Day 3 - Feel the Edge BEFORE: I did a lot at my workday, and ended up very nervous and anxious about its results. I work in sales, and you see, I'm working on my future monofin, so if I want to start training it somewhere in 2026, I gotta work hard😁 (I'm sure you see the principle why I don't like what I do and why sometimes all the stress and pressure translates into freediving...) I did day 3 right before the strength training, seeing it as a easy warm-up. X-PAND: I did some light stretching. X-HALE: triangle breathing felt good. I noticed that 4-4-8 might be a little bit fast for me normally, but considering how stressful I was today it was probably fitting... Didn't calm down though. X-HOLD: I did some 30+ seconds on full exhale with 1.30 intervals. I measured my BOLT score last summer and there it was 90, so I didn't consider such short exhale holds a big deal, so I tried to shorten resting intervals. They felt like I was breathing, I sat still, and saw no inordinary body signals at all. Last time was 60 seconds instead of 30, I was just curious if CO2 will show up (it finally did at 0'58''😁) X-PRESS: I jogged outside for 5 minutes (despite it was snowy) breathing through my nose, it felt good and as a good warm-up right before my strength training session. Maybe if I breathed through whatever feels right (either nose or mouth) it would feel more natural, but it was enough air for me for breathing through my nose. X-FACTOR: Here is the difficult part. I don't care about the usual high-CO2 'urge to breathe' when it comes, as well as about contractions. So mantras are either not nessessary for me, or - they don't help when the very reason I exit my long dives shows up. So, for the relaxation purpose, I want to learn to return to that 'dreamy' state when i either daydream about my future or the 'observant' state when I'm actuall in that future, but seeing everything with my own eyes. And for competitions and scoring good results, I want to withstand whatever my body throws at me to get good numbers, so I want to be all fiery and fighty, and never ever surrender to anything.

Day 2 - Calm in the Chaos ----------------------------------------- BEFORE: It was early in the morning, right after sleeping. I remembered my old CO2 tables when I did them (right after my base freediving training), and I was feeling curious how it would feel now. Also, I knew it should be a DNF leg-day pool session in the evening, so I decided to go more easy on myself. X-PAND: I did some light stretching right before starting the CO2 table. X-HALE: I did purge breaths (still, my purge breaths told me right from the beginning that I'm hyperventilating because I felt dizzy and tingly in my fingers, and heavy on my head), so I took my time with deep belly breathing to reset. I also enabled a beautiful ambient on my YouTube to see if it helps (from my previous experience, it didn't help but I gave it a try). X-HOLD: I wrote a CO2 table in Apnea Freediving Trainer for myself so it wouldn't conflict with YouTube song playing in the background. The times were fixed but quite good: I set them as 2'40'' (allowing myself to hold less if I need to - I still remember day 1, there was a sub-max, so should be careful). Well, everything was easy. I thought in a moment I could do this table with 3 or even 3'15-3'20'' times, so it would be some time for comfort, some time for urge to breathe, and some contractions time. There were no contractions, just a slight urge to breathe in the end. No matter how short was the interval, I felt the same while holding, it was easy. X-PRESS: I did all the exercises as it was intended, and quite honestly, I felt like I could do a breath once a round, but I still took 1 breath between each exercise as it was intended. X-FACTOR: calming ambiend music was actually good, not sure if it helped, but, I was feeling good. I hoped that it would change my mindsed into the dreamy one when I will daydream about my future freediving when I'm exploring the reef or relaxing in my own coral garden underwater, staying really long there together with my family and friends... Still, I just 'functioned through' - no difference with me existing when breathing, no some unordinary reaction. The time felt the same.