A few years ago I went snorkeling with my sister, and she startled a sea lion. Rather, I was snorkeling, and my sister was free diving — that is, diving much deeper, and holding her breath much longer. She had swum down to the ocean floor to inspect something, and as she glided up from the depths, the sea lion approached from out in the hazy blue. It was moving casually, but casual for a waterborne marine creature is still pretty fast. When it finally noticed my sister cruising through a space where humans normally are not, it pulled up, coming to a sudden halt, vertical in the water. The sea lion looked amazed and delighted — at least, that’s how it looked to me, looking at my sister — and at that moment, the thing I wanted most in the world was to learn how to hold my breath and dive deep long enough so that I might also startle and amaze someone, or something, like a sea lion.
Back on land and drying off, I asked my sister how she’d gotten so good. It took training, she said, but the key to free diving was not learning how to hold your breath. It was learning how not to breathe.
Free diving is unlike most athletic pursuits in that you start training by reading. I ordered “Manual of Freediving: Underwater on a Single Breath,” by an Italian diver named Umberto Pelizzari and his trainer, Stefano Tovaglieri. Although Pelizzari is a world-champion free diver, the authors warn early on that the activity “does not lend itself to competitiveness.” Indeed, a lot of the work that goes into not breathing ran counter to my notions of just what a sport is supposed to be. One of free diving’s central concerns, for example, is keeping your heart rate as low as possible and relaxing deeply, all the better to embrace the essential emptiness inside. “The heart is a hollow muscle,” Pelizzari and Tovaglieri write.
The manual also offers the story of an old Maldivian fisherman who, on encountering a diver, advised him on how to enter the ocean. “Remember that you can go underwater in two ways,” the fisherman says. He takes a piece of coral from the beach and tosses it into the water. Next, he takes a coconut, cracks it open and pours the liquid in with the surf. “Look,” the old man says, “coral and coconut milk are now together in the water. But the coral is still coral, while the coconut milk is now sea.” Be the coconut. Be the sea. “Small story, almost Zen,” the authors note.
This Buddhist self-erasure, though, is actually great prep for learning the real mechanics of breath-holding, which are weird and counterintuitive. Most of us can hold our breath for a minute or so, driving through a tunnel or past a cemetery, waiting, fighting the urge to inhale. The thing to know is that this urge to inhale is not our body telling us we need oxygen; it is our body telling us we are filling up with carbon dioxide. The more we tense our muscles to hold back this release — the more we prepare to withstand the passage of time — the more oxygen we burn, the more carbon dioxide builds, the greater our sense of pain, the greater the urge to release. Competitive free diving is sometimes called “competitive apnea,” drawing on the medical term for temporarily not breathing (as in sleep apnea). To not breathe, you must push past all feelings of need or pain, forget time, forget holding, forget nearly everything.
Here’s where things get tricky. If you really forget everything, if you’re really successful at suppressing the pain, you can black out, which is bad. Underwater, it can be catastrophically bad. When cold water hits our faces, our heart rates slow; under high pressure, the blood vessels in our extremities constrict, sending oxygenated blood where it’s needed most, to our lungs, to our brains. Aided by a weighted sled carrying them down, and a balloon to rocket them back up, competitive free divers can go hundreds of feet deep. Free diving is among the most dangerous athletic pursuits in the world.
Riding a weighted sled to the bottom of the ocean is crazy, and not at all for me. Nor, really, are the purer forms of the sport, in which divers under their own power and without even fins swim down 300 feet or deeper, past sunlight and all sense. The sport, remember, is not really supposed to be a sport. It doesn’t lend itself to competitiveness.
And besides, I spend nearly all of my time on land. Practicing not breathing is more difficult here, sure, and definitely weirder. There’s air all around, and plenty of it. Forgoing air for a prolonged stretch can be quieting, not just focusing the mind but emptying it. I take two long, slow breaths and then imagine myself melting. I try not to breathe. I don’t breathe. I go to a place I can only describe as somewhere past pain and time, but also past fear.
Maybe it’s just the novelty of existence experienced without the principal hallmark of being alive. When I’m not breathing, I’m no longer interested in impressing sisters or startling sea lions. I’m no longer interested at all. I’m no longer much of anything but a hollow muscle, still beating.
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Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about the most common types of cancer.
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