Diana Nyad: Swimming

American Star of the Women’s International Sports Hall of Fame

Photo: http://diananyad.com/the-night-before/

Website: http://diananyad.com/

I prepared myself for an interview with Diana Nyad. She wrote through e-mail that she was a fast

talker and I probably would have a difficult time keeping up with her if I chose to type our interview, instead of recording it, which I did not have the capacity to do. The preparation was simple. Every week, Nyad has a segment called “The Score” on the Los Angeles-based radio station KCRW. The Score is a fourminute piece put together by Nyad that discusses current events in sports and examines the deeper issues behind those events. I logged onto the KCRW website and listened to archives of Nyad’s pieces. Her quick voice seemed to make a point with every word she spoke. I prepared, but she was right. During our interview I could not keep

up with her energy and bounty of words, and anyway, in my preparation I got lost in the beauty of her stories. Nyad does tell wonderful stories—a mixture of both dark and light observations unique to the human experience, not least of which is the one about her life. She first became famous for being the greatest marathon swimmer during a 10-year period spanning from 1969 to 1979 that reached its peak and finality when she recorded the longest swim ever, a 102.5-mile, two-day journey that spanned from the island of Bimini in the Bahamas to Florida. What followed were numerous appearances on talk shows and phone calls from celebrities like

movie director Woody Allen, who asked her out on a date. Her story appeared on the front page of the New York Times and Walter Cronkite profiled her in his nightly newscast as a woman doing something that nobody had ever done before. Her feat was an inspiration

to both men and women. In 1974, she was the first person to swim the 32 miles across

Lake Ontario from north to south and in 1975, she broke a 50-yearold record for the fastest swim around Manhattan Island, which she accomplished in seven hours and 57 minutes.

“You’re never like, ‘Oh this is a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours,’” she said. “But you learn to handle the pain. It’s your desire that keeps saying to you, ‘You wanted to do this, you knew this would happen. Manage the pain.’ When you see that other shore that’s what it’s all about . . . the emotional euphoria, the sense of pride. I always do think that those swims are a little metaphor for life.”1 After powering over waves in the open ocean, losing consciousness

in freezing temperatures, crying out of exhaustion and sea-salt sickness, dealing with jellyfish, and losing 20 to 30 pounds throughout some of her swims, what would drive somebody to do

something like that and how does it become an attainable goal? For Nyad, there was never a path that logically or conveniently laid itself out and asked her to follow it. Rather, it was a path that took many turns, in some instances jutting into parts where nothing was clear and blind faith alone was the best compass, and turning back out into parts of sheer joy and exhilaration for accomplishments that defied all rationale. As Nyad says, she lived under the same roof as a con artist, her father, who intimidated her with his larger than life persona that was necessary for a person making a living by lying and stealing. She wrote a Newsweek article after her father died, detailing how one time he took her and her two siblings to a mansion in Key Largo,

Florida. A few days later they were running out of the mansion and into her father’s car when the homeowners arrived earlier than planned and threatened to call the police. It was, her father insisted, a misunderstanding, but Nyad had caught on by then. “As you get older you look back and I was terrified of him in some ways,” she said. “My mother knew that he was a liar and a thief and she finally got the courage to divorce him.” As a 10-year-old sitting in geography lass, Nyad remembers her teacher promising anyone in class an A if they would join the swim team. The next day she was at practice and after swimming for 10 minutes, Nyad’s teacher, a former Olympian, said to her, “Kid, you’re going to be the best swimmer in the world.” The compliment meant everything to her and swimming became her escape from home. So she turned to the water and dreamed of becoming an Olympian, just like her coach. But four years would pass before the same man was the source of heart-breaking disillusionment. On the eve of the Florida state

swim championships, Nyad was molested by her swim coach—the man she adored the most. The next day, she lost her first swim meet in two years. In both competitive and emotional anguish, the swimmer sank to the bottom of the pool and screamed. The 14-year-old Nyad vowed to herself that the incident with her coach would not ruin her life. The molestation would last four years until she was 18 years old and had graduated from high school, but Nyad never reported it to law enforcement for fear that it would cause her mother a great deal of embarrassment. Those four years of terror, Nyad says,

had ramifications that she still deals with today. She continued swimming

under her molester’s eye, hoping that she could make it to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, but she did not qualify at nationals in either the 100-meter or 200-meter backstroke.

