You’re Going to be a What?
Teaching people how to hold their breath and explore the freezing waters of Monterey isn’t exactly one of those jobs you learn about at the career fair - and it certainly raised some eyebrows at my tech job when I cited that as my reason for leaving. The first course I took with Odyssey Freediving was done entirely off a whim, but I remember being absolutely captivated by it. Weaving through kelp forests propelled by long fins and unhindered by bulky scuba gear scratched a deep brain itch that I never knew existed.
Flash forward 6 months and the bi-weekly line sessions or spearfishing days had turned into a very prominent part of my out-of-office life. I know that historically I’ve been prone to become obsessive about new activities, but this felt like one of those things I would keep getting the childlike excitement for every single time. The possibility of pursuing an instructor certification came up shortly after spending a couple weekends on my Intermediate Freediver course. Going freediving in Monterey even more regularly while sharing that experience with excited individuals and loosely calling it a career? I was ready to put a lot on the line to make that happen.
Doing something versus teaching someone to do something are two very different experiences, regardless of the activity. In complete transparency, I was more than a little worried about this shift. I had thoroughly enjoyed exploring and fishing the Monterey coastline, but I had no idea what the other side of that coin looked like. Fortunately, the opportunity to begin shadowing courses came up almost immediately after deciding to see where this path would lead. Brandon from Odyssey did a great job of integrating me into training sessions and making sure I had at least a vague idea of what I was getting myself into. Each experience in this new context of diving further confirmed that helping people hone different parts of their technique was just as fun as my instructor had made it look.
The Path to Thailand
I took a slightly less conservative approach to getting my instructor certification than I maybe should have, but I would highly recommend a similar path to anyone willing to embrace a very go with the flow mindset for a few months. I quit my job when my lease ended and moved my things into a storage unit and myself into my car. I planned to spend the summer working as a river guide up in Idaho and to conserve funds and save up as much as possible. As it turns out, spending anything becomes very difficult when you're simultaneously out of service and on the clock for weeks at a time. At first I saw it as a ‘necessary evil’ to quickly save for my unemployed time abroad. In reality, it just ended up being part one of the adventure and a great warm up for stretching a budget and the comfort zone.
I chose to do my instructor course at Kaizen Freediving on Koh Tao for two main reasons: Cost, and that I wanted to eliminate as much as possible in my life with the exception of training. When I returned to teach for Odyssey, I wanted to know I had gotten as much as possible from what could have otherwise just been a two month beach vacation. Unsurprisingly, it requires a little leap of faith to have a major career shift, relocate to a new country and do it all while still being unemployed. Fortunately, the lovely community and new routine that waited on the other side made it a jump that I can now wholeheartedly endorse.
Culture Shock:
Unbeknownst to me a year prior, freediving in Monterey Bay and freediving on Koh Tao are two vastly different experiences. I am glad to have experienced the joy of diving without gloves or a hood and know now firsthand that it does live up to the hype. However, water temperature was one of the more minor differences. The most prominent changes surrounded the dive community culture.
Very few individuals begin freediving in Monterey with the intention of adopting a major lifestyle change and reaching impressive depths in the process. A level one freediving course is often the first step towards something like spearfishing, taking underwater photos, swimming with sea lions or training for big wave surfing. It’s more of a medium for a different activity, not the activity itself.
Along with the fact that very few divers on the California coast have time to train 5 days a week, it can turn the focus towards results rather than process. I very much thought this way initially, pushing myself to early LMC symptoms more than once just because I didn’t often get a chance to train in the water. While maybe it speaks more to my trust in Brandon as a safety, it also highlighted my approach to the sport. The desire was to achieve more -- a longer time, deeper depth or bigger fish -- by pushing comfort zone boundaries.
On the island, the freediving experience oriented around consistent training and small adjustments to routine or technique. Personal bests just increased by another meter or a few seconds at a time. One could train hard, but with the idea that each dive or routine should still feel relatively easy. Hard represented a metric to gauge training frequency and consistency, not discomfort experienced during those training sessions. I made the mistake of pushing too much exactly twice - quickly being restricted to slightly shallower depths for the rest of the week. There are still consistent jokes about my blue lips at Kaizen now three months later. As I quickly learned, freediving on Koh Tao was all about the process it took to get that extra meter of depth, not the extra meter itself.
Training on Koh Tao:
We trained twice a day at Kaizen, with a cadence of two days on and one day off. The day started between 7 and 8 with either static or dynamic training in the pool, occasionally finishing with a theory session or dry training. We would then break for a few hours to eat breakfast and recover before meeting back up in the afternoon for our ocean session. I expected that living on a tropical island largely consisting of picturesque beach bars and nightly parties would make it easy for this routine to slip. I wanted to remain very cognisant of that possibility. That being said, I underestimated how difficult it would be to think about much else after spending all day either diving or chatting about diving with people who also spent their day diving. The community surrounding this niche sport turned the rigorous training routine into a practice I looked forward to each day, not just a means to an end for desired depths.
Kaizen Freediving really excelled at keeping training fresh and engaging, especially when it could begin to feel repetitive. Sergey and Lana were constantly surprising us with new subskills and new ways to train. Traditional floating-at-the-surface-statics evolved to sitting at the bottom of a pool with a kettlebell or to crawling along the pool floor one fingers reach at a time. Dynamic or depth training was broken so far down into its component parts that there was even a two week stint where another student and myself treated our no fins glide like a discipline we were about to hold national records for. Even the small and boring aspects of a dive turned into training routines we consistently looked forward to. Our instructors masterfully shifted the desire to skip training and just go deep to feeling like any one aspect of a dive couldn’t possibly be trained enough.
Seeing firsthand that different approaches exist to this sport was an unexpected but appreciated side product of my time on Koh Tao. The opportunity to see both perspectives helped me grow and enjoy the sport in new ways, although of course it’s much easier to say this after the fact. The experience of pushing the comfort zone in Monterey did wonders to nurture my developing obsession and the Kaizen approach presented a way to keep the process of progression sustainable. Balancing these two feels far better than favoring just one. Especially as a new participant, it makes me even more curious about what new approaches might also exist out there.
Final Thoughts:
Regardless of the relatively recent start to my freediving journey, it has already shown itself as a medium for numerous perspective shifts both underneath and out of the water. Finishing my instructor requirements and beginning to assist courses has only further confirmed that I’ve seen just a small percentage of what this adventure has to offer. I’ve certainly had my share of I-just-want-to-go-home moments from this journey and I’m under no impression that those moments will become less frequent - especially with this lifestyle I am in pursuit of. However, I’ve noticed that those outside-the-comfort-zone moments only make their exhilarating counterparts more meaningful. It’s much like a first experience going below the surface with a finite amount of air -- it’s not about avoiding the discomfort, but coexisting with it and finding enjoyment in the process. It can be cold, scary and uncomfortable, but the euphoria of a perfect dive only exists because we embrace those discomforts to get there.