have to admit that I felt the competition demon in me.  I had won many competitions (not in freediving) and I like winning in general…but  I haven’t thought that this could be a driving force for my freediving… Well, we will see, I’m a beginner and I have to learn more about myself…Competing (with friends) is not a bad thing, we had a lot of fun during that two days. (I guess I bother with ‘competing’ cause I’m far from the sea and had tons of work to do.)

We didn’t miss the chance to make some figures in the pool – it was kind of hard in the beginning, laughing a lot underwater because of the lack of coordination between us. After a few tries we managed to form a decent circle on the bottom (Ivozag played with my camera and captured it; Thanks for the other good pics, Ivo!). We also attracted some kids  who were astonished at the fact that a human being could stay underwater for several minutes and come up alive! It sounds funny, but we had to be responsible when we train during public hours at the pool. Kids tend to imitate what they see…and doing that with freediving could be disastrous.

Sunday was a different day – much warmer, no wind…and full 5 mm wetsuit. I wanted to do dynamic apnea in the 50 m pool, but for a warm-up I did some static apneas in the deep pool. I regained the ‘record’ on my divewatch, but Mitko broke it again…Well I gave up the idea of max dynamics and after a short break started again with statics at the bottom.  Soon I set a new ‘longest apnea’ (according to the divewatch) that Mitko couldn’t break.  Next Sunday I’ll try to set a longer one, close to my PB (5:03 at the moment).

Now that I finished the basic preparation, I won’t spend much time training out of the water (running and cardio in the gym). I don’t think I’ll have the chance to go freediving again this month, so my training will be mostly in the pool (3 times a week) +some  dry CO2 tables. Here is how my typical work out in the pool look like:

10 x 50 m with the monofin, 1:30 rest

10 x 25 m sprints underwater, 1:00 rest

500 m monofin swimming – 25m underatwer/25 m on the surface (active recovery)

After that I usually spend 15-20 minutes doing some monofin drills – swimming on the sides and back, focusing on the knees (as I saw from a recent video footage I bend them too much).

After today’s session I thought for a while about the benefits of this kind of training. To be honest, I think I’m not training hard enough. I can swim easily 50 meters DYN with the monofin with those 1:30 rest and I don’t feel tired at the end of the workout. It’s high time to start doing either more meters or decrease the rest intrevals (I’ll try 1 minute rest on Thursday to see how I feel). After all, the body needs to get stressed to achive a good training effect. I haven’t done long dynamic apneas recently and last time I tried to pass 75 m I just didn’t want to suffer the contractions and came out early exactly at 75 m. Staying in the comfort zone won’t yield good results. Doing longer distances regularly (including max attempts) will help me get used to contractions and finally make the 100 m swim (I’m sure I can do that, just need some time to prepare mentally). From now on I’ll do one max attempt every week both in static and in dynamic…hope to see results in the near future. I haven’t done much wet staics either cause I usually  wear a 2.5 mm shorty wetsuit and get cold pretty soon, so maybe going to the pool with full suit on Saturdays is a good idea – I won’t be the only one with a spearfishing suit in the water – probably Mitko and Vov will be there too…