“Freediving is much harder for girls. Of course, our lungs, and our lung volume, are smaller. But it goes deeper than that – our differences in the water are primal. We handle body temperature changes differently. When men get too cold or hot, their sperm dies, but once they’re regulated again, they just make new sperm. When women get too cold or hot, we run the risk of permanent sterility. This is deeply connected to the desire to live – women have a stronger desire to live then men, so we have a faster urge to breathe. Because of these things, women and men simply can’t compete against each other in the sport of freediving…”
Jana Strain recently set a new Pan American Women’s Freediving Record in dynamic apnea, with a swim of 181 meters (594 feet) in two minutes and twenty seconds. She was the fifth woman to ever swim over 175M in competition on a single breath. But that’s not all she’s accomplished in the last year. She broke more Pan American freediving records, one was in Constant No Fins and the other in Dynamic No Fins, and she won the title of ‘National Champion’ at the Canadian Indoor Finals. Oh, and launched a breathtaking career.
“Freediving is a small sport, not really well known,” says Jana from a friend’s apartment in Egypt where she’s getting ready to compete next week. “It’s more recognized in Europe or places that border the sea. It’s all about how deep you can go and how long you can hold your breath.”
The sport of competitive freediving features disciplines performed in the pool and in the sea or lake. Both have strict rules and gear regulations, cameras, judges and lines for measuring distances. Dynamic Apnea is an underwater swim where competitors hold their breath unassisted and use either a mono-fin or bi-fins for accelerated movement.
Jana only entered the sport just over one year ago in the spring of 2008, but as she says, “I follow open doors.” And when she recognized that she had a talent for freediving, she didn’t look back. “Basically, I was having a mid-20’s crisis. I was teaching scuba at the time and I thought my calling was to be dolphin trainer. So, I went to sign up, and they told me that I had to be able to swim 120 feet underwater on a single breath to get the job.” Jana signed up for a class immediately that specialized in this kind of training, thinking to herself that holding her breath for that long was an impossibility.
“But, it wasn’t impossible. I could actually do it,” she recalls. Her instructors, however, recognized that she had quite a bit of talent and asked her if she would consider competing. She would, she did and she triumphed, quickly landing a spot on the national team. The team traveled to Egypt in August, 2008 for the Team World Championships where Jana “met all of the top athletes from my sport. It was amazing to see all of the different body types and learn about the different ways to train. Since the sport is so small and because everybody responds to the water, depth and biology of the sport so differently, there’s an incredible amount of support, sharing and friendship between the athletes. Competition and hoarding secrets is pointless and a waste because what works for me won’t necessarily work for someone else. We all find our own ways.”
After her success in Egypt Jana decided it was time to really start training seriously, then she won the highest honor in the sport by being voted the Best New Freediver of 2008. But, with the sport so small, there aren’t coaches available with knowledge and time. “My brother trains with me, he comes to the pool and safeties me.” Her training regimen is something that she’s created from experience and listening to the other athletes in her field. Three to four days per week, she’s in the pool, working on apnea technique and endurance for 25-50 minutes – purely swimming underwater, and then she completes 600-1200 meters of lap swimming to tone and relax her muscles.
Depth training is a different story because divers have to space out their practices so the body doesn’t get overwhelmed. “What we’re really practicing here, is the ability for the body to go negative as it reaches increased depths – your lungs and the rest of your body need to learn to adapt to increased pressure,” Jana says. “With depth diving, it’s not how far you can swim, but how relaxed you can be in order to equalize your body and your ear space. If you’ve ever been deep in water or on a plane, you know that when the pressure changes you feel pressure in between your ears. When you scuba dive, you equalize the ear space fairly easily because your lungs are full. But with freediving, without the lungs full, we have to use techniques to equalize the pressure in the throat and mouth. It’s intense.” As a result, freedivers can train, on average, for two days before needing to take a day off to rebalance.
“When you get down to about 20 meters, you hit the free fall zone. It’s almost like meditating, you have to be entirely motionless and relaxed. I have a really busy mind, so holding still and holding my breath down so deep in the ocean, I feel like I’m in an asylum. It’s my greatest challenge. But there was this one time, where a baby humpback whale was in the area of our dives, and when I hit 20 meters, I could hear his whale song. That was magical, his serenade.”
Jana may be new to the world of freediving, but not the discipline and endurance it takes to thrive. “I’ve trained as a dancer since I was a kid, I think that’s why I’ve excelled at this sport in such a short time. Freediving is one part physical, one part lungs and, perhaps most importantly, one part mental. If I tell myself I can’t, then I can’t. If I tell myself I can, then I will. Dynamic apnea is very hard and extremely uncomfortable – and I could negatively talk myself into quitting very easily. But if I keep the self-talk positive, the way I would speak to a good friend, I can do more than I ever imagined. It’s all up to me.”
By Julie Roads
[...] my interview with Jana (she says some very cool things) and check out the new site, follow me right over here… Share and [...]