Tanya Streeter pulled her right hand through her waist-length blonde hair as the wind blew all around and the swirling dark grey clouds blotted out the sun.

Tanya is a free diver and the only woman to have bettered a male world record in any sport. She had stopped to take in the view. To the right was Roedean School, to the left the Downs sweeping towards the Channel.

She said: "I used to come here as a pupil. I remember thinking 'wow, what a beautiful and cool place to go to school' and it still is.

"Sport was the foundation of my entire existence in Sussex. I played lacrosse for the county and suffered ruptured ligaments. But playing or practising sport was what I lived for. I loved the team aspect.

"Lacrosse to free diving seems a bit of a quantum leap from a team to individual sport. But you need a support team for free diving."

Earlier, over lunch in a Hove restaurant, Tanya was in nostalgic mood, her right index finger pointing up the road.

"I used to go to secretarial college just up there," she said.

Memory lanes were everywhere. One led to Handcross Park School where Tanya was sent as a nine-year-old from her native Cayman Islands, another to Brighton University where she studied public administration and French, a third to the Black Horse at Rottingdean where she worked as a bar tender and met Paul and a fourth to Brighton registry office where she married him.

The 13 years she lived in Sussex developed her passion both for diving and Paul, a Hove rugby player and now manager of Team Streeter.

Tanya, 31, said: "I dive and he does everything else. It's pretty easy for me."

Diving deeper with a single breath than anyone else, without oxygen or any artificial aids, sounds far from simple.

But she achieved a new feat of human endurance when she broke the world no limits record, reckoned to be the extreme discipline in her extreme sport.

She did it on the Turks and Caicos Islands, just off Florida, on August 17, 2002. It meant plunging to a depth of 525ft and holding her breath for 3min.26sec.

Unable to breathe, speak or smell, her heart rate was reduced to 15 beats per minute. Her rib cage was compressed by the water, her lungs were like dried prunes and her ears burned.

Her supreme achievement came just over six years after discovering her natural potential for diving.

She said: "It was a hard dive. It took six months to set up and train. Paul found the sponsors and we trained together for three months. I thought about the sporting history because it is unusual for a woman to beat a man's record in any sport.

"There was a lot of pressure. But when I woke up on the day I didn't have much time to ponder because the attempt was in the morning. When I dipped my head under the surface I thought 'three and a-half-minutes and it'll be done.' It's not that I hated it, but I just wanted the job done. It was business.

"When I was down at 525ft, I focused on everything that had to be done. You can't afford to drift off. It would have been like a tennis player who lets his or her mind wander between points."

Eighteen months on I asked why she still puts herself through such experiences.

"There's a bunch of reasons. The initial motivation was to learn about myself and empower myself with challenges.

"It is now more a career, I've done nine world records and want to help my sport grow, but ultimately I still dive for myself. I need to get something personal from it. A record is a necessary evil."

Fear is never a factor. She said: "I'm a chicken at heart so if it was dangerous I would not do it."

The subject turned to safety.

"It's something we pay close attention to. You can have too many divers in the water. It is a careful balance. It is not life or death if you do your preparation. You're not playing Russian roulette every time you dive. There are risks but with safety in place they're highly-controlled.

"People think because I go down 500 feet and hold my breath for a long time I'm taking big risks or there's something superhuman about me. It's rubbish. I don't take chances and I'm perfectly normal physically and physiologically."

She even puts blackouts underwater into perspective.

"They are like pulling a muscle. It's just your body's way of protecting itself, it doesn't mean you're going to die. I've had a handful of blackouts.

"If I'd lost brain cells every time it happened I'd be locked up in an asylum. It's like a head rush through lack of food. They only last a couple of minutes. There would only be a degree of danger if you weren't with a buddy diver to watch over you. If you didn't have that you would die."

The safety issue came to the fore when Frenchwoman Audrey Mestre died trying to beat Tanya's record.

Tanya said: "What happened to Audrey was an entirely different issue. It bothers me that it is so misunderstood. She was more than capable of doing the dive but didn't have the safety to help her.

"You cannot compare that with the way anyone else free dives. Unless you really look at the details all that's going to get printed is somebody died trying to beat Tanya's record and I hate reading that."