Meet Renee Blundon

She Fled the Stress of Manhattan for the Thrill of Freediving

There was a lot for Renee Blundon to like about her New York City lifestyle — her design job, her singing classes, the vibrant energy of the city. But there was one thing she hated: stress. Her job left her burned out and without much time or energy to pursue her passion for singing or her desire to start her own business.

When she landed in the hospital as a result of stress-related back pains and heart palpitations, she realized that she needed to make a big change.

She wanted to make a life change, but she felt held back by “the cage of modern society…”

She fondly remembered a place she had visited on a two-week vacation to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. It was an orphanage with thirty kids where she had used her professional skills to help design school buildings. Renee had fallen in love with the raw, untouched beauty of the environment, the friendly people, and an orphan community run by a New Jersey expat who lovingly catered to the needs of the children and local villagers.

At the time, Renee couldn’t even conceive of leaving the US to move there. So when her vacation ended, she dutifully returned to her stressful life in New York City.

“My mind didn’t even go there — it was, like, no, I live in America and why would I leave? That’s not possible.”

She wanted to make a life change, but she felt held back by “the cage of modern society — I need the job because I need to pay the rent, and I need the apartment to do the things I need to do in New York. I was in a stuck place.”

In New York, her life was filled with “projects and milestones, strategies to complete the projects and start points and endpoints.” In Bagamoyo, everything was different.

After her return, she could not forget Tanzania, the orphanage, or, more importantly, that she had never been happier than during her short time there. A year or so later, Renee made a return visit to Tanzania, this time for three months. She convinced her boss to let her go by foregoing her salary for the time she was away. When she left, neither she nor her boss knew that she would not be returning to New York.

Renee’s love for Tanzania and the orphanage returned. Her life there stood in dramatic contrast to her life in New York. Unlike the fast-paced go-go-go that she had been used to, life in Tanzania was grounded in the here and now. It took a while to shed her New York mindset, but she found that she much preferred the slow-paced African lifestyle to the one she had had in the Big Apple.

In New York, her life was filled with “projects and milestones, strategies to complete the projects and start points and endpoints.” In Bagamoyo, everything was different. Renee was surrounded by beautiful African landscapes and the Indian Ocean. She spent a lot of time swimming and snorkeling.

She fondly recalls the big open plains and tall grasses, the Baobab Trees, and the tribal people walking their cattle along the fields. “My home was literally in the middle of a kind of wetland. It was actually built upon a platform, a few meters above the ground.”

When the three months were up, Renee faced a decision: either go back to New York or take a break and remain in Tanzania indefinitely. Given how much better she felt in Tanzania, it was an easy choice.

“When you go from one end of the spectrum, being so unhappy and unhealthy in an environment for so long, to the complete other end, it was kind of a no-brainer. Of course, I’m not going to go back to a place where I didn’t feel happy at all.”

Renee mitigated any concerns about the move by thinking through all the worst possible outcomes and what she would do should they occur.

“I put a lot of thought into it,” she says. “When I rated my worst-case scenario — if I were to fail at everything — from zero to 10, zero being the worst and 10 being the best, it was maybe a seven. If I failed at everything, I could just go and live at home with my family.” And that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Once sure of her decision to stay in Tanzania, the next step was to tell her boss in New York. She waited until the Friday before the Monday she was supposed to return to call him. When he asked her about her school design project, she broke the news:

Boss: How’s everything going? How’s your project there?

Renee: It’s good.

Boss: All right, great. So, I’ll see you Monday.

Renee: Yes, about that…

Boss: You’re not coming back, are you?

Renee: The project, like…I really want to finish it and I need to be here to finish it.

Boss: OK, well, we’ll just have you work remotely.

The conditions in Tanzania weren’t ideal for working remotely with a design firm in New York City, but Renee made it work. Most places didn’t have electricity during the day, only at night, and it was hard to find clean running water. Despite these challenges, Renee continued working for her New York employer for two years.

Staying in Tanzania enabled Renee to finish drawing up plans for the school, a large and complicated project that entailed eight new buildings and took a year to complete. She had to deal with a difficult topography because of their location on a hill and the nearby proximity of swamps. The buildings had to be designed to stringent standards to qualify as a registered school that could charge its students to attend.

