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Alchemy's Carlos Coste is the first human who managed to freedive below -100m. Having no formal training, this "curious" kid from Caracas, succeeded in developing himself, at a time when information was scarce and the internet was kind of non-existent. How was he able to do it? This is what he said during a recent podcast with The Freedive Cafe. Read on.
I am from Caracas, Venezuela. I grew up in the city but normally during my childhood I would travel a lot to the countryside, to the beach, etc. I wasn’t a city kid. I used to spend a lot of time surrounded by trees, on the mountains, in the water, doing crazy stuff. My family used to call me "Carlos Who Makes People Worried"! I was s super curious explorer.
I started freediving a bit late when I was 21 years old. Prior to that though, I had a lot of attraction for the water and the ocean. I was very interested in underwater documentaries, from Jacques Cousteau for example, books about depth, etc. But I never had the opportunity to practice freediving before. Maybe because my family didn’t have the necessary experience with that, maybe because I didn’t have the equipment, maybe the beaches close to me were not good for such activities.
So, because I had all this curiosity, when I started university I joined an underwater activity club. I was studying to be a mechanical engineer and a classmate told “hey, come to this club”, so I went. We had a training session at a pool and it was very interesting for me. To be able to swim underwater, for me, was a discovery at that moment.
After that, I started practicing spearfishing and developing my own ideas about freediving, because, at that moment in Venezuela, freediving was the means to be a better spearo or a better scuba diver. Spearfishing taught me a lot as well. I used to be in the ocean very often and learned stuff from good spearos. So I started to do it every weekend and it helped me to pay some costs as well, as I used to sell some of the fish I caught. So I used to train in the swimming pool all week and go spearfishing during the weekends.
As I became more interested in freediving, I started researching. I was looking at how can I breathe better via yoga, do more training with guys from the club, and one thing led to another. We also started having connections with people outside the club. During that time there was no Facebook and Instagram and it wasn’t the easiest thing to communicate with the rest of the world. We didn’t know what was happening for example in France or Europe. Then, step by step, we started getting some information from competitions from all over the world, but it was very limited. For example, I discovered packing by myself. I used to experiment with getting more air in my lungs and just found out about it.
Now, the world of freediving is totally different. Now, you have formal education. At that moment we just used old-school concepts. I trained for some years with that club, then we started to compete and in 2000 we went to our first international competition in Nice, France, where we established a good contact with Umberto Pelizzari. During the next year, we managed to bring Umberto to Venezuela and he organized a workshop for us. That was my first formal freediving course, in 2001. At the time I was able to descent to -60m, and Umberto taught us about deep equalization. That was a big change for me.