A shallow pool set into the lobby of an old hotel on the Croatian coast, about ten feet deep.<\/p>\n
A man in a wetsuit floats face down in it, arms loose, not moving at all.<\/p>\n
Around a hundred people are watching, and several of them are timing him.<\/p>\n
He stays like that for longer than most people spend on a commute across town.<\/p>\n
He is not holding still<\/strong>.<\/p>\n He is holding his breath<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Ordinary air is about a fifth oxygen and most of the rest nitrogen, and the nitrogen does nothing useful at all.<\/p>\n Breathing pure oxygen beforehand flushes that nitrogen out of the lungs and replaces it, a process called denitrogenation.<\/p>\n The usable oxygen a person carries into a dive rises from roughly a pint to close to three quarts, which is a different order of reserve.<\/p>\n The second effect matters just as much. Carbon dioxide is what makes a breath hold unbearable, not the lack of oxygen, and the loaded lungs delay its buildup.<\/p>\n So the urge to breathe arrives far later, and the diver spends most of the attempt in a state an ordinary breath hold never reaches.<\/p>\n The oxygen is not an accessory<\/strong>. It is the whole category<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The venue was a lobby pool in a hotel in Opatija, on the northern Adriatic, in the middle of June last year.<\/p>\n The attempt ran under formal record conditions, with five judges and official timekeepers watching the clock and the surface.<\/p>\n A safety diver stayed within reach throughout, because the failure mode in this sport is a blackout without warning.<\/p>\n The final time was 29 minutes and 3 seconds, and the diver said afterward that the twenty minute mark was where it began to feel easier.<\/p>\n He also said the training session the previous day had gone better than the attempt itself did.<\/p>\n The record was raised by more than four minutes<\/strong> in a single sitting<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The previous mark in the same category was 24 minutes 37 seconds, set by another Croatian in 2021.<\/p>\n Against that, the new time is an increase of close to a fifth, which is unusual in any record that has been contested for decades.<\/p>\n Now set both beside the records without oxygen, which is the discipline people picture when they hear the word.<\/p>\n There the marks are 11 minutes 35 seconds and 11 minutes 54 seconds, depending on which federation is counting.<\/p>\n The same diver’s own best without oxygen is around 10 minutes, which places him well inside the elite range and nowhere near 29.<\/p>\n One man holds two numbers<\/strong> that differ by a factor of three<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A pulmonologist who examined him described the result as something completely unknown to modern medicine, and the line has travelled further than anything else about the attempt.<\/p>\n Read narrowly it is defensible. There is no clinical literature on a healthy adult holding still without breathing for half an hour, because nobody has reason to study it.<\/p>\n Read loosely it suggests a physiological mystery, and the mechanism here is not mysterious. It is a gas swap, a slow heart rate and a great deal of practice at doing nothing.<\/p>\n What is genuinely unmapped is the long term question. Repeated deep hypoxia is suspected of cognitive cost, and the evidence in elite apnea is thin in both directions.<\/p>\n Extreme physiology experiments tend to produce one clean measurement and a pile of open questions, the way 100 days in an underwater habitat<\/a> left one man half an inch shorter.<\/p>\n The protocol, the judging and the comparison records are set out by a diving publication<\/a>.<\/p>\n An absence of literature is not a finding<\/strong>, it is an absence<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Nothing in this belongs anywhere outside a supervised attempt, and that is worth saying plainly rather than as a footnote.<\/p>\n Breathing pure oxygen and then submerging is dangerous without medical oversight and a safety diver in the water, and a hypoxic blackout gives no warning to the person having it.<\/p>\n The sport itself treats solo practice as the thing that kills people, which is why the record was run with judges, timers and a rescue plan.<\/p>\n The attempt was also a fundraiser, tied to a campaign on illegal fishing, which is the part of the story that will outlast the number.<\/p>\n Endurance records keep turning out to be about recovery as much as effort, as when a teenager awake for 11 days<\/a> slept it off in two nights.<\/p>\n The physician’s wording and the oxygen figures appear in a fitness magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n What was demonstrated is a limit<\/strong> under conditions almost nobody shares<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A shallow pool set into the lobby of an old hotel on the Croatian coast, about ten feet deep. A man in a wetsuit floats face down in it, arms loose, not moving at all. Around a hundred people are watching, and several of them are timing him. He stays like that for longer than … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":36890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"pool","rank_math_title":"A man lay face down in a hotel pool in Croatia for 29 minutes without taking a breath, and the breath hold he set there is a category that begins with 10 minutes of pure oxygen","rank_math_description":"A Croatian freediver lay motionless at the bottom of a pool for 29 minutes and 3 seconds, adding 4 minutes to the world record. Here's the physiology that","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36887"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37058,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36887\/revisions\/37058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What ten minutes of oxygen actually changes<\/h2>\n
A hotel lobby, five judges and a stopwatch<\/h2>\n
The four numbers you need to compare<\/h2>\n
What the doctor’s phrase does and does not mean<\/h2>\n
Why this one does not transfer<\/h2>\n