Prinsloo insisted that there was more to freediving than descending along ropes and trying to beat your opponents. “It offers a stillness,” she told me on the boat, a kind of full-body meditation that could be found nowhere else. And there was no need to force yourself down to three hundred feet to find it. The most incredible transformation, she said, happened at around forty feet down. There, the force of gravity seemed to reverse; the water stopped buoying your body toward the surface and instead started pulling you deeper. This was the “doorway to the deep,” where everything changed, and
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