Mateusz Malina
Freediving Poland
An excellent story on Mateusz Malina’s last visit to Dahab.
A terrific performance, a real tour de force, by one of the most exciting of the up and coming athletes.
Destined, I feel, to be a great Champion.
A post from Matt’s Facebook page:
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This year I was mostly focused on pool competitions with ability to dive deep, however it was not my main focus due to lack of my presence at depth World Championships. By “ability to dive deep†I mean that I was maintaining my lung flexibility levels but not preparing my muscles strictly towards depth diving. Pool and depth diving are completely different efforts and so they have to be trained accordingly. I had 2 weeks of holiday and I decided to spend that time in lovely Dahab. I’ve planned that trip to catch some competition and have opportunity to do some official CNF dives (cause Blue Hole is too shallow for me in any other discipline I didn’t even take my monofin there). Water temperature of 24 degrees combined with wind was quite challenging condition for my Orca Free suit but I’ve managed to perform few relaxed no-warmup dives. I’ve decided to use half of my pool packing capabilities, means I was doing 40 packs instead of 80 before the dive 🙂 With 1,2kg I was neutral at 21m. All together I have done 3 training days where I’ve reached 67m , 74m and 80m CNF, all with ease, finally feeling some strength in my arms. I had 2 days off before competition and got typical to Egypt stomach issues. However I quickly get over it within 1 day and I had another full day to recover. I’ve decided to announce 83m which was national record attempt (77m was the old record). It felt really good and strong. One day break and I have announced 86m for 2nd day of comp. In the morning I could feel that I have some lactic left in my hamstrings (could feel them a bit stiff). However I knew that I can still do the dive cause in all of my previous dives I have quite a bit of oxygen reserve (and If I don’t feel like I can always grab a rope and go up FIM which is the easiest discipline for me). Problem came with my D6i. For some reason during deco dive after 83m in gauge mode I got no flight-mode for 48h and all dive modes disappeared after surfacing. After a while Free mode and Gauge mode were restored. Strange thing is that depth notification alarms were restored to factory settings (30m – off) and I find out about it during my way down 🙁 Normally I rely on them a lot and use all 5 of them. (For slowing dawn, for last stroke, for mouthfill, refill and nearly there…) It kind of completely destroyed my way down, I was anxious and start freefall way too early (it took me approx ~12sec longer to get down to the bottom than it should). I was considering if I should abort the dive at that point but I’ve decided to give it a go as long as I will be able to stay relaxed and equalize from mouthfill that I took around 30m I guess. At the bottom I hit the plate with my head and was quite confused, based on bottom camera review this turn was much less efficient then on the previous dive. All together dive was 15sec too long (4:00) and I had tiny 2sec BO at surface. I came up, took few breaths, start removing nose-clip and pass out just to be back in a few seconds. The way up was also not efficient cause I was swimming all the way to the surface (instead of letting positive buoyancy float me up from at least 10m) and I don’t have a habit of good recovery breathing after deep dive. All this few issues combined took precious seconds and meters from my capabilities and I didn’t accomplish the dive that I would certainly do in normal conditions 🙂 Anyway I’m very happy about this trip and my accomplishments. At this point I would like to thank Aharon Solomons for all his tips and webinars, they certainly helped me with my flexibility, not that I had problems with it in the past but this year was amazing for me in term of equalization. I had zero issues and didn’t have to think about it during my dives. Thanks to his approach once on a dive location I don’t have to do too many deep training dives. I have done 3 and even that was too much, cause on 2nd and 3rd I was feeling much stronger than on competition dives. We had measured saturation levels after comp and some minutes after 86m I had 96-97% SpO2. At the moment I got to the point that in order to progress more I have to focus either on DNF or depth (CNF, FIM). It will mostly depend If I will be able to find some sponsorship. If I find it I will train mostly for CNF and FIM and will try to progress my CNF in Bahamas next year cause I have quite a good idea how to train it and plan my deep dives now. If not I will train for DNF and give that 225m a go someday 🙂 I’m really excited about next few years!Cheers,Matt