The pool in Asker, Norway sat perfectly still above him.
Below the surface, a 60 year old man was walking.
Not swimming, not gliding. Walking on the tiles, one deliberate step at a time, torso bent flat, arms out ahead like a prow.
He had one breath in his lungs and 394 feet of pool floor to cover.
A week earlier, he had been coughing from bronchitis. He went anyway.
So what does the body do to make it survivable at all?
What the body does the moment your face hits the water
Walking burns oxygen. Every stride demands fuel from the legs, and the working muscles signal the heart to speed up and push more blood. That is the normal arrangement on land. Underwater, a second system partly overrides it, and that override is what a record like this depends on.
The moment cool water touches the face, cold receptors in the skin trigger a vagal slowing of the heart. In breath hold divers that slowdown can reach 20 to 30 beats per minute. A slower heart needs less oxygen to function, buying a few extra seconds with every beat it skips.
At the same time, blood vessels in the arms and legs constrict, pushing blood toward the vital organs. The body essentially decides the brain and heart outrank the legs, even the legs doing the walking. The spleen contracts too, releasing stored red blood cells and briefly adding oxygen carrying capacity.
The specific problem that walking creates
Walking underwater is harder on oxygen than swimming, and that is the detail that makes this record genuinely strange. A swimmer is neutrally buoyant, gliding forward with each fin stroke. A walker has to stay pinned to the bottom, because the rules require one foot to remain in contact with the floor throughout. Staying down is not free.
He carried roughly 60 pounds of lead along a pool about six feet deep, and every step had to move that load through water rather than air. The dive reflex is fighting a bigger fire than usual.
So he bent at the hips until his torso was horizontal, held his arms straight ahead to decrease resistance, and drove forward from bent legs, using his hands to turn at each wall. That posture cuts the frontal profile and reduces drag. Every small saving compounds over the full length.
The record, the illness and the numbers
Stanisław Odbieżałek set a new mark of 394 feet on March 14 in Asker, up from his previous verified distance of 363 feet, after around 18 months of preparation. Bronchitis inflames the airways and reduces the volume of air the lungs can move cleanly, which is precisely the resource an underwater walk runs on.
“I don’t feel 100% well,” he said as he prepared, “but with so much preparation, I can’t waste the opportunity. I think the body is strong enough to overcome this bronchial infection, and we’re just going to go and do it.” When a brief pause in the coughing arrived, he said, “This is the moment,” and went under.
A scuba diver stayed beneath the surface with him the whole way, both to keep him safe and to film the attempt for verification.
What 18 months of lung training actually changes
The body does not arrive at 394 feet untrained. Stanisław said he had been working hard to stretch his lungs so he could walk even further on one breath. That stretching is literal: the ribcage and diaphragm grow more flexible over time, allowing a fuller inhalation before the dive and a wider range of compression during it. Mental control matters just as much, because stress raises heart rate and works against the dive reflex.
The spleen may adapt too. Research on sea nomads off Sulawesi found that lifelong breath hold divers carry notably larger spleens than neighboring populations that do not dive, a difference tied to genetics as well as habit. A bigger spleen means a bigger reserve of oxygenated blood waiting to be released.
After his first record, Stanisław said all his stress melted away only once he knew the distance was his. Training is partly about learning to stay still while anxious, so the reflex can work from the first step.
What the record leaves open and what comes next
The category itself is relatively young. The men’s mark has grown from the 240 feet achieved by a US competitor roughly 15 years ago, an increase of about two thirds. The women’s record stands at 370 feet, set in Australia, and there is no established ceiling on how far the technique can go.
The harder limit is not distance but oxygen. The dive reflex protects the brain and heart through a slower pulse and reduced blood flow to the limbs, but the legs still need something. At some point those muscles call in a debt the rest of the body cannot pay. He also holds the record for the longest voluntary breath hold under ice water, at 3 minutes 11 seconds, and work on an 88 minute sit in crushed ice points the same way: cold sharpens physiological responses the body simply does not run at room temperature.
Stanisław has now broken this walking record twice. After the first attempt he said he did not think it would be his last try, and in Asker he proved it, infection still in his airways. Afterward he said there had been a little margin to spare, and that he might go further still.
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