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Excerpt: The Introduction
In 2008 I co-founded a scuba training and certification agency called Unified Team Diving (UTD). Ten years later I bought out my partner and rebuilt the company from the ground up. This meant a new training director, new website, new podcast and maybe most importantly, a whole new way of thinking.
We became more focused than ever on what was actually best for the students. One of the first things we did was create a coaching program specifically for scuba divers. It’s built on the same coaching model I had been using for decades as a masters cyclist, each client getting a weekly calendar of workouts, just as if they were training on the bike. Those workouts might be an academic scuba chapter, a podcast episode or video, various homework assignments, exercises to do in the water, and other content that creates education “out of the box.”
UTD also runs a very successful scuba diving podcast. As I spent more time coaching divers, I started recording what I called “carcasts.” They started out as short, off-the-cuff musings about life, goals, quitting, pivoting, that kind of thing, and eventually grew into a series of stories drawn from diving, cycling, and just living. Those carcasts formed the basis for the stories in this book.
Throughout this book you’ll get to know me as an educator, a scuba diver, a cyclist, something of a philosopher, and occasionally as a completely uncertified armchair psychologist.
My sincere hope is that, as you reflect on your own life through these stories, you’ll acquire some new insights about you as a diver, as an athlete, and you as a complete human being working every day to become the best version of yourself.
Enjoy!
Jeff Seckendorf
July 2026