From rodeo to rock climbing, extreme sports and pushing limits are core to being Albertan.
Besides the frozen kind and some incredibly bold river surfers, water sports are more challenging here.
One form of adrenaline-pumping escapade that’s rare in Alberta is diving, but when we do it, it’s in the winter!
But Banff resident travels to no end to get his fix every season.
Thibault De Sainte Maresville spends his winters as a ski coach in Lake Louise, his summers as a hiking guide in Banff, and every chance he gets, he goes abroad, where he works as a certified freediving instructor.
Free diving is the practice of scuba diving minus an oxygen tank.
As far as high-risk sports go, it tops the list.
They say you can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air, but Maresville pushes these limits to the max.
He’s done dives as long as five minutes.
“You start to feel an urge to breathe, but the idea is to relax through it because no matter how bad the situation could be, the best thing you can do is relax as much as possible,” De Sainte Maresville told The Rocky Mountain Outlook.
Calm in the Anxiety!
Fighting the urge to get oxygen to your brain underwater, under extreme physical pressure, fifty-plus meters beneath the surface, might seem an undeniably and quite rightfully anxiety-inducing experience to most.
But Maresville finds it calming.
“A lot of people consider it very stressful, but I find it the opposite,” he said.
Testing the limits of his capacity, Maresville just went and competed for the first time in the Azul FreeDiving Challenge in Playa del Carmen.
He brought a locally grown stubborn drive to the game.
On day three, he made it a whopping 61m in the free immersion category before returning for a well-deserved breath of fresh air.
Incredible!
Competing against locals who’d been in the sport from a young age, he placed fifth overall, a hell of a run for a Canadian ski coach!
“It’s about relaxing and feeling comfortable. Once you just try it a little bit with an instructor, and you know what’s going to happen, it’s a lot better than what people think.”
Back in Banff, he’ll continue to practice where he can, although the freezing glacial waters here aren’t exactly his favourites for practicing breathwork and stretching. (We’d feel the same.)
Whether he’s here or overseas, we’re excited to see what this adrenaline junkie does next!
