ATC: Video and media

Lars Strandridder from Aarhus Freediving Club put together this video from last weekends competition. Hopefully you will get a little glimps of the great athmosphere and maybe come join us next year...



Bjarte and I also made it to the norwegian media with our new national records, and you can read more on Aftenposten (if you are fluent in norwegian!).

Also check out the final results and the pictures from the competition.

ATC 2008: sunny and warm!

Aarhus Triple Challenge was, like the two years before, a warm and friendly competition with alot of happy faces. This year's competition was going on in Silkeborg, just outside of Aarhus, and on both saturday and sunday we were using a beautiful outdoor pool.

This ment a lot of sunshine on pale scandinavian skin (and some sunburns!), fresh air and of course a BBQ by the pool afterwards. Even though I didn't really manage to copy friday's great performance in DNF on either saturday or sunday's DYN, I had a wonderful time.

It was also great to see another norwegian freediver competing. Bjarte Nygaard from Oslo Freediving club is a rather new, but very talented freediver who I hope we will se much more of in the future.

He did a very impressive DNF on friday with 125m and a strong 144m in DYN on saturday. These performances are both national records. In static I was coaching Bjarte, who fought his way to 5.13 without a suit in the 26 degree pool. I'm especially impressed that he managed these three clean, nice dives on his first ever competition!

So, a great weekend is over, but there's already talking about another competition here in Aarhus in three weeks or so. For some reason, it seems like we can't get enough of this sport!

113m in DNF: new national record!

My first dive at Aarhus Triple Challenge went surprisingly well. I was competing in dynamic without fins, a diciplin that I hadn't seriously persued since the world championship in July 2007. I had only been doing one 75m dive at training and a little technique, so there was no big expectations.

15 min before my official top I was gonna do my warm up, which is just a couple of 25m dives to get the water feeling. I then realized I had brought the wrong neck weight, a 1,5kg instead of the usual 2,5kg! This brought me some stress as I knew that with one kilo less weight, I was way to positiv in the water to do any proper diving.

Luckily Daan had a 2,5kg neck weight laying around, and the problem was thereby quickly solved. I tried it out a single time, then sat on the edge of the pool to start breathing up. I had promissed myself to focus on only one thing for this dive: to relax. Not to worry about any meters or records or ranking at all. And it worked!

Once I was diving, everything became silent and slow. I convinced myself, meter by meter, that in fact, I could do a little more. At the turn on 100m, I thought: "Hey, it would be fun to do a new personal best." So I kept swimming untill I was sure I had passed 106m (from March 2007), and came up on 113m with a clean surface protocol and a big smile :)