The World Champs has begun

Well, here we are, finally in Aarhus, Denmark, competiting at the AIDA individual indoor freediving world championships. The Kiwi team are mostly staying a little out of town at a backpackers in the woods. It is beautiful, peaceful and quiet and I am sleeping fantastically well. Chris left us yesterday when his father called and asked him where they should meet. Ian decided to pop over and support (and surprise) him. My room is a mix of girls from different nationalities: Ruth from Auckland & Northern Ireland representing Great Britain, Maria from Norway who learned to dive with the Lazy Seals and Jana from Canada who just doesn't have a team. We're doing our best to adopt as many honorary Kiwis as possible.

We had our first competition day of the world champs today with the dynamic without fins heats. There was much excitment with a lot of national records and black outs as people pushed to their limits to try to make finals.

Suzy was one of the early starters and the first girl to do a long enough dive to qualify for the finals. She did a personal best of 132m.

I had nominated pretty high (the highest of all the women) so was in the final heat containing women (the heats are mixed sexes) so knew essentially what I had to do. I had nominated 127m so wanted to do that as a minimum, so just turned at the 125 and came up at 128m. Quite luxurious really. I definitely felt nerves but they weren't dibilitating as they have been in the past. My buoyancy wasn't great in the deep pool, but it wasn't too much of a challenging dive and I qualified 7th out of 8th for the A final. The announcer thought I only did 118m (not sure how he figured that out) and everyone kept asking me afterwards "what happened?"

All our three boys nominated high so were in the last heat and knew exactly what they were required to do to make the final. Will made it through with a very clean and conserrvative looking dive to 162m. Kerian has his first sizeable samba that made him re-submerge his airways at about the same distance as Will and scored him a red card. Chris made it to the surface somewhere around 140m but also blacked out.

The static heats are tomorrow morning. I'm once again in the last heat containing 4 of the world's best women. Hopefully I will have the luxury of not having to push it too hard again. The dynamic without fins finals are in the early evening.