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In this episode of Trint’s “A Photo A Story”, Jeff shares one of the most extreme experiences he reported on. Learning about free diving or breath-hold diving, an extreme sport where competitors dive hundreds of feet underwater without oxygen tanks, relying solely on the breath in their lungs.

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Although skeptical at first, Jeff was trained for a day in a pool by a former world champion free diver and got to experience how challenging it is to hold your breath for long periods under intense pressure. This was a sport not for the faint of heart. Requiring discipline, dedication and a desire to push yourself beyond human physiology.

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Watch the video above or see Trint in action by viewing a read-only link of this transcript, with playback features to read-along with the video. Or if you’d just like the text, you’ll find Jeff’s story below.

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Jeff: [00:00:00] And that sense of panic as you can't breathe. You really have to train yourself to get into a Zen state, clearly. And it takes years. And 24 hours was clearly not enough for me. This takes a special kind of personality and a special kind of drive. 

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Jeff: [00:00:27] This picture was taken off the coast of Kalamata, Greece, in the Mediterranean. And it was a story I did for ABC News on free diving or breath-hole diving, one of the most dangerous extreme sports on the planet and pretty incomprehensible for someone who doesn't do it. 

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Jeff: [00:00:44] This is a competition. People from around the world have come here to see how far down they can go underwater without oxygen tanks, just with the breath in their lungs. And I think the world record is something like 700ft.  

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Jeff: [00:00:59] How they know how far they go down. They drop a cable with a small weight at the end and they know how long the cable is and they have to go down and retrieve the weight and bring it back up to prove that they actually made it that far down. And it's all on one breath and it is minutes of swimming.  

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Jeff: [00:01:18] So I go down to Kalamata and they say, For you to understand this, we need to show you how to do it. And I'm thinking, there's no way you're going to get me to go down deep. But they said, you don't need to go down deep, but we'll train you. So for a day I spent a day in the pool being trained how to do lengths on one breath and I wasn't very good at it, is the truth. I just didn't have the confidence and didn't feel very comfortable holding my breath for several lengths of a swimming pool, let alone going down deep where the pressure is more intense. 

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Jeff: [00:01:48] And in this photograph, I'm getting coached by William Winram, a Canadian who was at the time one of the world champions. And I'm pretty skeptical. And I was right to be skeptical. Even that was beyond my ability. It was really hard. The pressure gets very intense on your head and that sense of panic as you can't breathe. 

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Jeff: [00:02:09] But it was really fascinating to see the discipline involved in the extreme sport and the dedication, the fact that people really love to do something that is just so against human nature and human physiology.  

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