World Champion Freediver shares her story of victory despite physical challenges
From being diagnosed with scoliosis to achieving her goal of competing in the AIDA World Indoor Freediving Championship, this is the inspirational story of Bevin Reynolds.
Bevin Reynolds has had to overcome many challenges to achieve her dream of representing her country at Olympic level as a swimmer.
She told Beautiful News that she was diagnosed with scoliosis – an abnormal curvature of the spine. The condition caused her a lot of pain, causing her to stop swimming.
To deal with the condition, she turned to yoga with the hope that it would restore her health.
“I went to a yoga teacher who specialises in scoliosis and within three months of doing my exercises with her, I started to feel so much stronger again and much more alive,” she told the publication.
After feeling better, she says she began to gain enough strength to be able to swim again.
“Within a month of training, I was starting to already do fairly big distances that were getting quite close to the national record,” Bevin told the publication.
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She says after seeing that she could swim again, she challenged herself to compete on the global stage.
“That was kind of the point where I was like, ‘Okay, I can do this’.”
She went on to compete at a local freediving competition before going to the AIDA World Indoor Freediving Championship which took place in South Korea.
This is where she won one gold and two silver medals, breaking three national and three continental records, and earning the title of Vice World Champion Freediver, reports Beautiful News.
Reynolds says freediving has a lot to do with the mind.
“They often talk about freediving as being 100% physical and 100% mental because it definitely requires a certain mental fortitude,” she told the publication.
Reynolds says she has learned that nothing should ever stop anyone from achieving their dreams.
‘We can have dreams that we put to bed or give up on or surrender because we think it's impossible, and actually, you never know what might happen,” Reynolds told Beautiful News.