Under A Billion Stars - Legendary freediver Mehgan Heaney-Grier on creating records and breaking boundaries for American freediving

Jason Elias: (00:08)
Hi and welcome to the Big Deep podcast. Big Deep is a podcast about people who have a connection to the ocean, people for whom that connection is so strong it defines some aspect of their life. Over the course of the series, we'll talk to all sorts of people. And in each episode, we'll explore the deeper meaning of that connection. Today, I speak with an iconic freediver whose pioneering dive broke boundaries for women and raised the profile of freediving in America. Hello, this is your host, Jason Elias. Welcome to the Big Deep podcast.

Jason Elias: (00:51)
Today, I speak with iconic freediver, Mehgan Heaney-Grier. Mehgan's life story is wildly eclectic and has elements that originally attracted me, particularly its sense of rugged individualism and carving your own path. As a teenager and underwater model, she was a pioneer, as she set the first U.S. freedive record for both men and women in the constant-weight category. And this earned her a place as one of the original inductees and the youngest ever at the time of induction to the Women Divers Hall of Fame. From there, she went on to perform underwater stunts for Hollywood films, such as Pirate of the Caribbean and Into the Blue, and was recruited by Discovery Channel and starred in their original series Treasure Quest: Snake Island. And all of this culminated in her recent membership as a Fellow in the Explorers Club.

Jason Elias: (01:37)
But over the past few years, I've also gotten to know Meghan personally, and she is kind, fun, and very thoughtful. And when we spoke, she talked a little bit about how she went from being a Minnesota lake girl to an ocean advocate, the crazy bootstrap story of how she set her own record, and an amazing moment freediving with a group of jacks.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (01:57)
My name is Meghan Heaney-Grier, and I am a freediver.

Jason Elias: (02:01)
So I know you were raised around the lakes of the Midwest, about as far from the ocean as you can get. But you had a connection to the water in Lake Superior. And I'm curious, how did that transform into a deeper connection with the ocean?

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (02:21)
I was born in Minnesota on Lake Superior. And my mom always jokes that I was the first person in the entire state every summer in the water. Later, we went to Hawaii on a family vacation, and that was the first time I ever snorkeled. And I got to see what was down there. Blew my mind and I was hooked.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (02:55)
As fate would have it, my mom remarried. And my stepdad was kind of this salty sailor, pirate living down in the Florida Keys. And so when I turned 11, we moved to the Florida Keys. And whenever my mom would say, "All right, you kids go out and play, get out from underfoot," it took on such a different meaning when the ocean was right out my doorstep. I could just stumble outside and there you were. And I was so excited about it. And I would spend all of my time out exploring the flats, wading through and looking at the different creatures, or popping on a mask and getting in the different canals, which literally set the trajectory for the entire rest of my life.

Jason Elias: (03:41)
Yeah. Right. I can certainly understand why as a kid if your playground are the mangrove forests and coral reefs of the Florida Keys, why that might set your life's path.

Jason Elias: (03:53)
So now I want to talk about what put you on the map, both in freediving and culturally really. You were a pioneer in establishing the first American freedive record both for men and women in 1996. And in a way, that gave American audiences the first real exposure to what freediving was all about. Freediving was also overwhelmingly male-dominated at the time. And I'm curious, were you intentionally going to break boundaries? Was that an important part of why you decided to set this record? And once you did set this record, what kind of cultural or social impacts did it have?

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (04:34)
I didn't set out to break boundaries. I really was going off of my love of being underwater, my curiosity about my own limits and where the edges of that were, and the personal challenge. And so when I started freediving, competitive freediving wasn't a thing yet, especially in the United States. It was growing, but in the U.S. it was very much considered an extreme stunt. I was compared to Evel Knievel a lot.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (05:07)
So in 1996, I trained and set out and established the first freedive record in the constant-weight category for men and women in the United States. So it made for a good story in the sense that it was this American model, teenager breaks record. There were very few freedivers on the global stage at the time. They were all men, the well-known ones. We're talking Enzo Maiorca, Jacques Mayol, and that back and forth competition that was the inspiration for the movie The Big Blue. And there were very few women. So it was very much a male-dominated extreme sport.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (05:45)
And I think being underwater and holding your breath and going deep, it seemed like it put people in this irrational fear place, kind of like with sharks. It also had a stigma back then that you had to be some superhuman, big barrel chest or you had to have this amazing capacity or be some freak of nature to freedive. And we know now the only physiological thing you have to be able to do is equalize your ears and you're in. If you have the mindset and you want to do it, anybody can freedive.

