Amber Fillary – Free Diver & Record Holder
I’m Amber Fillary. I swim, I free-dive and I ice-dive. My life is messy. I struggle. I have severe depression and will battle my life long with addictions and eating disorders. I have good days, I have bad days, and somehow along the way I’ve stayed alive and become. 2x Guiness World Record holder in the water.
I’m no poster child athlete, I’ll be honest about that. I’ve lived a reckless life at times because the anorexia began when I was a teenager and spiralled into addictions, depression and suicide attempts as the years went on.
While a large part of my life is chaotic and dark the other is filled with water, coffee and sunshine. Lots of sunshine in fact! I grew up in Cape Town, and I still spend a lot of time there right next to the ocean. I’m really lucky to be able to swim when I want to, or need to and just be next to the water. As a young girl I was seriously into swimming before the anorexia, later it Scuba and I didn’t get into free-diving until quite late in my life. When I finally discovered it, I was in love with it. To slide beneath the water with nothing but your skin to play in the colours of another world is absolutely amazing.
Doing an extreme sport like free-diving really showed me that I can get through really challenging things when I focus, but ice-diving really takes it up a notch or ten (for a sun lizard like me).
My depression and anxieties don’t let me focus a lot of the time. I’m spiralling in a million moments, moments that don’t exist here and now. Moments that may never come, dark moments, doubts, confusion. Looping around again and again, displacing me from reality. I feel like I have nothing tangible or meaningful to anchor to and I can’t see the way out and I’m left in a dark and frightening place. It’s a constant bad chitter-chatter in my mind and it’s exhausting.
When I get into the water to dive or swim, the spiralling stops. Or at least slows down. I’m forced to focus just on the current moment, only 1 breath or 1 heart beat or 1 slow stroke to glide ever so slowly through the water. Nothing beyond that. Since I trained as a free-diver I can make my body stop breathing and it feels like the effect is my mind can finally take a much needed breath. A precious few minutes rest from the mad chitter-chatter that is me.
It was a surprise to me when I started free diving just how long I could hold my breath. That tells you how desperate my mind was for a breather! I actually won 2 national records in South Africa for breath hold technique and distance swims, which is still mind blowing to me. I don’t think I’m much of an athlete, just a nutty women with a quirky talent to stop breathing.
Then about 3 years ago I took up a challenge to see if I could free-dive in ice cold water. The ocean around Cape Town is not warm, but its also a fair few degrees above frozen so I didn’t really know how cold really cold water was until I arrived in Finland to try a World Record swim under the ice. Does anyone sane do these things? Amazingly, it turns out I can swim and breath hold in really cold water too and as of March 2020 I’m the Guinness World Record holder for the longest under-ice breath hold swim, unaided.
Me and my bikini were cruising along on that day. Maybe the extreme cold requires another levelling up of focus and calmness and my mind is fully up for that. I must say, while my mind might be up for it my hands and feet are usually not! I am so cold when I get out after those swims its unbelievable. But at the same time I know I’m very happy and for a while the calmness hangs on. I just wish you could bottle that feeling and take it instead of the meds!
My ice-diving and free-diving records are my little achievements. They mean something to me. For all the years and things I’ve lost in life, water gives me a something back and being able to break records hopefully gives me the platform I need to raise the profile of mental health, of the oceans and the threat they are under, and to help people survive the way water helps me survive. I now want to join the conversation on mental health and I want to be able to inspire people with depression, anxiety or whatever might be weighing them down, to find their own little achievements. I’m not cured, I’m still dealing with depression, but I’m still here and and that’s something. Swimming, diving, warm or cold, the water has helped me make it this far. But the ice swims definitely reinforced the fact I’m nuts :-). It’s a good job I have some friends who get my nuttiness and join me for an ice dip from time to time. That certainly helps too.
The Bucket List Record for my birthday:
When I did the women’s record in 2020 I got so close to the men’s record distance I wanted to break that too, but it required a completely separate attempt to qualify under the rules. I’ve kind of had that on my bucket list since. I had penciled it in for 2021 but the pandemic forced me to push back. So just in time for my 50th birthday I’ll attempt a new under the ice record in March in Norway… No pressure right!
Sadly I don’t have a formal sponsor so I’m left covering the costs myself if I don’t want to have to cancel it. What I’ve done is set up a crowd funding page on Make-A-Champ so anyone interested in my story and my challenges can donate. I hope it works, I really do.
www.makeachamp.com/amberfillary
Apart from that, if you want to know more about my messy life, my struggles, my achievements or my art, I have much of it on my website at www.amberfillary.com or I try to post stuff on instagram under @amber_fillary and Facebook.