Redefining the race
Photo by Dayanidhi Das, @1more808. Amber Keegan’s passion for the water evolved from pool competitions to open water marathon swimming.
Marathon Swimmer
Amber Keegan’s passion for the water took her from disciplined pool competitions to the chaos and freedom of open water marathon swimming.
Her determination led to World Championships and Olympic qualification events – but beneath it all was a private battle with an eating disorder, fuelled by the pressure to conform to harmful body ideals in sport.
Now the founder of Athlete Interactions, Amber is channelling her energy into creating safer spaces for female athletes to speak about their mental health.
In conversation with The 1v1 Project, and in her own words, she shares how missing out on Paris 2024 became the turning point that redefined her sense of purpose – and the race she’s truly here to run.
‘Look, Amber, we’re not going to let you in the pool unless you start getting this sorted. This is beyond what I can help you with. You need to see a professional to get you through this.’
Those were the words of my swimming nutritionist who had noticed what was going on with me.
Until then, I’d thought, in this twisted way, that my eating disorder was healthy. Hearing that was a real turning point.
Restricting my food intake and over-exercising became two ways in which I was almost trying to make up for everything else in my life.
I was struggling with injuries at the time, and it was my way of telling myself, ‘Okay, I can’t work as hard as I want to in the pool. But I can still be the hardest working person.’
What I didn’t see is that being the hardest working person isn’t necessarily a good thing. You need to have that middle ground where you’re working hard enough to improve, but not so hard that you’re harming yourself.
But while my eating disorder started as a way for me to regulate the outside world, what continued to feed it were beliefs around smaller and less being better when it came to my body.
“You need to have that middle ground where you’re working hard enough to improve, but not so hard that you’re harming yourself.”
That’s a universal problem that applies to women and girls in sport and beyond. It’s the messaging we receive from films, adverts, products, diets… the list goes on.
Women and girls in the Western World especially have been bombarded with the idea that if you’re lighter, you’ll go faster. That you have to look like an athlete, not just be an athlete.
We’re conditioned to believe that athletes are slim. They have flat stomachs – they’re not soft on the edges. They’re super toned – they have six packs. That’s not accurate. In fact, it’s definitely not accurate.
Getting through that was so difficult. A lot of people told me to prepare not to ever compete again. But through support from the people around me, particularly my swim team in Sheffield, I not only got through that, I also started to progress again.
I had the first chance to show all that hard work from 2020. I was happy, healthy, and ready to compete. Everything was coming together, and my best time began to tumble down across different events.
I started to believe that I could make it on to the senior scene in the 400 metre individual medley event. The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games were coming up, and I set my sights on that.
“We’re conditioned to believe that athletes are slim. They have flat stomachs – they’re not soft on the edges. They’re super toned – they have six packs. That’s not accurate.”
But I bottled the final. I’ve never bottled anything before. It meant too much to me. I got so wrapped up in this story in my head about how I had to make the team, otherwise all these years of hard work would have been for nothing.
I thought, ‘Where do I go from here?’ I didn’t have Birmingham to compete at, so I decided to try open water swimming.
I loved it from the first second. I loved that it was back to pure racing.
It wasn’t about times; you weren’t confined to a lane. It was chaos. You were all in there together, battling each other. It felt like the same race I used to have as a kid on the school playground, everyone running together to see who was fastest.
I enjoyed that because I’d previously found that the perfectionist in me could spoil a race. Before, I’d be thinking about those milliseconds, about every single element being flawless.
In open water, nothing’s perfect. You have to balance the currents and the waves: your competitors are the course conditions. There are so many things that go into the tactics, so it’s impossible to have a faultless race.
Photo by Dayanidhi Das, @1more808.
I love being outside and in nature, too. Getting to embrace that with swimming was a dream, and it also turned out that I was pretty good at it. Endurance had always been my strong point, but I’d never imagined that I would be able to tolerate the amount of training needed.