Jason Elias: (06:19)
I love the story of how you broke the record because it says so much about who you are and also what the freediving and dive world was like at the time. Could you tell us that story?

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (06:32)
So my first deep freedive experience, I was out on a spearfishing trip. I had on my depth meter watch I had borrowed and I was just going to see how deep I could go. And took a few deep breaths and applied these basic techniques. And I looked at my watch and I was around 60 feet and I was like, "Wow. Okay. I'm feeling okay." And so I just made a split-second decision I was going to go a little deeper. And when you're freediving like that, you go so fast. All the air pockets in your body are condensing down and down, down, tighter, smaller. You're becoming more dense as you get deeper. And so within a split second, I looked at my watch again and I was at 87 feet. I was like, "Whoa." My next dive with my friends looking on then I did 120 feet.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (07:16)
And I had stumbled across this thing I loved to do. I was good at it. And I wanted to figure out a way I could do it all the time. And then I started researching, who's doing this? How do you train? What are the records? What I found was that there was almost nothing written in English. It was very popular for centuries in places like Italy and Cuba where people would spearfish. But here in the U.S., it was in its infancy. There was no training regimen to follow. There was no information to be had really at all. And so it was like, "Oh. Well, there's no U.S. record. Maybe if I establish the first record."

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (07:59)
So I trained for about three and a half months. We had the boats set up and my safety team that I had been diving with. And we had the media set up to be there through the Tourist Development Council. And we're scheduling to put it out on the AP wire. Because this hadn't been done yet in the United States, there was no certification agency here either. And there were a couple of certification agencies, CMOS and ADA, on the international level. But America, we hadn't really gotten on the scene yet. So there weren't any roots for that necessarily. So we got this gentleman who was a skin diver with the Florida Skin Divers Association to come down and be our official.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (08:52)
I was a recent graduate from high school and barely had two dimes to rub together. I didn't even have a wetsuit. So I went in, I had a job as a kid at one of the dive shops down in the Keys. So I went in there and I asked if I could borrow a wetsuit.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (09:13)
We got everybody on the boats and we headed out. And the weather was perfect. I had my flaming pink wetsuit on. My team consisted of my mom, who was my medical safety for the whole team, my stepdad was a safety diver for me, and my boyfriend at the time was one of my coaches. And I had no idea how deep I was going to go. I was just going to go for it.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (09:43)
So I take my last big breath. And I just, I start kicking down. I can always feel when I start to become negatively buoyant. And so I stop kicking and then I start sinking. And then as you go deeper, you start working faster. So I can feel hair just starting to bang on my skin as I'm going faster and faster and faster. And you feel the water rushing by.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (10:15)
I like to close my eyes when I'm in this free fall. It's just the most amazing experience. Then I start to feel that squeeze just constricting as you go deeper and deeper. It's just squeezing and squeezing. When I hit the surface, I didn't even know how deep I had gone. After I caught my breath, I was like, "How deep did I go?" You know? We had to wait to get the final read till everybody had decompressed and come back up.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (10:49)
I made it that day to 155 feet. It really was a pioneering time for freediving. It was basically trial and error. We were figuring it out as we went along like, "Well, that technique didn't work." And you circle back around and you try something new. And made so many mistakes. We blacked out and rescued each other. But you're laying the groundwork for the path ahead. And it was really such an exciting thing to be part of. And to look back and to see now how far it has come, is pretty incredible.

Jason Elias: (11:36)
That is such a great story. Part of the timeline for most any pioneering story is pushback. And again, as a young woman in a sport that was heavily male-centric at the time, did you experience any resistance to what you had done? And what were the cascading repercussions you saw afterward?

