Long classes or split up, with or without LDS home base?

[DiverLaura]

How many people have gone on a vacation or trip... been so super excited to be doing whatever it was that you didn't even notice how tired you were... until you were past the halfway point on the hike, dive or drive or whatever and on way home... And suddenly you realized you were still many many hours from where you wanted to be, and for whatever reason (gear, weather, etc..) were just absolutely EXHAUSTED and had to hold it together and perform at a level to get you home...

i've been there more than once. Sometimes things go down in an unplanned fashion that even your happy fun vaca dive/climb/hike mean you are coming out in less than ideal fatigued state.

the thing that comes to my mind first are all the deaths that happen up at leavenworth (a nice multi-pitch day climb area) when experienced but exhausted climbers rap off the end of their rope. It is not an 'expedition' by a long shot but it can still be exhausting.

Perhaps the point of pushing to exhaustion in class is to know that you can indeed perform in a manner to get you and your team home. you know you've been in a more exhausting situation and performed, so in a sense, you believe in your ability to deal, and know how to operate in that condition, muscle memory taking over.

 

[rjack321]

In addition to what Laura mentions...

As much as the split up classes supposedly provide a break, many divers just go back to work in the intervening days/week and aren't all that much more rested or prepared by the time the 2nd half starts anyway.

I had 2 days "off" in the middle of Cave2 but we dove nearly as much on those days as we did in class. In fact we did our required surveys on one of these days off.

 

[lamont]

In addition to what Laura mentions...

As much as the split up classes supposedly provide a break, many divers just go back to work in the intervening days/week and aren't all that much more rested or prepared by the time the 2nd half starts anyway.

I had 2 days "off" in the middle of Cave2 but we dove nearly as much on those days as we did in class. In fact we did our required surveys on one of these days off.

I would have loved to have a single day off in the middle of Cave 2. Sleep in an extra hour, if we went diving, to get done with diving by 4pm, go shopping, do more repairs, relax for an hour or two at the dolphin jail and get to bed early. That would have been really awesome and reset my head a lot.

I had heard about your class and at one point I was praying something like that would happen, so I could have a day or two to catch my breath (that was probably wednesday night).

And mostly for me, its mental, where after 14 hour days of nothing but one topic in my head, I need to reboot. I have the same problem right now with work where I'm trying to build out an entire mid-sized business this year with 2,000 servers and an IT staff of 3 people that do the actual work. I can wind up doing work, then going home doing, work then doing work on the weekend, and I hit a point where I'm simply not getting anything effective done, because I need to do something different to reboot my head (e.g. watch FIFA on TV and try to convince myself I like soccer^H^H^H^H^H^Hfootball and post on scubaboard...). A good 5-day long GUE course right now would clear my head and make me much more effective after going back to work right now...

I know one guy who can pull 14 hour programming sessions for days and days, but I can't do that, and that's probably one reason why I'm not a software dev. I need to break things up mentally. Even just doing vacation C2 diving in MX, I can't dive every day straight with 5-6 hours of diving-related activity, without needing a day to reset and read my e-mail, sooner or later. One of the problems that I have with just doing a single week down in MX is that it makes it harder to take one day off in the middle because it feels like you're wasting so much time that you could be diving.

YMMV.

 

[Scott L]

Once again I am guessing it has more to do with scheduling and cost than a test of endurance. Instructor latitude exists, so...classes running on consecutive days is not an agency driven requirement ...

 

[amascuba]

Once again, I am guessing it has more to do with scheduling and cost than a test of endurance as instructor latitude exists thus it is not a agency driven requirement ...

It depends instructor to instructor and class to class. Any of the classes can run straight through over their given time frame or they can be broken up into weekend and/or evening segments.

My particular Fundamentals class was broken up over two long weekends.

 

[TSandM]

Laura, I think the training would be better if it pointed out to you that you DON'T dive well when you're tired, so you avoid getting into that situation, or you are extra, extra careful if you inadvertently have. But we aren't talking about discovering, halfway out of a long swim dive, that ones legs are tired.

We're talking about days that start at 7 am and go until 11, day after day, involving not only a lot of physical work but a ton of mental stress.

For me, a day off in the middle -- even if I dove during that day -- where nobody is watching my every move and nobody is throwing curve balls in the middle of my dives, would have been a rest. And an extra couple of hours of sleep would have helped an awful lot, too.

When we did Cave 1, we all did pretty well, really. We started out with a few issues, but by Wednesday, we were rocking. Wednesday, we made no really big errors, we were clicking as a team, and you could really see progress.

Then came Thursday. Yes, the questions were a bit harder, but we were making mistakes we hadn't made the two prior days. All of us came out Thursday afternoon crestfallen and discouraged. I'm convinced we were tired. I'm not sure we learned a great deal from that, except not ever to believe that you can count on being on top of your game on any given day

I really think the classes run the way they do simply because GUE classes have an ENORMOUS amount of material to cover, and the high standards often require repeating something. So, if you are going to package a class so that someone flying in from somewhere far away can get it done in a week's stay, you have to stuff the days completely full, and there is no room for time off or remediation, should it prove to be required. I don't think there is a good answer to that, really, because those ARE most people's constraints. Unless you set the classes up so that people have to plan a 10 day or two week period (which is awfully hard for many folks), you're just stuck with having a bag too small for all of your groceries

Edited to add that it's true, classes can be broken up. But I believe Richard is arguing that they shouldn't be, because the fatigue is constructive.

 

[Scott L]

Edited to add that it's true, classes can be broken up. But I believe Richard is arguing that they shouldn't be, because the fatigue is constructive.

If Richard influences an agency change on this issue before I matriculate through training I will not be a happy camper.

 

[lamont]

Once again I am guessing it has more to do with scheduling and cost than a test of endurance. Instructor latitude exists, so...classes running on consecutive days is not an agency driven requirement ...

I scheduled 18 days (minus 2 for travel) around Cave 2, and the instructors were local and I was flying in, so it could have been broken up. Richard's course *was* broken up due to external events affecting the instructor.

I think from the instructors perspective, they do this more often than we do, they're better at it, and they'd probably rather get it all done rather than drag it out. They do 5 solid days and get paid, get students graduated, and can move on to doing other things. It would definitely be asking more of them to break up the course.

I also don't really know from their perspective if they think that students get something out of it that I don't see. Maybe if I was an instructor, I'd have a different perspective and think it was better to do it that way. Maybe they get something out of pushing the fatigue factor as far as they can in 5 days, I dunno. I just get a bit crabby and switch into a really low gear like a semi slowly climbing a hill -- maybe they push some students like that and they fall off the cliff and completely implode, and they want to weed those students out, dunno...

 

[HenrikBP]

When we scheduled Fundies class, Bob Sherwood gave us his reason for preferring 5-day classes; essentially he feels that the class and students "loose momentum" when the class is broken up. That things are just starting to click at the time of the break and you spend a day of "section 2" getting back in the swing of things.

Personally I felt Fundies went well despite the 5 long days. However, as for the skills, I'd have loved a day of easy, un-supervised diving to get a few of the skills put into motor-memory about the middle of the class.

Henrik

 

[PfcAJ]

I've always enjoyed the 5 day courses.

I feel that being saturated in diving for that time allows you to pick up on things, your weaknesses show through, and you develope some additional team skills by working with the same folks the entire time without a break.

Like Laura said, sometimes you're on a hike (or a dive) and even though you've had enough, you have to keep going. I don't think it puts you in any real danger, but shows that "hey, I can do this." You come out a little stronger in the end.