Aside from the programs we construct to turn Current Defending Izod Indy Car Series Champion Ryan Hunter-Reay into a Race and Championship Winning Race Driver, Ryan practices Free Diving. A discipline he has been involved in for many years.
How Ryan Hunter-Reay’s Freediving Gives Him the Edge
Ryan Hunter-Reay is an unlikely racecar driver. The 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series Champion is unusually tall, a slow, steady speaker, and mellow in a way that makes him seem less like he’s saving up energy and more like he’s about to make a pitch for transcendental meditation. He’s not. He’s just trained himself to be self-possessed. The driver for Andretti Autosport has an almost intellectual approach to his chosen profession; he’s reigned in his brain’s neurotic streak by freediving to the bottom of the ocean.
Hunter-Reay, who grew up SCUBA diving with his father off his native Texas, has always been comfortable in the water, but only got serious about breath-hold diving when he began training off Florida with spearfisher Cameron Kirkconnell. The underwater hunter and merchant ship captain taught him to stay down longer and become more conscious of his body. And the lessons paid off. During a physical at the Indianapolis 500 this year, a doctor recorded Hunter-Reay’s resting heart rate: 41 beats a minute.
“Guess I was calm that day,” says Hunter-Reay, who recently won the ESPY Award for Best Driver at the 2013 ESPY Awards and is currently favored to finish near or at the top of the Indy field this season and bound for the Honda Indy 400 at Mid-Ohio on August 4. He says this with a bit of a smile, presumably because the only way a driver with an infant son would be calm on race day is if he knew he had an edge on his opponents.
Here’s how Hunter-Reay found that edge on the sea floor.
Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/expert-advice/how-ryan-hunter-reays-freediving-gives-him-the-edge-20130719#ixzz2ZZq8m2gO
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