I was training 90 kilometres a week in the pool. I was doing 10 swimming sessions, some of which were three hours long. That is something I could never have dreamed of even a few years before that.
But really taking care of my body – eating more than I possibly imagined I needed to – allowed me to do that.
From my third-ever open water 10km race, I qualified for the 2023 World Aquatics Championships in Japan. It was so cool to me that only three races in I’d made it to this level of competition.
Sure, it didn’t come from nowhere – I’d had almost 20 years of training behind me – but suddenly, I’d found my thing.
Japan gave me such a confidence boost. Like any tactical sport, experience counts for a lot. I completely blew up in the qualification race. I’d been vomiting in the middle of the race, and at the end, one of my competitors had to pull me out of the water because I couldn’t pick myself up.
“In open water, nothing’s perfect. You have to balance the currents and the waves: your competitors are the course conditions.”
I had so much to learn, but I still came 18th. I finished less than a minute behind the overall winner. It made me feel that my Olympic dream was back on the cards.
I knew there were around 18 places available for the women’s marathon event at Paris 2024, and I started to believe that I could make it. That was such a fulfilling moment for me to be able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘I am good enough to be an Olympian.’
I doubled down on my open water training, working on my skills and improving my tactics. I was focused on progress, and I was in the form of my life.
I made my second world championships, in Doha in 2024, which was also the qualification race for Paris.
Again, though, it fell apart. That’s sport, right? That’s why we love watching events as spectators. Anything can happen. But it sucks when anything can happen and you’re the one missing out. I watched my Olympic dream swim off into the distance in Doha, knowing there was nothing I could do to catch it.
I’d held on to this dream of being an Olympian. Can you imagine if I could show people that you can come back from an eating disorder and compete on the biggest sporting stage of all?
I was around 27 at the time, too. Swimming is a sport where people drop off quite young, and me breaking out at the world level in my mid-twenties was not common at all. I felt I had a responsibility to anyone at a similar age feeling their moment had passed.
There was just so much emotion involved in my mission to make the Olympics.
Aside from the sport, the Olympics give athletes this incredible platform to champion different causes. For me, that cause was and is mental health. It worried me that I’d missed an opportunity to contribute to meaningful change by not making Paris.
It was time to ask myself, ‘Why do I need to be an Olympian to make the world of sport a better place?’
I realised that the journey is everything. It’s half the battle. I had still been on that path of trying to reach the Olympics, and everything I had been through was real and valid. I knew how each step felt, and I knew I could still make a difference.
“The path I took led me to something even bigger than Paris: making sure that no other female athlete feels as alone as I once did.”
In 2019, when I first struggled with my injuries, I came up with the idea of launching a non-profit organisation called Athlete Interactions. I wanted to create a safe space for female athletes to reach out for help when needed.
At the start of Athlete Interactions, I talked to lots of female athletes, and we agreed that so many of us suffer in silence. It struck me that we embrace this harmful mindset of believing that suffering is simply part of the path to becoming great. We internalise it and we accept it.
The desire to change this narrative had been a huge motivation for my swimming career, and in hindsight, missing out on Paris 2024 only fuelled the fire. I used the time and energy I would have expended on the Olympics to focus on growing our work.
We now have an Athlete Support Network, a programme run by our amazing team of volunteers. They’re on the other end of a phone or video call to support athletes through hard times.
Whether it’s an injury, the pressure and attention around a big competition, or de-selection: it could be anything. We’re not trying to replicate medical support. We’re just like a supportive teammate, there when needed.
Early 2025, we also held our first live online session, which focused on student-athlete life, and we have plans to run a research project to help us better understand how we can best support our community.
So, while I absolutely didn’t feel it at the time, I see now that the path I took led me to something even bigger than Paris: making sure that no other female athlete feels as alone as I once did.
I know from experience how powerful a conversation can be. That chat with my swimming nutritionist changed everything for me – I will always remember it as my turning point.
But it shouldn’t be so difficult to find the safe spaces needed to share what we’re going through.
That’s what I want to change. That’s what I’m racing for.
