If you swim regularly at Newcastle Ocean Baths, Lambton or Wallsend Swimming Pool, chances are you’ve seen Michaela Werner gliding effortlessly underneath the water looking very much like a dolphin.

The 42-year-old Novocastrian mother-of-three, who can hold her breath for up to six minutes, does in fact, draw on a technique used by all mammals to slow the heart rate and conserve oxygen stores. 

Michaela is a freediver, currently one of just two Australian women who has dived 200 metres underwater with one breath.

It is a gift she describes as “leaving the surface stuff behind”.

“I’m driven by the passion to find out how long and how far I can dive on a single breath of air,” she told Newcastle Weekly.

“The passion has led me to push myself further and harder every time.”

What began with a childhood spent swimming in a pool in Slovakia, has led Michaela to pursue more than a decade of free diving experience.

“All of us have spent nine months in water holding our breath, it is not foreign to us, and to me this is where I feel the best. 

“I’m a water person. It has always felt very natural for me to be in the water.”

Using a large monofin to propel herself, Michaela can glide, quite gracefully, to great depths.

Whilst she does this, she says for her, time stands still.

“To be honest it’s a gift and I’m lucky I found my gift. Some people search their whole lives trying to find what it is that brings them peace, for me this is it.”

Ironically her craft came about whilst attempting another underwater pursuit.

“I was scuba diving up on the North Coast and I couldn’t equalise,” she explains.

“I was the worst scuba diver on the planet.

“As I was struggling to equalise, 26 metres took me half an hour to get there on my tank breathing, I saw a group of free divers head down, mingle with sharks, and head back.

“They did this for longer than I could stay down and I thought ‘that is amazing, I want to learn how to do that’.

She then completed a free diving course in Bondi.

“That was 13 years ago and that’s where my journey began.”

When she is freediving, Michela says her goal is to achieve total relaxation – “nothingness”.

“When you take the breath away it forces you to be in the moment. There is nothing before, nothing after. It’s just what is now,” she says.

“All the animals I see and everything I experience down there, even in training, feels very present.

“It’s just quiet. 

“Even when you have so much noise and busyness on the surface, like the kids jumping in the water and the ladies doing their aqua aerobics – it’s loud. But the second I go underwater it’s peaceful.

“I call everything else the surface stuff.  I leave everything on the surface and it’s just me underwater.

“It’s very cleansing, it’s a meditative experience actually.”

Michaela says although she is at peace within herself, she is aware when she is nearing the end of her breath.

“It’s not hurting, it’s like any sport – you go through sensations of pain and discomfort but you just learn to talk positively to yourself about it.

“Obviously you feel the urge to breathe, like everyone else, but you know it’s okay it’s just the co2 getting higher in your blood, so you just keep going.”

It is mental fortitude, she says, that is most needed on long dives.

“Most people can train very hard and improve themselves physically but then for the very long dives, like the 200 metres, it is all about the mental strength.”

Depth also challenges the body’s natural processes.

“As you go deeper you have to equalise because the pressure of the water is compressing you, the air in your lungs and sinuses and ears have to constantly equalise,” Michaela explains.

“When you get toward the end of a long dive your oxygen is dropping dramatically and it’s really important to recover that oxygen as quickly as you can.”

That’s when her dive buddy fellow-Novocastrian Nick Parker, or as she refers to him her ‘safety angel’ reminds her to keep breathing when she comes to the surface.

Without his focused support she is at risk of blacking out.

“Even mammals feel the urge to breathe, it’s not that scary. 

“All of us have the skill to hold our breath, it’s just that most don’t spend time on it, learning about it, so they lose the ability.”

Her ultimate reward is simple – to go down deep.

“I want to find out how far I can go.”

The national record for freediving for women is 200 meters, for men it’s 218 metres.

“I’d like to go further than 200 metres one day.”

For now though, aside from hosting freediving training courses, Michaela would like to share her knowledge with a younger demographic.

“This year we’d like to start educating teenagers about safety in the water, breath holding, and breath training while spearfishing,” she says.

“I feel it’s lacking and many teenagers don’t have the correct basics.

“There are too many young people dying because they dive out there in the ocean alone.

“They go spearfishing and they dive with a lot of weights on which makes it easy to get down but it makes it really hard work to surface, and that is when you need your strength the most.

“I’m envisioning a free talk for anyone who is willing to listen,” the freedive instructor said.

“Nick and I show up for half an hour and talk about how to train your breath hold safely, what to do and what not to do in the ocean, and then possibly show them how to do it. 

“I have this knowledge and I feel like it could save someone’s life.

“We take breathing for granted, until we don’t know when our next breath will be. 

“Breathing changes everything.”

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