Deep Commitment

(ABOVE) Oahu freediver Enchante Gallardo surfaces following a record-setting dive to eighty-eight meters at the CMAS World Championship last May in Kas, Turkey.

Ten years ago I took a walkabout in Southeast Asia, intent on exploring the far edge of my freediving limits. I trained for months, earned my instructor ticket and was close to diving to fifty meters on a single breath. But after about six months I was hit with "tropical burnout." I made a choice between continuing my freediving career and doing adult things, like grad school. I chose wrong. 

Enchante Gallardo chose right. She is a full-time freediving competitor and instructor. She holds three US national records for depth, and she's only a few meters shy of a hundred meters in competition, a depth that guarantees you a seat among freediving's elite. Impressively, she started her freediving journey only a few years ago, in her thirties, while raising her two boys, Santiago (13) and Kymani (10). Despite the determination, courage and commitment required to do the things she does, Enchante is laid-back, almost shy-until you get her talking about freediving. Then her eyes grow wild with enthusiasm as she talks about a sport that, to the uninitiated, sounds like it amounts to slowly drowning oneself as if it were the most natural thing in the world. 

These days she calls Makaha on Oahu's Leeward side home, but she grew up in various places around the island and attended Maryknoll School in Manoa. Enchante was always in the water, surfing, snorkeling, spearfishing and sailing, but her true obsession with the underwater world started with scuba, a known gateway drug to freediving. In 2017, the day after she completed her Freedive Instructors International Level II course with only a few dives to thirty meters under her weight belt, her instructor, Daniel Koval, encouraged her to compete in the Kona Depth Challenge, a local freediving event for amateurs and visiting pros. At first she was out of her depth, but she learned quickly. Six months later at the next Kona Depth Challenge, she nailed fifty-five meters and took second place.

(ABOVE LEFT) Gallardo in her element at Makaha, on the Leeward coast of Oahu. (ABOVE RIGHT) Another official PB (personal best) for Gallardo, with ninety meters in the free immersion event at the AIDA World Championship in Roatan, Honduras, last August.

Enchante entered more competitions all over the world to "find the challenge and motivation to see what my limits are," she says. Just about every competition resulted in a new PB (personal best). Freediving competitions aren't so much about beating other divers; they are less competitive and more cooperative. "You have amazing freedivers from all over the world, working with their coaches and mentors and dedicated to overcoming their own limitations rather than seeing who they can beat," she says. Enchante travels solo, without a coach, but gets all the help she needs from the community. "Everyone shares tips and tricks and advice," she says. "I take advice and just sit with it. If it feels right for me, I try it."

Freediving might be unique among sports, because the key to success is surrender-the more you relax, the less oxygen you burn and the deeper you can go. To achieve that surrender when everything in your body is screaming at you to breathe is part of the training. "Freediving makes you more aware of internal sensations and thoughts," Enchante says. Descending is comparatively easy, because when you get deep enough, you're no longer buoyant. During this "sink phase," you can just relax and watch depth markers on the safety line tick by. But that's only half the journey: Getting back to the surface is another matter. For that you need mental toughness along with physical conditioning. When you turn for the surface during a deep dive, it's best to forget how far you must swim. Thoughts like, "I can't do this" can lead to panic. "Understanding your body's sensations helps calm your mind," Enchante says, which means that a successful dive is as much a mental as a physical achievement. While she likes the easy dives, "My most difficult dives are the most rewarding," she says.  

If you think lung capacity is the key to diving deep, you're only partly right. Men tend to hold more depth records than women, who statistically have smaller lung volumes, but there are many more factors. The second woman to break the hundred-meter mark was Sara Campbell, a slight woman who applied her yoga practice to achieve amazing things in the water. Another woman, Natalia Molchanova, reached 127 meters to secure the overall world record, for both men and women. Sadly, Molchanova disappeared in 2015 during a casual training dive in the Mediterranean. Her son, Alexey, has carried on the family tradition and holds the current world record of 131 meters.

Safety divers drop down to thirty meters and accompany Gallardo during the last phase of her ascent at the CMAS World Championship in Kas. Though a relative newcomer to the sport, Gallardo holds three US national records for depth and is aiming to break one hundred meters in competition as well as set a new world record.

The deepest woman in the world (at the time of this writing) is Alessia Zecchini, who joined the hundred-meter club in 2018. Zecchini also holds the world record in free immersion apnea (FIM) at a tantalizingly close ninety-seven meters. In the FIM discipline, you wear no fins and pull yourself hand over hand down the safety line. That might sound easier than finning, but no-it's more difficult because it engages more muscles and therefore burns more oxygen.

Enchante has completed multiple dives past national records and close to world-record depths during training, but not officially-yet. For a record to count, it must be performed at an official competition. The rules include declaring your target depth the day before the dive. Post-dive surface protocols detect telltale signs of impairment that would disqualify a dive. For instance, a diver must surface and remove headgear (goggles, nose clip, etc.) before signaling to the judge with an OK sign and saying, "I'm OK." If the diver signals to a safety diver or coach instead of the judge, that, too, is evidence of an impairment. And of course if you black out before reaching the surface, the dive is disqualified.

