After spending 500 days alone in a dark cave 70 meters below the Earth’s surface, assailed by a plague of flies and the odd tantalizing vision of roast chicken, most people would be craving a wash and some company.
But after emerging from her underground lair in southern Spain a little after 9am on Friday and having a quick checkup with a doctor and a psychologist, Beatriz Flamini was treated instead to a 50-minute press conference in which she endeavored to explain the almost inexplicable.
“I was expecting to come out and have a shower,” she told the room full of reporters. “I wasn’t expecting there to be so much interest.” That was one of Flamini’s rare miscalculations of her.
On Saturday 20 November 2021 – three months before Russia invaded Ukraine – the elite sportswoman and extreme mountaineer entered her de ella Stygian lodgings in the cave outside Granada, determined to learn more about how the human mind and body can deal with extreme loneliness and deprivation.
Monitored by a team of scientists from the universities of Almería, Granada and Murcia, who kept in touch through special, limited messaging technology, the 50-year-old athlete from Madrid is now thought to have broken the world record for the longest time a person has spent alone in a cave.
Flamini told the media that she had lost track of time after day 65. Asked how she had succeeded in keeping herself sane for so long, Flamini pointed to her extensive experience and mental preparation, adding: “I got on very well with myself.”
Yes, she had talked to herself – but never out loud. After all, the silence of the cave (“it wasn’t my house”) had to be respected. The key, she added, was consistency.
“For me at least, as an elite extreme sportswoman, the most important thing is being very clear and consistent about what you think and what you feel and what you say,” she said. “It’s true that there were some difficult moments, but there were also some very beautiful moments – and I had both as I lived up to my commitment to living in a cave for 500 days.”
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