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (12:06)
You know, looking back as a woman coming into male-dominated sport, I feel like I was welcomed with open arms. I was given a lot of respect. And I think that the freedivers at the time that were in power positions because they had already set world records and were participating in the world cup event, back then there was just one per year, it felt like they were ready for the sport to grow. Coming on the scene in the United States, I think was really important for the growth of the sport. But in looking back, there were very few manufacturers at that time that made freediving gear and nobody was making women's gear. So I was wearing men's gear.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (12:50)
If there was any pushback, it was from the scuba industry. The scuba community was not really ready to recognize or accept freediving as a valid avenue for diving. There were certain people and companies that were excited about it but not necessarily investing in it, which of course came much later. And almost all the manufacturers now make freediving gear as well as women's sizing. And now, you can go get a freedive certification from a freedive instructor with the big certification agencies. That's mind-blowing to me.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (13:34)
So it's pretty exciting to see where the sport has come because I feel partially responsible. And freediving is such a unique and important way to connect with the environment. And I love that it's now so accessible.

Jason Elias: (13:55)
All right, Meghan. Now let's talk about your personal connection to the ocean. Is there one story of being underwater that still means a lot to you?

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (14:16)
So we were out probably in about 85 feet of water off the Florida Keys. Was a white sand bottom. Then it would turn into the craggy bottom. And there were some ledges. I went down after breathing on the surface and preparing and really I wanted to make the most of it because it was such a beautiful area and that day was gin clear. You could see for 100-plus foot viz.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (14:50)
And so I dove down and just kind of glided into the bottom. Was just perched there. You know, just my fingertips and fin tips resting on the bottom. And when you're down there freediving like that on your own power, you're completely silent. And it really allows you to hear how loud it is underwater. You like that hum and crackling and the parrotfish crunching and all that stuff, that whole universe just busy and working. And I was perched there watching the ocean unfold around me. Critters started coming out, peeking their heads out and they kind of start investigating you and reciprocating that curiosity. Kind of started getting dark. What is happening? And I rolled over and there was this massive school of jacks that had swum in. It was doing that cool tornado thing. You know? You could see pictures of it. They're powerful, beautiful, solid fish, good size. And it was a huge school, hundreds of them. And they were circling out the sun.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (16:21)
It was around this time where I was starting to feel that first twinge of needing to get back to the surface, to get back to air. I lifted off the bottom and started picking up. And that school, they always stay just out of reach. But they come close to you. They're inquisitive too. And so they come in kind of close. And they were just swimming in their circular magic like they do. And God, it was by far my favorite dive.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (16:56)
But all the dives that are my favorites involve that same thing. They're about bottom time and just watching what's happening and deeply connecting with that environment. And the thing that I love the most about those dives is that it's so incredibly humbling. I'm reminded that I am but a guest there. Such a privilege. And it's this profound feeling that reminds me how small and insignificant I am in this whole universe. Kind of like when you're standing under a billion stars and you're really far away from any kind of light and you just are overwhelmed with gratitude.

Jason Elias: (18:20)
Finally, we end every interview and every episode with a single open-ended question we ask everyone we talk to. What does the ocean mean to you?

Mehgan Heaney-Grier: (18:31)
To me, the ocean is the lifeblood that keeps everything going. Whether you've ever seen it, whether you ever get to stick your foot in the salty waters, you're connected to it.

Jason Elias: (18:51)
Thanks for listening to the Big Deep podcast. Next time on Big Deep.

Speaker 3: (18:57)
Titanic, of course, resonates because of the powerful human stories. And I was chief scientist for the 2010 mission to do the first complete scientific mapping of the entire wreck site.

Jason Elias: (19:09)
We really appreciate you being on this journey into the Big Deep as we explore an ocean of stories. If you like what we're doing, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please like and comment because those subscribes, likes, and comments really make a difference. For more interviews, deeper discussions with our guests, photos, and updates on anything you've heard, there's a lot more content and at our website bigdeep.com. Plus, if you know someone who you think we should talk to, let us know at our Big Deep website, as we are always looking to hear more stories from interesting people who are deeply connected to our world's oceans. Thanks again for joining us.