Last July, she took a shot at one hundred meters and the official world record during Vertical Blue, the Grand Prix of freediving. The venue, Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas, is the perfect venue for deep dives: a deep, dark, two-hundred meter sinkhole surrounded by limestone cliffs, so there are no waves, currents or dangerous wildlife to disturb the dive. While she did manage to tie the US record by diving to sixty-seven meters with no fins in training, her record attempt was thwarted by blackout. "I am not sure exactly what happened," Enchante reflects. "There are probably a few factors, but I experienced my first blackout on the first day of competition. I made it down but did not make it back up. I think it was something a little difficult to process at first and very emotional," which is a somewhat understated way to describe the phenomenon of shallow-water blackout, when a diver loses consciousness on the surface and is unable to keep her face above water.

(ABOVE LEFT) A judge holds up a white card signaling the successful completion of Gallardo's ninety-meter dive in the AIDA World Championship in Roatan, tying her for a silver medal. (ABOVE RIGHT) Gallardo fins down the safety line; after a few kicks, she'll reach the "sink phase," when negative buoyancy takes over and she can relax on the descent.

The experience might have been humbling, but true to form, Enchante is undeterred. "I know there is something to learn here," she says. "Maybe the competition didn't start off the way I had hoped, but I am not discouraged. I have gone through the array of emotions here from sadness and loss into acceptance of what happened. Realizing that the only action is to move forward and do the best I can."  

I meet Enchante at Makaha, one of her favorite dive sites. She's agreed to let me tag along, perhaps share some tips to help me get back in the game. With no spearguns to hunt with or world records to attempt, we cruise the reef looking for seashells. She swims languidly, slowly, like she's browsing an ABC store for souvenirs. I try to keep up, a creaky old tinman in a battered wetsuit, as she drifts comfortably through Makaha's undersea cathedrals. I'm not sure whether we dived even to twenty meters, but if we did Enchante wouldn't have noticed-that's a mere bounce to the bottom of a puddle for a freediver of her caliber. Training, for Enchante, doesn't involve a lot of regimen or structure; she just dives as much as she can, splitting her time among family in Hawaii and Puerto Rico and visiting the world's best dive sites to get consistent depth. 

But sometimes depth just isn't available. Bad weather, head colds and logistics can impact training and travel schedules. I want to get her out of her comfort zone and into mine, so we head for a swimming pool.

What looks like a peaceful underwater stroll on the sand flats off Makaha is actually a training exercise for Gallardo-albeit an enjoyable one. Gallardo doesn't travel with a coach or follow a strict training regimen. Her approach is simply to dive as often as she can and experiment with new methods. "If it feels right for me," she says, "I try it."

"Pool disciplines are a different animal," she growls as I meet her at a Windward Oahu pool where the lifeguards have become accustomed to my alarming, semi-suicidal aquatic antics, like floating facedown without moving for minutes at a time to practice static apnea (holding one's breath without moving). "I've done only one pool competition," Enchante admits, which is surprising. Freediving encourages all to compete, and for landlocked apneists (yes, it's a word), pools are much more accessible and predictable than oceans and lakes. A well-trained freediver should theoretically perform well in both pool and depth disciplines. But Enchante prefers depth, because "partial-pressure oxygen is my friend," she jokes. Meaning that when you get deep, the pressure reduces air volume but increases the concentration of oxygen in your blood, so you feel pretty good until you ascend. In a pool, you suffer to hold your breath like a marathoner suffers running uphill. 

Sea to shining sea: Gallardo and the divers of Team USA show a little national pride at the CMAS World Championship in Roatan.

Enchante and I slip into a relaxed routine of alternating static breath holds, which are similar to Zen meditation-only you do it floating face down. We test our comfort levels, serve as one another's safety buddy and share tips. I tap out after two minutes. Enchante holds out a bit longer, but I think she might be sandbagging to make me feel better. It dawns on me that she might just feel more comfortable dangling at the end of a thirty-meter rope than floating face down in a kiddie pool, and being comfortable is the key to success in any apnea discipline. Before competitions her warmup consists of two (slow!) four-minute dives to thirty meters and back. Pool work is just a distraction-Enchante wants to go deep. 

After our statics we don fins to see how far we can swim underwater on one breath, a.k.a. dynamic apnea. Seventy-five meters for her and barely fifty for me. On paper we're both mediocre; the world record for the dynamic apnea with fins is three hundred meters, or three laps in an Olympic-size pool. 

Things are different for Enchante out in the big blue. Her last shot at the world record was last August at Roatan, a small island off Honduras that has top-notch beaches, deep water and the occasional whale shark. (Fun fact: Honduras translates to English as "depth.") Now that competition season is over, she's already thinking ahead. "I think the next offseason might be focused more on homing in on monofin technique among other things." The monofin is a single hydrodynamically efficient fin that looks like a mermaid's fluke. It engages an entirely different set of muscles that need to be trained for endurance and proper movement. "I think building a base in the other disciplines has actually created a nice foundation that has allowed me to progress so much more quickly with the monofin," Enchante says.

Gallardo hangs suspended in a cavern off Makaha, having achieved neutral buoyancy by exhaling most of her air in order to simulate the sensation of deep dives in relatively shallow water. Here, she's forgoing fins to train for free immersion, one of the most challenging of the freediving disciplines, in the hopes of breaking the world record next season.