The nerves calm, the mind clear, a deep breath later, Akshay Thatte immersed face-first in the water. He was competing in the Static Apnea category at the AIDA Malaysia Freediving Pool Games last December. By the time he surfaced, 5 minutes and 16 seconds had elapsed. The effort landed him the national record.
In June, he’ll be looking to improve on his mark at the World Apnea Pool Championships in Hungary, alongside two other athletes from India, Archana Thiagarajan, 34, and Vachan Gowda, 33.
“It’s the paradox of freediving, trying to stay relaxed when all along you’re not breathing,” Thatte, 36, says.
Freediving ran informally for decades until the International Association for the Development of Apnea (AIDA) was formed in 1992. They put in place rules and guidelines, while also organising competitions and promoting the sport around the world. In open waters, freediving is about how deep an athlete can go. Over in the pool, like at the upcoming competition, it’s down to how far they can swim horizontally—there are separate categories where one can use fins (DYN) and bi-fins (DYNB), and another for no fins (DNF)—besides the Static Apnea (STA) where the athlete is stationary. What is common to all disciplines is the single breath of air and how long they can make it last.
After retiring from the Indian Army in 2022, Thatte discovered freediving while pursuing scuba diving in Havelock in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It allowed him to get closer to marine life without the frills or distractions of an oxygen tank. That’s until he started thinking about how much longer he could hold his breath, how much deeper he could go.
“It starts to get addictive. Besides, the silence experienced while doing breath holds is something else,” he says.
A competitive swimmer during her younger days, Thiagarajan’s love affair with the water blossomed again when she took a sabbatical in 2024 after serving in the Indian Air Force. The adrenaline rush she had experienced while leaping off the starting blocks made way for something calmer. “A sort of underwater meditation where there’s awareness of the body, yet you don’t keep thinking about it. You get into a flow state, really peaceful. It was the opposite of everything that I had learned until then about competing,” Thiagarajan says.
At her first event in 2024, Thiagarajan broke three national records; by October 2025, she had all seven national records against her name. “It’s been gradual progress, a lot of respect for the body and learning to understand it better. That’s what has made this sport safe and enjoyable for me,” she says.
Thiagarajan and Gowda have been training together in Bengaluru, working on customised plans handed out by their French coach, Vincent Mathieu. Besides strength and conditioning sessions at the gym, Thiagarajan also throws in a few yoga sessions to work on breathing.
“The idea is to get the body to adapt to less oxygen. Workouts are typically to increase carbon dioxide tolerance and work on the hypoxia state,” she says.
“With every second, the oxygen supply to the brain keeps reducing, so you are not going to be able to think very clearly over time. It’s down to muscle memory after a point,” she adds.
Pushing the limit has consequences quite unlike other sports. Gowda believes that awareness of one’s ability is the difference between a good dive and a blackout. And most times, it’s down to a matter of seconds.
“If you are hypoxic, there are side effects like tingling in the fingers and blurry vision. That’s when you need to figure if it’s the right time to come up. Accidents happen either when someone is pushing too hard or due to negligence,” Gowda says. “The frequency of accidents is much higher during competition because athletes are pushing and someone may get stressed given what’s at stake. But by and large, it’s an extremely safe sport,” Thatte says.
Thatte follows a basic rule of always finishing with something in the tank, rather than stretching himself to the limit. His goal during competition is always short of what he attempts during training. Under Russian coach Sergey Busargin, he’s been working on technique, physicality and improving his carbon dioxide tolerance. “Before my attempt, I practice visualisation—warm-up, the swim, each turn and how I should be feeling. And I repeat the process multiple times. That gives me clarity on what I need to do and how it’s going to feel,” he says.
Freediving has a handful of practitioners in India, even as the first generation of athletes are helping the sport grow. While Thatte is an instructor at a school in Thailand, Thiagarajan wants to guide others through the technicalities of the sport alongside chasing her goals.
For Gowda, it’s been a careful balancing act between his passion and profession. After the morning training, a hectic day follows for the lawyer. He’s had to put in place a system that helps him ready for the next session.“Everything matters—what you eat and how you sleep. The beauty of the sport is that it changes your personality, makes you a lot calmer on the whole. And that helps in your daily affairs as well,” he says.
Gowda chuckles when he looks back at the moment he informed someone about his love for freediving. “The first question was—how long can you hold your breath. And when I said 5 minutes, he looked into his watch and said, OK, show me,” he says, laughing.
Just so you know, the men’s world record for Static Apnea stands at 11 minutes and 35 seconds. Take a moment to let that sink in, breathe.
Shail Desai is a Mumbai-based freelance writer.