 Thanks for listening in this Monday afternoon to Around the Northwest. Now there's not many of us can hold our breath for almost six minutes but one person who can is Claire Walsh. Claire is a competitive freediver as well as a year-round sea swimmer and she's a teacher of breathwork courses and the first person to represent Ireland at the Freediving World Championships in 2019. Born and raised in Kildare which I may add is landlocked but now luckily she lives by the coast with her husband Boudie and she spent her 20s living the life that she was supposed to live and did a variety of jobs then found herself at the age of 32 single living with her parents so what did you do? Book a flight to South America and discovered freediving. Well all of this and more is in a new book it's called Underwater How Holding My Breath Taught Me to Live. Claire Walsh good afternoon. How are we doing? Yeah good there's a there's a lot that's that's a lot and I've just given it to just a few lines there but that's that's an awful lot of stuff but I suppose spread over a number of years. Yeah it is it is funny to hear back and it sounds like that it does it sounds a bit mad. Yes well it is all a bit mad because throwing some depression some issues with your mental health and a really bad bout of long COVID and we get we get the sort of the up-to-date picture if you like. Yeah pretty much just you know to add a little bit more spice in there and but as he mentioned my new book on my first book Underwater was published on the shelves last Thursday and what it does is explain how freediving was I suppose a bit of a classroom a bit of a way for me to muddle my way through all those things that you mentioned and you know that feeling of not quite being able to do things as you should for example and find a partner and get somewhere to live and all those things that my contemporaries were doing so yeah I headed off freediving of all things. When you discovered freediving was it was it was it was it almost a eureka moment in that this is this is what I want to do this is it this is me I've phoned my calling. Yeah I think I'd be fibbing if I said it was maybe in retrospect knowing what was to come it was but no at the time it was just you know as you mentioned so I was traveling and let me paint you a little bit of a picture of what looked like I headed off and I think ended January 2015 and I've been talking to my brother who had gone to South America the summer previously and he whatever the conversation was he said play the yes game. Okay how do you play this game has played the yes game new experiences new opportunities just say yes don't think just say yes now in that you do have to keep a couple of no cards in your back pocket for safety now but other than that just got just go for it so that's the kind of attitude that I set out with so I said yes to meeting new friends I said yes to paragliding even though I have a horrific fear of heights I said yes to you know oh we're gonna go and take a boat trip from Panama to Cartagena do you want to come yes yes I do so it just eliminated that sense of you know that that chance to overthink things and that's how I found free diving now looking back it was something that intrigued me I didn't need I didn't really even need the s-card to want to try it to be honest with you it intrigued me it was water I'm comfortable I'm competent in water I wanted to give it a go and was it specifically free diving or were you doing other sorts of diving and somebody within the group was doing some free diving or how did it work I've been doing I did my very first thing on my to-do list when I arrived out was do my scuba certification so I went through the and beginners and then the advance and then just wanted to get as many dives under my belt I had plans to come back next year and I was going to be a dive master and maybe be an instructor this is all scuba and then I was introduced to free diving a couple of months in and it just felt like it fit me a little bit more that it might fit me a little bit more so I headed off to the island of Utila which is an island off Honduras and the first thing I did was book in to a free diving course the second thing I did was go next door to a scuba diving school and book 10 dives so all I wanted to do while I was there on the island was be underwater so I was going to do free diving and I was going to do scuba scuba diving so the first thing I did was free diving and I never put on a tank of oxygen onto my back again I gave away or sold my scuba dives I was done I haven't done scuba diving since that was it because we might forget that when you're free diving there's there's no oxygen tanks attached yes you're on your own you draw a deep breath and down you go and tell us about that experience or tell us about how it works exactly you're on a rope is that right so there are lots of different types of free diving so essentially if you leave the surface of the water and are holding your breath you're free diving so I am my second chapter of the book I talk about swimming lessons as a kid and daddy's to throw rings into the deep end for us and we would scramble knocking each other out of the way to grab those rings from the bottom of the pool from the deep end that is essentially a crude introduction to free diving so free diving can be that but when I talk about freediving usually I'm referring to depth training or competitions so that is from a buoy or a platform on the surface there will be a line extended down to whatever depth that you're aiming for and you can descend the line whatever way so there were a couple of different ways to do it so you can pull down that's called free immersion you can swim down in a stroke that looks like breaststroke so that's called fins and then you have two options when it comes to fins so I'm making the sign here my hands are kicking down with long fins so two fins is by fins mano fin is one fin and that's one that looks incredible so think of like a mermaid tail attached to your feet a mermaid fin and you do a dolphin kick down it looks majestic and competitively are there broadly speaking two disciplines one how long you can hold your breath and the other how deep you can go no so there's a couple of different disciplines so it's divided into pool and depth so pool is done in the pool and that is distance under water or time so that discipline I go through there is a chapter kind of a glossary of all these terms in the book so time it's called static apnea and that kind of describes it in that you are lying still on the surface of the water not moving so that typically will be your longest breath hold and then the depth disciplines like I said are meters below the sea level and then that's sub divided into how you descend so whether that's pulling yourself down no fins or the different type of fins you can hold your breath for almost six minutes and for most of us