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Sheena McNally, Canada’s deepest woman, is one of the 5 women who have dove below -100m on a single breath of air. Sheena, being an instructor, was teaching at Blue Element, in Dominica, during lockdown, and due to lack of freediving students, she found herself with plenty of time, which she took advantage of and proceeded to train, physically and mentally, in and out of the water. Having been to -94m last year, she set her target on to diving to -100m.
In the latest episode of the Freedive Cafe podcast which aired last week, she revealed how she did it.
"It was a combination of the covid situation, hard work and stubbornness. During the lockdown in Dominica i had a large chunk of uninterrupted time where i could just train and dive, and sort of figure it out and not worry about scheduling or teaching. So i spent most of the time getting back to deep freediving. I made progress in Free Immersion and then i kind of realized that i wanted to work more with the monofin. That took time as i’ve always had a difficult relationship with the monofin. So i started pushing depth with it and sorted out a few residual equalization issues and then there was a moment that everything just clicked. I had this extremely cautious strategy of doing one meter at a time past a certain point. Some people told me that it was a bit ridiculous and that i should do 2 to 3 meters, but i was feeling comfortable with this. So i was doing a deep dive and then take a day off or spend a day safetying and then try another deep one. Everything was working, it was shocking, i was like “wow, i’ve never had a period of everything working”. Then it came to a haul when i did my dive to -98m and had an LMC. So, when you hit that, you think that it really doesn’t make sense to continue. So i backtracked a little bit".
"This might be shocking, but i did plan every single bit of my training. I’m a super nerd when it comes to keeping dive logs. I’ve been keeping them for years and during the lockdown i decided to transcribe all the paper parts into digital and so i made this massive Google sheets document where i can generate all kinds of charts and actually look at it and see visually what was working and what wasn’t. I kept really detailed notes of when i was feeling good, when i was feeling bad, sleep, diet, days of diving. Having all of that in a digital format meant that i could see which days i was gonna feel good and what was working - that was really interesting. Using that i was able to put together a plan. I also experimented with trying to do a little bit of training outside of the water as well, mostly walking in the valley because we have some pretty steep hills in Dominica. I did a lot of power walking, some of it with nose breathing and some apnea walking. I generally experimented with things that i could do here, essentially with no gym and no budget".
"I had spent a lot of time in the 90-100m section last year and before i had left Dominica i had done -94m. That was the first time i realized that i could probably do -100m. When i had the LMC at -98m, i went through all my dives leading up to it more than once on the dive log and i proceeded doing the -100m dive, when i was feeling good about it. Actually i set the line to -100m twice and i didn’t do it on the first time - i did a massive early turn because on the way down i realized that things were going well and i might ,actually be able to make it so i freaked out! The second time i was feeling that i was going to do it, there wasn’t any doubt, which was a super nice feeling. It was a hard and difficult dive, but also a super nice one. I did 3:15 min which for me is a good time, i was clear on the surface and i remember thinking to myself to do long, good recovery breathing".