I've been scuba diving before and for me scuba diving is like running with an ankle chain. Free-diving is breath-hold diving. It's any diving without compressed gas. So if you're not diving on scuba and you're underwater, you're free-diving. Herbert is the world's greatest free-diver ever, hands down. What's really extraordinary about Herbert is he's doing dives no one else has done before. So, every dive he's done, it's the first time a human being has done it. I love swimming and diving, interacting with marine life. You're more than just a spectator and it's just a world that opens up and I wouldn't want to miss it. I think as a good free-diver, you have to be in tune with your body. Not many people comprehend what it means, really, listening to the body. Training is critical in free-diving for the same reason it's critical for climbing to the top of Mt. Everest. I've heard that un-acclimated person taking the top of Mt. Everest would die within minutes. The same is true for a person taken off the street down to 200 feet or 400 feet or 800 feet, like Herbert dives to. To be able to reach those altitudes or dive to those depths, you have to train your body and mind. "Packing" is a technique where I go sip by sip, I compress extra air in my lungs, probably twice as much as normal. But this is not something that happened overnight. It's something I've practiced. Most free-divers are a bit older because then you're mentally stronger and this is the key factor of free-diving, that you stay very calm. Imagine the situation that you are there on the dive-rope, setting your record and you have all the eyes on you, the media, the judges, the safety divers, and you have to be in a mode like waking up on a lazy Sunday and turning back around in bed, because if you are not relaxed, really relaxed, you need so much more oxygen so you can dive at all. When I dive longer and deeper, the body takes more and more nitrogen in the blood system and when I go back up, there's too much. You have to off-gas... it's exchanging the excessive nitrogen with oxygen again. If you don't do that, eventually you will get decompression sickness. Decompression sickness is serious, especially in free-diving, and it's basically air bubbles going to places they shouldn't go, which is basically the heart or the brain. And it tends to show itself as stroke-like symptoms. And this can be a very minor thing or it can be a few major things, which happened to me in the last no-limit dive. In the beginning, everything went as planned. The problem was upon going up again, I fell asleep and the safety divers found me there without any motion, at 26 meters below the surface and they thought I had blacked out because of lack of oxygen. Their initial thing was to unstrap me and bring me back up, even though I was trying to stop them they brought me to the surface, and like 15 minutes after the dive, I felt the onset of decompression sickness, getting limp in my right body half, the leg, the arm, getting a bit numb too. No movement. Then, yeah. I was wheelchair bound and my brain was gone. I could hardly speak and I didn't know my best friend's name and so on. The doctors, they tried to tell me, "Learn to cope with it." In the beginning, I didn't think so much about diving, even though I thought it will always be part of me, even though they said, "You should never ever dive again." Then I said, "Okay, see ya," and I did some diving again. It was fantastic, just to be in the element again. Seeing him in the water again, in a couple of days, he was back at depths that most people can't reach in a lifetime. So, he's obviously still got his...still got his A-game. It's just outside the water, I still have some issues with balance, coordination, with articulation, but in the water is maybe a bit more my element than being on land. Being in the water, I felt like a kid again. Even though I didn't compete again, I was back to where I was before, confirmed to myself I can do it and that was enough. Herbert's just different because he's pushed the limits further than anyone else has and showing that the human body is capable, if properly trained and if you're strong enough mentally, to do these extraordinary things. Deep diving is just a mystical part of it, just exploring the underwater world to see what's down there, what's under the surface.