if we were underwater and you know it went beyond one minute and you know who knows maybe two just to put it in perspective that's that's the the length of bohemian rhapsody play it in full and that's a really long song that's a really long song so when you're when you're down under underwater and a depth because you've gone down to what like 60 meters when you're at depth and you're holding your breath are you in a different what's going through your mind are you in a different place is it relaxing for you or is it your your preoccupied with the the mechanics and about how deep you can go how long you think you'll last when do you need to turn around or what is it so the very first thing I did with this book was describe all of that and the reason I did that because it sounds mad like let's face it you know you're from Kildare you're surrounded by other counties describing wanting to go underwater for any length of time sounds a bit bonkers and then if you do a bit of googling you come up with that very sensational headline of second most dangerous sport in the world so suddenly it doesn't look bonkers it looks really dangerous so what I wanted to do on my very first piece that the readers would engage with is describe it in every single beautiful calming detail so let me take you through just a little bit of a dive and that part is called free fall so free fall comes when let's take free immersion I pull myself down on the rope I've overcome positive buoyancy so I'm not going towards the surface I'm now sinking and I'm softening my body I usually close my eyes I send my attention all the way throughout my body I might start on my feet am I holding tension in my ankles no I'm not I can feel them trailing through the water I can feel the colder water going over my feet it's it's exquisite so once I've made sure that all my body is as relaxed as soft as it can be I'll tuck my chin into my chest a little bit making sure my neck is nice and relaxed close my eyes and then all that's left to do is relax it's not drift off into a sleep but it's not far off at either it is I describe it in the book as flying that magical sort of Peter Pan flying like he describes you know second star to the right sort of flying it is soaring through water and it is nothing short of being exquisite you mentioned there you know almost in a sleep like state you were on a I think it was when you became the the first Irish woman to compete in the the World Championships it was one of the events a 30 meter dive I think it was and you were coming towards the surface and you blacked out now on the surface yeah on the surface yeah in water a blackout in water surely that's that's incredibly dangerous or talk us through it you don't you don't remember so it is a feature of the sport especially in competition and when athletes are pushing themselves at that little bit further and because it's a competition and okay not for me but for other athletes there's world records at stake and you know that there's a lot to contend with so for me it was a 30 meter dive I was doing no fins which is probably a little bit shallower and I picked a conservative number because it was my first dive at the competition and I would have to allow for nerves so coming up I remember the safety divers meeting me I remember so clearly looking like taking a quick glance to the surface checking where the platform was and trying to orientate myself so I would come up in front of the judges and that's it I don't remember anything so at that point I'm still conscious but the thought is gone so I kept going I kept swimming to the surface I came up and I didn't do my recovery breaths and I fell forward into the water there's a big safety team around me they they hooked me on my back and I came to a couple of seconds later so again to someone new to freediving this sounds exceptionally scary and I don't I I know I sometimes sound glib about it I suppose I'm used to seeing it but the reality is that dive was scary not because I was in danger but because I knew my mum and dad were watching and that was the first time they were watching and I have seen blackouts that can look terrifying so I had no clue where it happened and how it had looked and I just my first thing was oh my goodness I need to let mum and dad know I'm okay and you know freediving is obviously a really big part of the book but it's about so much more than freediving and I suppose my parents and underpin as so many of the things that I do and don't do and their support has and always does mean so much to me so when they're following me on my crazy adventures and then suddenly they have to see this oh my goodness that was that was a hard chapter to write that's it's funny it's buying center in the book and I wrote from the start in and from the end in and I finished on that chapter that was a tough one to write as well as a freediving you also teach others how to talk about breathing and about holding your breath and and various techniques and it's not it's not just good I suppose for wild swimming or freediving but also for others like singers for instance no it's not just good for singers it's good for everyone you know I think you know breathing is uh very popular at the moment and we're learning more about how we can regulate our own nervous system how we can bring ourselves into a state of relaxation like proper relaxation on a deeper level just using our breathing using our breathing to calm our nervous system so this is you know a terrific movement at the moment and there's such a great awareness and what I like to do I have been teaching singers for a long time I sing myself and I've worked as a puppeteer and the very first thing you do with a puppet is breathe you see how the character breathes so in my really eclectic background and I do describe in the chapter it's something that I've always felt a little bit um embarrassed I think it's probably the word I've always felt a bit embarrassed about you know my my wide selection portfolio of work and but for me it does always come back to breathing there is a through line and that's how we use our breath and what we can learn by sitting in that space between the inhale and the exhale and again this actually isn't a free diving book this is about finding your thing finding your passion as something that brings you back to yourself for me it's free free diving for others it's it's swimming the sea for others it's running it might be writing reading crocheting gardening whatever it is it's a a nudge to you know go for things connect with your passion and and do it with pride I suppose well the book is out now it's simply called underwater how holding my breath taught me to live yeah clear watch and continue success with the with the free diving and the best look with the book as well thanks so many for joining us on the show thank you so much around the northwest with dunigol airport thinking of