The first time Diana Nyad tried to swim around Manhattan, in the fall of 1975, she was pulled out of the East River in the black of night after eight hours of non-stop swimming—“trembling uncontrollably, muttering an incoherent stream of monosyllables,” she wrote in her 1978 memoir, “Other Shores.” She had contracted a virus in the contaminated water, and it took her ten days to recover. Then she got back in the water and did it again. On her second try, she wrote, “the Hudson was rough, but the full force of the tide was with me and I almost frolicked in the waves.” Nyad made it around in seven hours and fifty-seven minutes, breaking the record by nearly an hour: “Manhattan Island was mine!”
There were pictures of her on the front pages of the New York papers the next morning. She was on “Saturday Night Live.” Woody Allen called her up for a date. (Nyad said yes, even though she’s gay, and they became friends; at one of his birthday parties, Diana Vreeland asked where she got her little shorts.) Nyad was twenty-six and strikingly beautiful, with big brown eyes, a toothy smile, and freckles. Her looks and her pronounced confidence made her a natural for television: she made a dazzling appearance on the “Tonight Show.” Her friend Bonnie Stoll remembers, “She walked on to Johnny Carson’s show as if it was her show—no fear whatsoever.” Nyad was already an accomplished long-distance swimmer, having broken the women’s world record for the twenty-two-mile route from Capri to Naples and made the first north-to-south crossing of Lake Ontario. But after Manhattan she was a star.
For a follow-up, she decided, she would swim from Cuba to Florida: a hundred and eleven miles, the equivalent of five English Channel crossings, and the longest open-ocean swim in history. (The closest comparable feat was a sixty-mile crossing of Lake Michigan, performed by two men.) Nyad would have to contend with the strong currents and rough waves of the Gulf Stream, and with sharks and jellyfish. In an interview on the “Today” show, Jane Pauley asked about her motivation. “The most difficult thing I know, mentally or physically, is swimming these great bodies of water,” Nyad replied. But when she reached her destination, she said, she experienced “a moment of immortality.”
The Cuba swim was instead an epic deflation. Nyad entered the water in Havana Harbor protected by a steel shark cage, and the weather soon turned horrid. She was attacked by jellyfish, and eight-foot waves slammed her against the walls of the cage. The current pushed her wildly astray, toward Texas. Nyad had swum seventy-nine miles, in forty-two hours, when her team pulled her out of the water and told her that a squall had sent them irretrievably off course. She was devastated. “I have never summoned so much will power—I’ve never wanted anything so badly,” she told a television reporter just after she returned. Fighting tears, she added, “And I never tried so hard.”
A year later, on her thirtieth birthday, she broke the open-ocean world record for both men and women, swimming a hundred and two miles from the Bahamas to Florida, unassisted and without a shark cage. She did not swim another stroke for three decades.
One morning in November, Nyad, who is sixty-four, was at home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her dog, Teddy, in a rambling house in a neighborhood of green lawns and carefully pruned roses. Two ragged flags, American and Cuban, hung from a pole in her front yard.
When Nyad stopped swimming, she reasoned that thirty was a good age for an athlete to retire. She began a career as a television personality, on “Wide World of Sports” and CNBC, and as a radio commentator for NPR. Nyad’s voice is deep and resonant, and she is a voluble, impassioned storyteller; she also found work as a motivational speaker. She stayed in shape, and took a hundred-mile bike ride every Friday. “Part of the pleasure of these endurance activities is to be so engaged in your mind and in nature and just get away from the monkey chatter,” she said. “But I’d get back to the house and think, Oh, my God, I didn’t notice a thing. I didn’t look over and see if there were dolphins in the ocean.” Her mind was monopolized by regret. “I was very engaged in examining the past: Why didn’t I do it this way instead?”
She thought about the dissolution of her decade-long relationship—her marriage, as far as she was concerned—with a television executive named Nina Lederman, who is now a close friend. She thought about injustices she’d suffered and how she wished she’d fought back. And sometimes she thought about how differently she would approach her sport now. “There’s that French expression ‘If only the young knew, and the elderly could still do,’ ” she said. “How many athletes have I interviewed who say, ‘Oh, if only I could have my mind of this age and be back on the world stage’ as a skater, golfer, tennis player . . .”
She first had the idea of swimming from Cuba to Florida, in the seventies, when she was living on the Upper West Side. (She liked to gamble at the time—she used to meet her bookie at the cheese department in Zabar’s.) “I went out and got all the nautical charts of the earth’s surface, and I put them out on a big swath of the rug and got rid of the Antarctic Circle,” she said. When her eyes reached Cuba, “I literally had a palpitation about it. I thought, It’s Cuba. It’s magic. It’s that forbidden land we’re not allowed to go to, and they’re not allowed to come here. I thought of all the stories of the hundreds of Cubans who have tried to swim out on their own and not made it—they call it the Havana graveyard.” When Nyad was growing up, in Fort Lauderdale, her mother used to take her to the Lago Mar beach club and, pointing off the shore toward Cuba, say, It’s so close you could actually swim there. “She meant it figuratively,” Nyad said. “But I think somewhere, bubbling in my imagination, I was, like, It’s right there.” Around her neck, Nyad wore a pendant that Lederman had given her: a scrimshaw map of Cuba with “Onwards” engraved on the back.
