In my fight against the inevitable-the middle-age dad bod-I've modified my fitness routine. It used to be jogging and jiu jitsu, but my joints and my budget health insurance plan mean that high-impact is now a bad idea. So I've hit the water-distance swimming, freediving and spearfishing. Gentler on the body but hard on a social life: Aside from spluttering a few words between gasps to a dive buddy, there's not a lot of interaction. Freedivers are often solitary creatures anyway, and spearfishers are defiantly antisocial despite the requirement that you dive with a buddy. Maybe "buddy" is the wrong word. You don't have to like your buddy; you only have to trust them with your life. Get skunked? Blame your flailing, fish-scaring buddy. Sharks show up? Just swim faster than your buddy.
The search for the aquatically like-minded is why Elaine Hicks, a freediving instructor who's obsessed with the sport, created a group freedive meetup on social media (@theunderwatertherapist, if you're similarly aquaverted). "I noticed a gap in the community, and it was really hard to find dive buddies," she says. Hicks is also a social worker and research psychologist, which is helpful because we freedivers are all kinda nuts. To make the meetups more interesting, she created an underwater obstacle course inspired by her mentor, pro freediver Adam Stern, because holding your breath for minutes at a time while diving to a hundred feet or deeper isn't sufficiently interesting. But the course fulfills Hicks' two primary aims: "to bring people together to dive in a safe environment," she says, "and to have fun."
I caught wind of Hicks' submerged gauntlet and joined a gathering of about two dozen freedivers on a calm Saturday morning at Makaha, in Leeward Oahu. The underwater obstacle course is made from hula hoops at different depths and pool noodles, all weighted down at about fifteen feet and roped out across about twenty-five yards between two safety buoys. It takes Elaine and four friends about a half-hour to swim it out and set it up.
It's just the right amount of challenge for a fairly competent freediver. To complete the course you start on the surface with a big breath, duck-dive down and assume the streamline position-arms up and tight to your head. Finning along, you have to contort your body to steer through the hoops and weave to either side of the vertical pool noodles, becoming more dolphin than human. You surface at the safety buoy on the other side, signaling an OK to the safety diver who's watching you for signs of hypoxia-low oxygen, which often looks a lot like passing out. Everyone takes turns as safety divers. When a diver snags her weight belt on one of the hula hoops, two divers are there in seconds to untangle her. Everyone else repairs the course and keeps on swimming.
It's not about speed-no one runs the course for time, because speed is contrary to the essence of freediving, which is to chill out underwater. Relaxing and slowing down are, ironically, how you win the race. Economy is key: Every muscle contraction burns oxygen, so you try to navigate the course with as few movements as possible. There's a broad mix of abilities: Some breeze through, others struggle to complete the course in a single breath, some surface midcourse.
What you won't find, besides actual air, is an air of competition-it's about fun and, for a real athlete or an aging salt like me, training value. I'll run the course a few times as a warm-up. Then I'll ditch my fins and run it CNF (constant weight, no fins), or hold my weight belt in one hand and a rock in the other to see if I can make it halfway through on one breath. While waiting our turns, we dive down to check out the wildlife or practice blowing bubble rings. Some wander over to Makaha Caverns to check out the reef sharks living there.
Of course, nearly everyone has an underwater camera, so the surface conversations start with "Did you get a shot of me?" followed by exchanges of contact information and promises to follow each other on social media.
And that, folks, is how you make freediving social.
