At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers

Sara Burnett started free diving in July, 2023, at age 39. She entered her first competition on a lark and reached a very respectable depth of 65 meters, which spurred a judge to encourage her to try out for the US women’s team. Burnett did—also on a lark—and made it. As Lauren Larson reports for Texas Monthly, Burnett went from free diving curious to competing at the world level in an exceptionally short period of time.

In slowly building up to longer breath holds—when Burnett does static dives in a pool, she can hold hers for almost five minutes—free divers must overcome the uncomfortable, urgent pangs humans get in our torsos when we’re holding our breath, which are called contractions. These indicate not that the body is running out of oxygen but that carbon dioxide is building up. (Burnett started to feel contractions only recently, and she mostly experiences a burning sensation during dives.) “You can train yourself to get used to that feeling, to where it kind of starts going away. And if you just sit with it for a while, you enter a second phase where you don’t feel it,” she says. “And then, of course, when you’re free diving deeper underwater, you don’t feel it at all, because your lungs are so compressed. You feel like you can stay down there for a week.” She compares the feeling to being wrapped in a weighted blanket.