Freediving’s Alenka Artnik: Record Depths on Just One Breath

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The Depths She’ll Reach

Sunken by grief, Alenka Artnik found herself alone on a bridge, contemplating suicide. Ten years later, she is the world’s greatest female freediver and getting stronger with each record-breaking plunge. How one woman emerged from mental health struggles to push the limits of the human body.

Story by Xan Rice

Photos and Video by Daan Verhoeven

An old fisherman offers a diver some advice. You can go underwater in two ways, he says, taking a bit of coral and tossing it into the sea. Then he cracks a coconut and pours its milk into the water. The coral is still coral but the milk is now sea, he says.

Be not like the coral, but like the coconut.

Adapted from Manual of Freediving, by Umberto Pelizzari and Stefano Tovaglieri

A girl plays with her dolls on a third-floor balcony. It is summer in the mid-1980s in Koper, a small Yugoslavian city by the Adriatic Sea. Beside the girl is a tub of water; fallen petals from her mother’s plants float on top. When she climbs into the tub and splashes water onto the hot tiles, she creates, as if by magic, the sweet and musty scent of rain.

The girl submerges her dolls, one by one, to make them swim — her mermaids. She wants to know how moving underwater feels. Soon she will.

The girl’s father walks her down to the beach and she wades into the tidal pool. She takes a breath, sinks beneath the surface, and propels herself forward with her arms. So entranced is she by this silent and liquid otherworld that she does not see the concrete wall inlaid with seashells. Her forehead slams into it. Blood curls in the salty water.

A woman stands alone on a narrow pedestrian bridge. It is the winter of 2010 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is night, and the water far below is dark and very cold. More than two decades have passed since her blood met water in the tidal pool, and she has since endured so much more pain, heartache, and loss.

The woman calls out silently to the universe.

I can’t do this anymore.

If she climbs over the rails and jumps, it will all be over.

A diver floats on her back above a marine cavern with a travel pillow supporting her head. It is July 2021 in The Bahamas. She wears a thin wetsuit, a tiny headlamp, and a carbon-fiber fin that resembles a mermaid’s tail on her feet. She is 39 years old and the best female freediver in the world. Only a few people — all men — have dived deeper into the ocean than she has on just one breath. Someday soon she may surpass them.

The diver’s face is blank, and so is her mind. This is intentional: Thinking burns oxygen and the air in her lungs must take her down nearly 400 feet into Dean’s Blue Hole, where it is so dark that if her light fails she may as well be blindfolded. That same breath must also bring her back up out of the blackness, toward the spears of sunlight bursting through the turquoise water.

For 210 seconds, she will be suspended in the liminal zone between this life and the next. In a place where the water’s weight will wrap her in a strong hug and shrink her lungs to the size of tennis balls. Where her heart rate will slow to 30 beats a minute, and her arteries will constrict to stop blood supply to her legs and arms. Where, if her oxygen runs too low on the ascent, she will black out and rely on the white-vested safety divers to pull her to the surface, call her name, and blow on her eyelids to stimulate breathing and keep her from drifting off further, toward death.

The diver has trained for nine months for this moment. Suffered. Held her breath for so long, so many times — underwater, while walking, lying on her bed — that she imagined when her mouth finally opened again, she’d inhale the whole sky. Dived so deep, so often, she was too tired to even put the key in the lock of her apartment at the day’s end.

But wait — the time frame is wrong.

She has prepared for this not just for nine months but for all her life.

From a platform floating nearby, a safety officer in a pink, wide-brimmed hat begins the countdown.

— Four minutes…

— Two minutes…

— 30 seconds…

— Five, four, three, two, one…

— Top time!

The diver takes one long breath before noisily sipping air, like a fish reeled onto the sand. Eight little breaths, packing her lungs to their limits. Then, gently, she rolls onto her stomach and duck dives, following the guide rope down. She closes her eyes. With a few flicks of her tail, the mermaid disappears.

The announcer calls out again.

— Alenka Artnik

— Slovenia

— 118 meters

— World record attempt!

The Descent

Part 1

Nearly 6,000 people have climbed Mount Everest. Only a few dozen have freedived 100 meters under the ocean. We are land animals, and unless we are taught to swim while young, open water evokes primordial fears. We panic when holding our breath. A sloth can manage up to 40 minutes underwater without coming up for air. The average human might last 60 seconds.

But offer...