the world record completed by elite athlete Beatriz Flamini

BarcelonaIt was a few minutes past nine in the morning this Friday when Beatriz Flamini returned to the outside world. It was 510 days ago that this elite athlete was isolated in a cave in Motril (Granada), 70 meters deep. He entered it on November 20, 2021, aged 48, and left it at 50. Unaware of what has happened in the world in the last year and a half, he appeared with sunglasses on to protect his view and a wide smile. And it is that he has not only completed a personal challenge, which he has defined as “excellent and insurmountable”, but his experience has served for a scientific experiment and, in addition, he has broken a world record.

The alpinist, climber and speleologist from Madrid was assisted by two speleologists and a psychologist in her exit, which lasted for about 40 minutes, and she was received outside the cavity with applause from friends and people involved in the project, all of them with a mask to protect their health. “Seeing you all wearing masks, it’s still covid for me,” he joked at a later press conference, where he admitted: “It’s still November 21, 2021 for me.” He has not learned, for example, of the start of the war in Ukraine or of the death of historical figures such as Queen Elizabeth II of England.

Time to read up to 60 books

“On Saturday, November 20, the ship sets sail on a journey that will last 500 days […]. See you again in April/May 2023,” he had written in his latest post from Instagram. And so it has been. During the long stay she has spent alone in the cave, the athlete has experienced the total absence of natural light and incommunicado with the outside. He has been recording his day-to-day life on video and left the cards with the images in an exchange area in the cavity, where contactless delivery of food and water and garbage collection also took place.

Struggling for words after months of virtually not speaking, Flamini explained that he quickly lost track of time. “I started taking references of days, but there was a moment when I had to stop counting. Around day 65 I lost time perception,” he explained. Despite the difficulties he has gone through – among them, an invasion of flies -, he has assured that he never once thought of quitting. He has stated that in fact he “didn’t want to go out”.

During all this time she has used it to read up to 60 books, write, knit and, above all, “be and enjoy”, she said. “I’m where I want to be, experiencing what I want”, he said, although he admitted to having missed the company and “eating some fried eggs with potatoes”. The feat was part of the Timecave project, which he started two years ago with the production company Dokumalia and which will result in a documentary series, but it has also served research groups from the universities of Granada and Almeria to study how isolation affects and extreme temporary disorientation and the neuropsychological changes it entails.

Flamini, who has been monitored at all times, has narrowly broken the world record for underground isolation, previously held by Italy’s Christine Lanzoni, who spent 269 days in an underground laboratory in 2007, according to the Federation Andalusian Speleology and Descent of Canyons. The record in Spain was 103 days. Until now, moreover, almost all the experiments had been done in laboratories, with clocks and some kind of communication with the outside, something that has not happened in the case of Flamini.