Freediving
for a positive
impact
on the world
Freediving champion from Switzerland with over 20 National Records to her credit, Vera is a dedicated, resilient athlete and a passionate freediving, yoga and ski instructor.
Her dream is to inspire others to step out of their comfort zone and follow their dreams. Through helping others create stronger connections with nature, her mission is to raise more awareness and advocate for environmental protection.
Vera’s news
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If you feel like learning freediving or improving your existing skills, I’m going to be in Egypt until mid-November. All levels welcome!!!
Feel free to contact me for bookings and inquires! ✨🐪 🌊
I can help you organise your trip and your activities onsite! 🤩
Just reach out ✉️
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My last competition didn’t go as I’d hoped. I still received a white card, which means that I respected all the AIDA rules and came out of the dive showing the judges that I was “fresh”.
Of course I was lucid, I was not even hypoxic when I decided to resume breathing… My goal was to try and break AIDA’s Swiss NR of 6’02”, but I could only hold my breath for 4’36” - less than my last competition PB of over 5’02” (2.8.24). Exhaustion due to too much work and training lead to poor sensations and strong contraction during the static training.
A few hours after the competition, I started experiencing fever, sneezing and other flu symptoms. During my static and when I was coaching my friend Jan George in his very successful performance of over 6’ 🔥, I felt very cold and weak.
Initially, I attributed to overtraining and exhaustion the fact that I didn’t fight at all to get to 6’, and I thought that this result was due to too much working in the water while training. After spending a week in bed, I realised that my compromised immune system played a role in m disappointing performance.
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Epic 6 diving day competition, organised at the mythical Freedivingworld in Sharm-el-Sheik (Egypt) where I almost ranked second overall, collecting 4 white cards and 2 yellow! I
After a summer teaching freediving in Dahab, I joined this competition with the help of a private sponsor who supported my participation and my training. First things firsts, THANK YOU JC!
I started the comp, choosing to dive without fins - my favourite! - and got a little carried away with it once I started breaking CNF National Records:
🦈 48m CNF- white : a relief, especially with the nerves of the first day. 🇨🇭NR 🎉
🦈 50m CNF- white : tough, also because the second diving day was interrupted due to currents and I had to go back on the rest day to perform my dive which has been my PB for a few years 🇨🇭NR 🎉
🦈 52m CNF - WHITE 😱 Emerged after a unbelievably long PB dive without fins, fighting an unforgiving current that picked up during my descent making my dive last double the time, powering through the first day of a menstrual cycle that put me on my knees physically and mentally… It took me a good day to recover from the hypoxia caused by this underwater battle, but what matters is that I managed to finish the dive and get white even though in the last meters I was feeling my body shutting off… This was undoubtedly the most difficult dive of my career, and probably the most rewarding! 🇨🇭NR 🎉 THIS DIVE WAS THE DEEPEST CNF DIVE OF THE COMP AND MADE ME WIN A GOLD MEDAL !!!🥇❤️🏆
At that point I was finally happy with my CNF and decided to switch to other disciplines. Here’s what I scored:
🐠 63m CWT - yellow (announced 70) : early turn with monofin. Still tired since I had done a “monster” dive the day before, this result didn’t come as a surprise.
🦈 62m CWTB - white! After a few years, broke a new🇨🇭NR 🎉 in bifins! A smooth dive, made it easy by all the hours spent in the water wearing them, teaching and safetying my buddies! ☺️
🐠 At this point in the competition, I calculated the points and discovered that if I played well my cards, I would have won second place overall with any score over like 50 in FIM. I decided to announce a conservative 60m to make sure to make the dive. Unfortunately, although I was 100% that I would have made it, at the time to start the dive, congestion in my sinuses and Eustachian tubes made it impossible for me to start the dive comfortably and I early turned at 10 meters 😓 And just like that I need up 4th overall, loosing 2nd and 3rd place… I was not a great feeling, also because the congestion lasted 5 minutes and then I was perfectly fine again.
All in all, I broke 4 National Records, won a gold medal in CNF and ranked 4th overall 🎉
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Training static is not something that I normally do, but since my friends from Freedive Uruguay decided to organise a STATIC competition that made the whole freediving community decide to start practising this discipline, I let myself convince to participate - mostly out of curiosity 😏
To my biggest surprise, without training because I was travelling the 10 days prior the event, I won a bronze medal with a static of over 5 minutes (5’02” to be precise")!
Since my mind was elsewhere because I was taking care of some personal matters back in Switzerland the days before the competition, I also forgot that I had to arrive with a coach and I am grateful to my friend Ahmed Bambino for jumping in last minute (literally) and doing my safety in a very good non-invasive way.
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After a looooooong time recovering from a surgery, I am finally back in the sea, training depth!
To make sure to increase slowly and be conservative in terms of depth, I decided to focus on CNF. Diving without fins is more demanding physically but for me equalisation is more intuitive and not so challenging since I haven’t been so deep just yet.
I decided to dedicate my training and this competition to improving CNF, instead of trying to dive in several disciplines with the potential risk of going too deep too soon.
My announcements were as low as possible, considering that my previous CMAS record was 40m deep without fins - broke in the World Championship in Kas 2022. In the beautiful Blue Hole, this time, I broke 3 new CMAS National Records for Switzerland in CNF (41m, 43m, 44m) 🔥🇨🇭🤩
On the last diving day, I tried to dive deeper (to 51m) but I decided to abort the dive a few meters after I started it, because I was feeling too stressed and I decided that it was too soon for me to attempt a “deeper” dive with the feeling of not being 100% in control of my equalisation. A bit disappointed in this dive, but extremely happy of being able to dive without problems, I still won a silver medal in my favourite discipline! ❤️