She knew her speed was trailing off and her competitive career in the pool was coming to an end. Yet, her desire to forget the traumatic memories of her coach led to the finding of another escape. Nyad still had fantasies of being the best in the world and a desire to

compete that became the genesis of her marathon swimming career. She would travel across the world swimming for miles with hundreds of men and women in places like the Nile River and the Bay of Naples. “I was 18 years old, my Olympic dreams were not going to be a reality, and I figured what the heck, I’m going to give this a try,” she said. Then, on a trip back to the United States from one of her overseas swims, a friend suggested to her that there were many daring swims she could attempt at home. Nyad’s friend pointed out to her she was from New York and that she should give a swim around

Manhattan Island a try, which she did in 1975, capturing the imagination of the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who called Nyad “My hero” on the front page of the New York Post. From that point on, Nyad concentrated on fewer swims of longer distances.

One particular swim captured her memory—it was one she did not complete. It was a swim from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida, in 1978 that was called off in mid-swim because of weather that was veering Nyad off course. After 41 hours and 49 minutes of relentless effort, the expedition was shut down. The next year, the crew came together again and Nyad successfully stroked her way into the record books with that 102.5-mile

feat, the longest swim ever done by either a man or woman until 1997. Friends and well-wishers would meet her on the shores, and Nyad happily soaked it all in. She enjoyed the attention and the teamwork that came from collaborating with a crew of 50, including

Jacques Cousteau and NASA experts. But she also looks back at her swims with a different purpose. “Like a lot of kids that go through molestation they find a way to escape,” she said. “I really think, now, the safest place I felt was in the water. When I could be in the water for six hours a day swimming laps I felt like nobody could get

me. There was that factor of safety.” After one of her appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1980, the president of ABC Sports, Roone Arledge, noticed

Nyad and her penchant for story telling. He offered her a position as an announcer for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Her new job took her around the world to cover everything from table tennis championships to triathlons. “Every week I would work a different

event and it was fantastic,” Nyad said. “There was a great learning curve because the cameramen, the engineers, and the editors were all top flight in the business.”

Nyad became famous once more for her journalistic endeavors. She worked at ABC from 1980 to 1990 and has also worked as a columnist for NPR since 1988. While working with NPR she was also the host of the Savvy Traveler, where she visited exotic places

around the world and, as host of all foreign documentaries for the Outdoor Life Network, swam with whales and kayaked over 40-foot waterfalls. In 1996, she joined FOX Sports as an investigative reporter and covered such topics as the use of performance-enhancing

drugs by athletes. Currently, she is heard by millions of people on NPR with her sports commentary on The Score and she is also the sports business columnist for the radio show Marketplace. It is a dream of hers to be able to host a show where she can invite athletes and speak to them about issues not related to their accomplishments, where she can get to the heart and soul of the athletic experience as she does on her radio shows. “I slowly but surely decided I didn’t want to go out and cover events anymore,” she said. “I wanted to be one of the people that told stories about sports to the non-sport audience.

I wanted to be a storyteller more than an events coverer.” In 1998, as a board member of World T.E.A.M. Sports, an organization that puts able-bodied and disabled athletes together for unique sporting adventures around the world, Nyad and her teammates

bicycled 1,200 miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It was an important moment in reconciliation between war veterans from both sides of the Vietnam War. Along with Tour de France champion Greg LeMond and Congressmen John McCain and John Kerry, both Vietnamese and American veterans, many of whom had been blinded and maimed during the war, rode up mountains and ate dinner together while sharing their terrible war stories. Nyad has also started an enterprise with a business partner called bravabody.com, whose mission is for women over 40 years old to not be ashamed of their bodies and to develop pride and confidence through fitness. Also in development is a one-woman show where people would buy a ticket to listen to Nyad tell stories and entertain them for 90 minutes. “I think I have a talent for standing on stage and going for 90 minutes of storytelling that goes in an arc, hopefully making people laugh so hard they will cry and cry so hard they will laugh,” she said. “If I have enough guts to do it, I’m going to get it done.” When Nyad was five years old there was somebody telling her

stories. It was her father, the con artist, who she remembered would read The Odyssey to her late at night, a story about the great Greek mythological figure Odysseus who traveled for 10 years after the Trojan War to get back home. It was one of the good memories Nyad had of her father; maybe he was foretelling her future. Nyad has had

her own odyssey by traveling the world, reaching celebrity, and swimming distances that had been unimaginable.