Imagine if the one thing you can not think of is the precise thing that your life, literally, depended on. That’s precisely the relationship that veteran freediver Fred Buyle has with time and breath during his decade-long pursuit of undersea world records.
Born in Belgium, Buyle began diving at the age of 4- for him, being undersea is as natural as breathing. But not breathing was what he needed to refine and perfect when he immersed himself in the sport professionally at the age of 20. “That’s when I chose to do competitors and set records.”
Fred Buyle uses brand-new Ulysse Nardin Hammerhead Shark diver watch. Image: Ulysse Nardin
Which’s exactly what he did. Aside from 3 world records in the variable-weight and the constant-weight freediving categories, Buyle became the 8th individual to reach 100-metres undersea in a single breath in 1999.
Though he’s been freediving from a young age, rotating to a professional level was not without its physical and mental obstacles. “Like any other athlete, it requires a lot of practice. I was training; a great deal of running, time at the gym, six hours a day.”
Conditioning the mind to remain calm and concentrated is a considerable contributor to underwater success. For Buyle, there are 2 folds to the procedure that, with time, enable a freediver to grow in the deep void. “Initially, you dive into yourself; you make yourself calm and relaxed. And after that you require to understand the environment.”
Buyle likens the experience to going into a meditative state. “You have to be inside yourself to comprehend your body. However you likewise need to totally open yourself approximately the surroundings- you have to be able to get inside and outside to comprehend both sides.”
Fred Buyle. Image: Ulysse Nardin
A few of the psychological tools he utilizes to enter into the zone include imagining the dives themselves. “It’s one of the important things you do throughout training– doing the dive once again and again in your head, so it resembles you have actually done it currently.”
Visualising the experience is simply one element. A freediver’s success depends upon their capability not to breathe for as long as possible while disconnecting from time. “Time is a really special principle when we hold our breath. We can not consider time; when you begin to think about time, you will not be good.
As much as it was essential to not think of time, accuracy is a matter of life and death for freedivers. “To know the time passing is important, and I also require to understand the regression time between two dives.”
Buyle, an ambassador of Swiss watch brand Ulysse Nardin, depends on another visualisation strategy that’s helped him grow considering that youth to deal with this. “I have actually constantly had mechanical watches with hands to assist visualise time. In my mind, I have the ability to see the time passing; to see the hands of a mechanical watch helps me comprehend for how long I have actually been in the water.”
The sport presses both an athlete’s physical and psychological limitations, however Buyle says it’s never ever about making big leaps. “You do not have the feeling of pressing the limitation that much due to the fact that you do things step by step. And you just take the next step when you’re absolutely prepared. You don’t drive down to 200 metres in one day.,” he says. “I never felt I was pushing my limit since I understood it was constantly within reach.”
Fred Buyle. Image: Ulysse Nardin
While Buyle spent the bulk of his efforts refining his physical and psychological fitness, other elements of freediving came far more naturally to him. “When you freedive, you can approach the animals more easily than if you were scuba diving where there are lots of bubbles and sounds that keep the animals away.”
Raised in a family of professional photographers, Buyle began bringing a camera on dives in 2002 to catch other scuba divers and the underwater world. Towards the end of his expert career, magazines started getting his pictures, and he made the natural shift into a new career.
Though his ‘workplace’ stayed similar, his work ended up being greatly different, and it took some getting used to. “It was hard to go from a life where you train six to 8 hours a day to not needing to train at all.”
The medication and visualisation strategies that assisted him reach his peak continue to be important today. It’s so deep-rooted that he can get right away into the right headspace with little mental prep work when he dives.
At 50 and living in the Portuguese island chain Azores, there are plenty of chances for interaction with the ocean. He’s been working with marine biologists because 2005 to tag and track sea life like sharks and whales.
Fred Buyle. Picture: Ulysse Nardin
The work has actually allowed him to connect with wildlife in manner ins which couple of humans have ever experienced, like seeing a birth together with a pod of 30 sperm whales off the coast of Portugal 8 years back.
“The mom brought the child to the surface area and then revealed it to the pod. The moms are extremely productive; however she pushed the newborn towards me,” It remains among his most satisfying experiences. It is experiences like this that influence him to take part in conservation efforts and research. He works with Azores University to track sharks using non-invasive pop-up satellite tags, a project supported by a grant from Ulysse Nardin.
Along the way, he’s caught some sensational undersea images. He saw first-hand how a time out in tourism and fishing during Covid has actually permitted reefs to flourish again and hopes that the glimpses of the underwater world he shares with the world will be the start of more aggressive preservation efforts.
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