“How do we compete without feeling competitive?”

Ash, Angus, Ron and Jarrod at the Australian Pool Nationals 2023.

Written by Jarrod

Ash and I, along with our training buddies Angus and Ron, competed in the Australian Pool Nationals 2023. It was a great opportunity to test our training in the competition environment. Many of the skills we train whilst freediving improve our ability to control our breathing and our responses to stressful situations. We use breathing and mental techniques before a dive to defocus and control the nervous system and how we respond to stressful or exciting situations. These techniques are completely transferable and really help to keep you calm, focused and present when dealing with the stresses of work, life and relationships.

Freediving competitions are a great way to test these skills under pressure. To perform your best dive, you want to forget about the need to succeed. I love this quote I heard on a BBC recreation of the final descent of Natalia Molchanova - arguably one of the best freedivers of all time - “Unless you are capable of forgetting completely about Atlantis, you will never finish your journey”. I think this poem sums up the mindset we want to cultivate for freediving. We want to compete, without feeling competitive. That sounds like an oxymoron doesn’t it. But the more you want to achieve something the more you will have an adrenaline release which will create muscular tension, raise your heart rate and trigger signals of fight or flight. I have tested this out several times at home whilst doing my visualisations wearing the pulse oximeter. Just visualising a big competition dive I often notice that my heart rate has increased from low 50 beats per minute to 70 beats per minute. The only thing that has changed during this time laying on my bed is that my thoughts are at the competition. The ego often tells us we are capable of a big dive just before we start, BUT once we start we want to create laser focus on each individual moment and not let our mind get ahead of ourselves in the dive. It is important that we have confidence that we can do the dive, but focusing on the outcome, or destination, before or during the dive will create feelings of stress and tension in the body and set us up to fail.

Learning to master these skills have been a core reason why I have dedicated so much time to training and competition during recent years. With each competition a new layer is peeled away and some new lesson is embedded, making me more resilient, aware or confident in times of uncertainty or stress.

Jack Hatfield Ant Judge and Jarrod Briffa on the mens overall podium.

2023 CMAS Pool Nationals was the first major competition for Ash, Angus and Ron. They had all only competed once before, at the Melbourne Freediver’s Club Teams Competition at the end of 2022. It was an incredible experience for everyone and we all got the opportunity to test our training and physical abilities under the pressure of competition - with everyone achieving PBs, with a couple of poor performances also to balance out the emotions. I have often found at competitions that I takeaway just as much learning, if not more, from the poor performances as I do from the successful ones. It is important when we have negative experiences we analyse them and understand how you could have managed it differently. Success is often found in our ability to get ourselves back up after a poor performance, learn from our mistakes and be hungry to make it better next time.

The competition was a great success and it was so excellent to see so many world class performances in both the mens and womens categories (especially the women). Big congratulations to Ant Judge and Jordan Duncan for taking out overall winners of the competition. Also massive congrats to Amber Bourke on a massive PB of 190m in DYNB and Leigh Woolley for his huge PB of 222m in DYN. It’s inspiring to see a collective step up in the performances of Australian Freediver’s, especially Athletes that have been competing for a long time already. So I better not forget the Masters Competitors, Fred Maire and Angus Mcleay on their Masters National Records - congrats guys! Also well done to Emily Shaw on the National Record in the 8x50m event.

Leigh Woolley and Jarrod after the final Dynamic event on the last day. Leigh Woolley 222m and Jarrod 218m.

The competition freediving scene in Australia is so encouraging and supportive. I remember at my first ever competition feeling so surprised that all the other competitors were so generous and genuinely cheering one another along. I had been hesitant to compete originally but when I noticed this unique culture I was hooked. Being around great divers, seeing their inspirational performances and chatting to them afterwards was the best and fastest way for me to learn the skills to improve my diving. I suppose a big reason for this culture is that so many athletes are competing with themselves more than they are their competitors. For many athletes a performance is not measured by how it compares to the other competitors but by how it measures against their own personal potential. Maybe not everyone will agree with me on this but it has definitely been my experience. Ant and I were neck and neck for first place overall throughout the competition and I think we both thought the other had won after the final event (the scoring was a little hard to calculate without a computer as scores were a % of the current world record for each discipline). I had bigger performances than Ant in both DYNB and DNF but I was sure that I had lost the overall 1st position after I got cold and underperformed on day 3 at STA coming up at 5 minutes and 9 seconds, whilst Ant performed a casual and very impressive 7 minutes 34 seconds. Then on the final day I did a new PB of 218m in Dynamic with mono-fin. We both knew the results were close, but I was pretty certain Ant had won, but he said he thought the same about me. Despite how close we were Ant gave me genuine best wishes for each event and I did the same for him. I was so stoked to see his and other athletes great performances and it only inspires you further to keep training to discover more of your own hidden abilities. It was so great to have my Melbourne training buddies here for this competition to support one another and wash off each day and get ready for the next with a hot spa in the evening. Now we look forward to training for World Championships in Jeju, South Korea in June.

Angus, Ron and Ash post comp dives.

From all of our Melbourne crew we want to send a special thanks to Lisa, Gavin and all the judges and volunteers for helping to organise this excellent inaugural CMAS event in Australia.