Living the Life Aquatic

Editor's Note:

About a year and a half ago, writer Will Laughlin decided to abandon his 15-year career as a mental health executive to see if he could cobble together a less structured, more creative career featuring his passions for adventure, writing and philanthropy. He didn't want to just work for a living or to pay the mortgage, he wanted to live for a living. Laughlin describes it as a terrifying leap -- would he succeed or fail at the things he cared about most? Was it foolish and selfish to abandon his career during a recession?

Laughlin decided he needed help for the journey. He started interviewing other people who were living unconventionally, people who were making changes or sacrifices in order to do what they loved.

This week, Tonic presents the "Living for a Living" series. It's a personal exploration for Laughlin as well as a writing project (he may turn this into a separate blog and book), but also an inspiring look at a handful of people around the world who have left something behind for something different, something they love doing. Their stories are wildly different but share a common thread. Who couldn't use a little motivation in this New Year?

Kirk Krack and Mandy Cruikshank have spent the last 10 years teaching people how to hold their breath.

The couple are professional freedivers, aka skin divers, who spend their days pushing themselves and others to swim as far beneath the ocean’s surface as possible without the use of oxygen. Freedivers risk ruptured eardrums, blackout-induced drowning and, some researchers believe, long-term brain damage. None of this deters Krack and Cruickshank.

"It's a passion," says Krack, who has coached students, including his wife, to 20 world-record freedives. "It's about bringing out your inner dolphin," he says of the sport. "We came from the ocean and freediving is about returning to the ocean … to Mother Ocean."

Freediving, now a popular extreme sport in Europe, evolved from shellfish, seaweed, sponge and pearl diving, a tradition with ancient roots in many cultures, most notably the female Ama pearl divers of Japan and the Kalymnian sponge divers of Greece.

Success in these harvesting industries depends upon the divers' ability to hold their breath and work for extended periods under water and at depth. A combination of physical aquatic adaptation and the use of special techniques evolved over centuries allows these divers to repeatedly dive for extended periods of time throughout the day.

The sport version of freediving, called "competitive apnea," involves the use of a mono-fin, or a weighted sled to dive as deep as possible — with current records at well over 200 meters (over 650 feet) — without the use of oxygen. Elite freedivers use a combination of ancient techniques and modern sports psychology and physiology to push themselves to these incredible depths.

A Taste of Freedom

Both Krack and Cruikshank are unlikely candidates for the life pelagic, having both grown up in the land of, well, land. "We're both from the plains provinces of Canada," Cruikshank explains.

Yet somehow, after experiencing childhood trips to the ocean, both were drawn irresistibly to a life on the water.

"I taught swim lessons and I started taking dive trips to the Cayman Islands," Krack says of his teen years. At age 20, he bought his first dive shop in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean. Despite being landlocked, Krack managed to build an international reputation as an expert deep water diver, using technical gas mixtures and cutting-edge techniques to take divers in excess of 200 feet below the ocean’s surface. His quick success in the emerging field of deep water commercial diving allowed Krack to buy a commercial diving company and move from the plains to Vancouver, BC, and then to the Cayman Islands.

Even after having transitioned from swim teacher to dive shop owner to deep-water scuba expert, however, Krack's reverse evolution as a water creature was not complete.

"Whenever I took a group on a diving expedition," Krack recalls, "I would sneak off in the afternoons to just freedive." Diving without tanks and regulators gave him a feeling of liberty and silence that he found increasingly irresistible. "Diving with tanks is like driving a Hummer," he says, "but skin diving is like throwing on some hiking boots and just taking off."

As he had done with mixed gas diving, Krack immersed himself in the study of freediving. As his own expertise grew, he began to teach them to the small, but growing, freediving community.

Before long, Krack found himself at a crossroads. "I'm not the kind of person who does a little of this or a little of that," he says. "You have to be committed in order to make something work."

He would have to decide whether to pursue his passion for this fringe sport or continue his career in the now mainstream technical dive industry — an industry that he had helped to create.

"I was one of the top technical diving directors in the world, very well established in a lucrative field," he says. True to form, Krack chose passion over practicality, attempting to stake his claim in a market niche that didn't even exist — freediving instruction.

When he left his job as a diving director to start Performance Freediving, he says, "people said, 'you're crazy! Who's going to pay you $700 to learn how to hold their breath?' I don't like it when people tell me what I can't do."

I Love the Way you Clear your Sinuses

According to Cruickshank, she fell in love with freediving long before she fell in love with Krack, though she blames both falls on Krack.

"It's all Kirk's fault," she says of her life as a globe-trotting, freediving instructor and world-record setter. After bumping into each other for years at dive conferences, the two dive shop owners began to connect over their shared passion for freediving. For Cruickshank, scuba had lost its appeal.

"I took a freediving class from Kirk and it was addictive. Without the tanks and bubbles, I could hear the fish grunting and the reef popping and crackling for the first time. It's just a more natural way to be in the water."

