9th Coupe d'Apnee - Montreal freedive competition

After placing 3rd at Nationals, I had 1 month before the Montreal pool competition to continue training before getting a chance to set new personal bests and give it my all.

Everything stayed on track and I knew I was prepared and essentially had no excuses - all I had to do was perform when the moment came.

I was looking forward to this competition, as it was to take place in a 50m pool that was a constant 3m deep, which would make it perfect for freediving for DYN.  I had wanted to try a 50m pool for 2 yrs, since I first started the sport.

Oh yeah - one potential hiccup - the pool was outside and on May 25th in Montreal... that's a coin toss at best.

As it turns out - we lost the coin toss!  8* and windy / rainy on Saturday and 12* and rain on Sunday.  At least the pool was 27*.

For static, people were staying warm in 5mm suits, but for DNF 1/2 of people mis-managed their temperature and were shivering before their official top.  I got into the water much later than normal and still started to feel a chill coming on.  I dropped to the bottom of the pool for a minute where the water was warm and away from the chilling air on my face / head / neck / shoulders to warm up.

I surfaced with 2 mins remaining and did 1/3 of my planned breathe-up and managed a personal best 112m and won gold for the event!  Lots of room for improvement and conditions were far from ideal as well.  Quite encouraging.

For DYN with my monofin, I again got into the pool quite late and risked a chill, but managed things well and swam a personal best 169m.  My previous PB was at Nationals a month earlier with a 136m swim and I KNEW that I could have made 150m... so the game plan was to swim 150m and see how far I could go beyond that.  Turned out to be the right game plan and was executed well.

I was surprised at the distance and did not expect to swim so far, considering that a year ago (and 2 max attempts ago) I had just managed 101m, which was a real benchmark for me after my first year of training / diving.  

Both of my DYN and DNF performances re-set new Provincial records from the ones that I established at Nationals a month earlier.

As it turns out, in DYN only one other diver in Canada has swum further (a professional freediver and one of the top 10 in the world) and only 3 others have swum further in the USA - making my swim the 5th longest DYN swim in North America!

Take a look here:

That performance was enough for me to solidly secure the overall win for the competition - my first!  Here is the overall final podium:

A sample of the beautiful medals handed out by CASM.