Day 1 At The Pool

Hello everyone back home from the olympic sized Pristan Swimming Arena, Maribor, Slovenia, where the long awaited AIDA Freediving World Championships began today.

What The??
I am here as an official guest of Team New Zealand (one person, my mate Kathryn...) being the back up team motivator/cheering squad, after Kathryn's hubby Braedon ofcourse. Comparative to the sort of thing that Peter Brock and John Eals was doing for the Aussie team in at the Athens Olympics - nothing but an excuse to go on holiday and hang out with cute athletes.

A bit about why I'm a fan: I met Kathrn at first year uni and we were flatmates for the following two. We witnessed each others many glories and defeats and miserable sunday mornings over those rough young times. And I still must say, she excels at anything she attempts. To be able to achieve the NZ record within a very short time of starting the sport and making the world champs within three years is an amazing achievement. Wish her all the best everyone!!

Back at the Pool
My 'Team' isn't competing on Day 1 (only half day) so it was spent being educated about what freediving is like in practice. Its quite a fascinating sport really and it involves a whole lot of different disciplines of total body fitness, lung endurance, mental toughness, and competition strategy. It crosses between scuba diving and swimming, both of which I have done before so it is not completely foreign for me to understand. It can also be quite dangerous as you can suffer from blackouts after your brain doesnt receive enough oxygen, and very scary to watch some one suffer from that in the pool. That is why safety is so important in the sport. And its quite interesting to watch because you are not cheering for how fast they swim but how FAR. You can read more about the technical side of freediving on Kathryn's blog.

Day 1 was dynamic with fins heats (swim non stop at the bottom of the pool with fins for as far as possible without blacking out) and already the Slovenian Men's and Czech Republic Women's national record have been broken. Just to give you a rough idea of the scale of fitness and endurance we're talking about... the world record for women is 200 meters (thats four laps of an olympic sized pool, no breathing...) and the mens is 225m. There are two finals, one for the top eight qualifyers (A Finals) and one for those ranked 9th to 16th (B finals) which will be decided on Day 2. The results are constantly updated on the comp website above, so you can check it out as it progresses.

Meanwhile I have created my own category of competition: The Flying Baroness's Slapping Six Packs in Slovenia Awards. Today Gold goes to Netherlands, Silver goes to Japan and Bronze goes to Slovenia's safeties in army wet suits. Results updated daily.