Cruickshank, implying perhaps that Krack was the first of the two to have a heart flutter, remembers that, "I had this weird ability to equalize hands-free at depth." In other words, she was able to clear her sinuses without having to hold her nose — a skill that increases efficiency for a freediver, and a skill, Cruickshank says, "that got Kirk excited." Soon after discovering this talent, Krack was coaching Cruickshank toward her current "deepest woman in the world" title and the two were finding their lives increasingly entwined.

Together, they began to build Performance Freediving on Krack’s reputation as a freediving expert and coach and Cruickshank’s reputation as an elite competitor. Despite her seemingly edgy hobby of freediving, Cruickshank describes herself as someone who never questioned the fundamental  value of a stable job, a secure income, insurance and a retirement account. But her relationship with Krack was a challenge to that addiction to stability.

"He got me out of that box," Cruickshank remembers, "I'd be trying to work out my vacation schedule to attend competitions and Kirk would say, 'I don't think they'll give you that time off. You'll have to quit.'"

Cruickshank at first resisted letting go of her dive shop job and the security it provided, but eventually the two moved in together and, despite her fear that they would not be able to make a living pursuing her passion, Cruickshank quit her job to invest fully in Performance Freediving. Her own assumptions about a life lived with security and predictability gave way to something she's discovered she values even more.

"We work hard for what we have," she says. "But people with six-figure incomes and stable jobs are jealous of our lives. Now this life seems like the most natural thing in the world."

As the two lived and worked intensely to build the business, Cruickshank says, Krack's attraction to her ear-popping finesse evolved into deeper and broader attraction to the whole Cruickshank.

"We've been together for 10 years, first just as roommates and business partners; our love developed very slowly over that time." The two are now expecting their first child.

Head First

"Believe you can or believe you can't … you'll be right," says Krack of doing anything difficult, especially things that other people think are impossible. "It drives me crazy when people's first reaction to an idea is to tell you why it won't work. My own first instinct is to wonder how it could work … imagine if this slight shift in world attitude took place. Imagine what could be possible."

From the time he purchased a landlocked dive shop during a recession to now, Cruickshank has spent his career ignoring the naysayers in order to pursue his passions. And it's worked. "We've had to max out credit cards and we've had some lean times," he says, "but if you pursue the lifestyle you want and the passions you have, the income will follow."

Krack's rebellious streak, his unconventional lifestyle, and his choice of high risk activities belies a methodical, measured personality. He approaches his sport not with the reckless abandon of a BASE jumper hurling himself off a cliff, but with the precise, sequential routine of an astronaut preparing for a spacewalk. When asked about the dangers of freediving, Krack says simply, "The way we do it, it's not dangerous."

The mission of Performance Freediving is not, Krack says, to satisfy thrill seekers or to flirt with disaster. It's to learn to enjoy the sport of freediving by "identifying and managing risk to a level that's acceptable."

Krack and Cruickshank's work involves an orderly curriculum that first teaches safety and breathing techniques, then provides sequential exercises to help divers adapt physically to water pressure and apnea over time, and finally trains divers to break the task of a dive into manageable micro-steps so that it's not overwhelming. If you reframe the question of danger and ask how most people dive, Krack's assessment of the sport is slightly different, "spear-fishermen routinely essentially commit suicide" by ignoring safety protocols such as buddy diving.

Cruickshank agrees, saying, "I never think of freediving as a dangerous sport … except when I think of how other people do it."

This commitment to method and safety got the attention of magician David Blaine, who used their services to train him to live underwater for a week and attempt a world record for static apnea. They also found themselves diving in Japan for the acclaimed documentary The Cove, where Krack and Cruickshank started as dive directors but ended up as part of the storyline.

Their success in a thrilling, edgy sport comes, it seems, not from a cowabunga attitude, but rather from their calm, measured approach to things.

"Mandy and Kirk taught one of the best classes, of any kind, I've ever taken," says Sean Hartman, a Princeton-educated management consultant and international adventurer. "Their curriculum is incredibly well structured; everything had well-defined safety techniques, processes and systems attached to it, and they taught us in safety every day, repeatedly. Kirk seems to know everything about the psychology and physiology of diving."

While this methodical approach may seem less sexy than the black and blue approach inherent in most X Games sports, it's what makes the impossible possible for students like Hartman. In his four day course with Performance Freediving, the novice skin diver learned to hold his breath for more than five minutes and to dive to nearly 100 feet, "Things I never would have considered possible on my own."

Krack and Cruickshank are pausing only a bit to consider how to make room for the newest member of their freediving empire. "We've learned to travel as a family in such a way that we bring our home with us wherever we go," says Cruickshank.

With the same methodical approach with which they engage every important endeavor, they are engineering their 2010 schedules and staffing such that the child "won't completely change our life," says, Krack, and will instead become a part of the home on the road that they have created over the past decade.

And to ensure that their child starts off on the right fin in life, of course, they're planning the birth to take place — where else? — in the water.

Other stories in this series

• Jason Doherty: Fighting Lions for Kenya's Daraja Academy
• Bill Lane: Transformed Transporter

All photos courtesy Kirk Krack and Mandy Cruikshank.