“It needed specific things to be considered a school. So, we had to create a site plan that incorporated all of the things that they wanted,” Renee says.

During Renee’s four-year stay in Tanzania, she developed an unexpected interest in a sport that would dramatically transform her life: freediving.

In Tanzania, Renee also pursued a project that had been on her to-do list in New York: singing before a live audience. She had been taking singing lessons with the intention of performing in New York, but since she was not going to return any time soon, she put together a band using a cast of non-English speaking Tanzanians who played reggae. Renee knew mostly classic jazz songs and American pop music from artists like Lady Gaga, which she sang to a reggae beat, translating the lyrics to one song into Swahili. Her nameless group performed just one show, but it was an “incredible” experience, she says. She recorded it for posterity but lost the recording when her computer was stolen.

During Renee’s four-year stay in Tanzania, she developed an unexpected interest in a sport that would dramatically transform her life: freediving. Freediving is a form of underwater diving that relies on breath-holding until resurfacing rather than the use of breathing apparatus such as scuba gear. Her path to freediving began with snorkeling, which eventually led to scuba diving.

“My friends convinced me to do it [scuba diving] because they knew I would love it, and I did.”

From scuba diving, the next step was underwater hockey. “I was playing on an underwater hockey team in Dar es Salaam. And then, that led to freediving.”

Two people on the underwater hockey team were freedivers, and one day they suggested that Renee go out with them.

“When I saw them go down and swim inside of this shipwreck and all around it and stay down for minutes at a time, I mean, this just blew my mind. How the heck are they doing that? I just could not — I was just like, no freaking way.” She was instantly hooked.

Freediving is not an easy pursuit, but Renee threw herself into it with great intensity. Her initial attempts weren’t very successful, but she persisted, practicing alone in the Indian Ocean for hours a day, miles from the shoreline, using an abandoned sailboat as a launchpad. She dived in low-visibility waters surrounded by giant jellyfish and contended with unexpected storms that came out of nowhere.

“I was very determined to be able to freedive,” she says.

Her persistence paid off. “One day it just clicked, one day it worked, after three weeks of every day, hours and hours in the water, trying. Since then, I haven’t had any issues.” Today her deepest dive times are in the three-minute to four-minute range.

When Renee was ready to move on from Tanzania, she chose her next happy place specifically for its freediving. Dahab, Egypt, on the southeast coast of the Sinai peninsula, is the site of a former Bedouin fishing village that now attracts freedivers and other sportsmen from all over the world. As of this writing, she’s been teaching freediving there for five years.

“I researched Hawaii, I researched places in Europe, the Philippines, California, but nowhere else ticked the boxes that this place ticks. I love it. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Since leaving the US ten years ago, Renee has learned the value of facing new challenges as a way of life.

Companionship has never been an issue in Renee’s travels. Her social life in Dahab centers on a community of expats, all of whom are freedivers. Even when she has taken side trips to Italy, France, and Turkey, wherever she has gone, she has found a community of freedivers to hang out with.

Since leaving the US ten years ago, Renee has learned the value of facing new challenges as a way of life. “I live my life today to do things that aren’t always comfortable, to do things that challenge you to go on adventures, to go into unknown territories, because every time you do that, the experience changes you.”

Her current challenge is to win the US National Record in Free Immersion, something she’s been training for six years but hasn’t yet achieved. But Renee is OK with that because she’s fulfilled by training in freediving, an endeavor that keeps her happy and healthy.

For those contemplating a major life change, Renee recommends doing what she did when she initially left the US: to write out all the possible outcomes and their likelihood, both good and bad, and to decide what you would do if the bad ones come to pass. Once having taken a realistic assessment of the risks and rewards, she recommends that you follow your intuition.

“So much of it is following your intuition because inside, you know what’s the right thing for you to do. Only you know that. Nobody can tell you what you should do and how you should live your life.”

This story will be included in a book about women who make a major life change entitled, Women Rising: True Stories of Rebirth and Renewal. If you have a compelling story to tell, or know someone who does, contact me at cityfeller55@gmail.com and tell me about it. Your story could end up in my book.