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Oxygen : a memoir 326 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colour) Cover subtitle: A memoir. Summary: William Trubridge spent his childhood waking to the sound of the sea. Setting out for New Zealand from the UK with his family as an 18-month-old, William spent ten years growing up on a sail-boat. He suffered a great deal of mental turmoil when eventually he arrived in the Hawke's Bay as a teenager, given he had to stay on land to attend school. Not long after he finished high-school William set-off for the Bahamas to learn the art of freediving, a form of breath-hold diving without the use of scuba or surface-supply breathing gas. He's still there today, where he trains and teaches at Dean's Blue Hole, the deepest sea water sink-hole in the world. Described by Adam Skolnick (author of One Breath: Freediving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits) as 'the greatest freediver of them all,' William Trubridge is a 16 times world freediving record holder. He broke his own world record at Dean's Blue Hole in 2016, a dive he described as 'terrible', and feared he was going to black out before he reached the surface. In a sport where there are between 40 and 60 fatal accidents every year, it's not surprising William has had his fair share of close calls, one of which took from him the sense of taste. Freediving is one of the oldest and most intriguing relationships humans have with the ocean. It requires building a tolerance to oxygen deprivation and the feeling of suffocation, coping with immense water-column pressure, increasing lung capacity by expanding diaphragm muscles and stretching areas of the body seldom used. William has studied the techniques of sea mammals to test the limits of human physiology, and his experiments make for incredibly gripping reading. But this is not just a book about the sport of freediving: it is a book about one man's wonderment with the ocean, its creatures and ecology. Exquisitely written, the book is also a meditation on life, death and risk, dharma and discipline, motivation and mental toughness. There are also strong messages on overcoming life's adversity, whatever that may be, and how almost everyone's greatest adversary is actually one's self. (Publisher)