Her mother died shortly before Nyad turned sixty, and something shifted inside her. “I don’t care how healthy I am—it’s not like I’m going to live another sixty years,” she said. “There’s a real speeding up of the clock and a choking on, Who have you become? Because this one-way street is hurtling toward the end now, and you better be the person you admire.” She didn’t want to ponder her past anymore. “I used to be such a maverick in the nineteen-seventies,” she said. “I was one of the few people—certainly one of the few women—doing these kinds of extreme things.” She wanted the “thrill of commitment”: a magnificent goal that would consume all self-doubt. “Cuba, because the dream had been there before, I thought, Boy, that’s a dream I could rekindle.”
But it seemed impossible: you could never do at sixty what you did at thirty, let alone what you couldn’t do at thirty. The body disintegrates every year, every hour. “In some parts one grows woody; in others one goes bad,” the critic Charles Sainte-Beuve wrote. “Never does one grow ripe.” And yet: Cuba. So close you could swim there.
“We usually know where each other is,” Bonnie Stoll, who has been Nyad’s best friend for more than thirty years, recalled. “Suddenly there’d be hours of time when she’d be all squirrelly—three, four hours at a time where I don’t know where she is, because she’s swimming.” After Nyad revealed her plan, Stoll accompanied her on a training swim in Mexico and saw her in the water for the first time. “One hour in, I saw that she was meant to do it,” Stoll told me. “She was one with the water. There was no difference; she was just part of it. That lasted six or eight hours. I said, O.K., let’s go.”
Nyad announced her intention to the rest of her friends at a party. “I feel powerful—I’ve got a lot of chi left in this life,” she shouted, pacing poolside in a white bathing suit. “When I walk up on this beach this time, the whole world’s going to see: sixty is the new forty!” Then she leaped into the water.
Nyad met Stoll playing racquetball; Stoll was once among the top ten professional players in the country. The two dated briefly, and then settled into a jock friendship, working out together constantly. After Stoll, who has the demeanor of an exceptionally jovial drill sergeant, retired from racquetball, she became a trainer, and she helped Nyad prepare for Cuba. She wasn’t particularly concerned about Nyad’s age. “Endurance sports are very different from other kinds of sports: the mind is a large part of the endeavor,” she said. “And Diana has a different kind of mind.”
Steven Munatones, the director of the World Open Water Swimming Association, told me, “If you run, eventually your joints give out. In basketball, you can dunk at twenty-two but probably not at forty-two, and certainly not at sixty-two.” Munatones, who is a performance consultant for a variety of athletes (when we spoke, he was on the way to coach skiers for the Olympics in Sochi), said that swimming is different: “If you are inclined to, you can do it until the day you die. Marathon swimmers aren’t Michael Phelps. They are not being measured on aerobic capacity. If Diana’s aerobic capacity decreases, she just slows down.”
But the slower she swims the longer she has to stay awake, and to get from Cuba to Florida at any pace she would have to swim for days on end. Nyad has always operated without a lot of rest, though. In fifth grade, she wrote an essay called “What I Will Do for the Rest of My Life,” in which she announced, “I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon. I need to practice hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible.” Stoll told me, “Diana is the least lazy person I have ever met in my life.”
After Mexico, Stoll began to gather information: “Let’s figure out the nutrition; let’s write to people. But nobody really knows.” What they wanted to do had never been accomplished by anyone, male or female, at any age. Stoll said that she could “see the playing field: in endurance sports, you have to build up and then you have to taper down in order to peak at the right time.” But they couldn’t simply pick a date to begin the swim. They had to wait for a window when the currents and the wind would not make the journey impossible. Even then, at any moment—after, say, forty hours of swimming—the weather could suddenly force them to stop.
They estimated that the expedition would cost about half a million dollars. Nyad needed a boat with a crew and an experienced navigator that she could follow. She needed a medic, in case she collapsed in the water. (In 1959, the Greek swimmer Jason Zirganos, attempting to cross the North Channel of the Irish Sea, suddenly stopped stroking after sixteen and a half hours. The medic in his crew cut his chest open with a pocketknife and performed open-heart massage, but Zirganos died before they reached land.) Nyad would need handlers available the entire time she was swimming, calling her toward them every ninety minutes, so that they could feed her over the side of the boat. (In keeping with the rules of the sport, they would have to feed her without touching her, as if dangling fish into the mouth of a dolphin.) Finally, the entire crew would need plane tickets and paperwork to get to Cuba. They began raising money.
When Nyad wasn’t working on logistics, she trained ferociously. She spent the first half of 2010 going for twelve-, then eighteen-, then twenty-four-hour swims off of St. Martin, where there are rarely sharks to contend with. For the Cuba swim, Nyad and Stoll decided that they would employ shark divers and kayakers for protection: Nyad had bad memories of swimming inside the shark cage, and, furthermore, an Australian named Susie Maroney had made the swim in a cage in 1997; Nyad wanted to accomplish something unprecedented. She and Stoll found a company that produces a kind of shark shocker—a telephone-sized contraption with a seven-foot antenna that drags in the water and emits a shark-repelling electromagnetic field.
Early in the summer of 2010, Nyad and Stoll went to Florida and waited for the right conditions. “Ninety-one days in a row sitting in Key West—trained, ready, expedition paid for—looking at the winds, calling the meteorologists,” Nyad remembered, shaking her head. “The winds never stopped coming from the east. And when they come from the east and the Gulf Stream’s going east they hit and they form giant peaks. And you can’t make it. Then the water temperatures get too cold by the end of September.” In early October, she sent an e-mail to friends and donors: “I got in better shape both body and mind than even in my twenties. It has been draining, ripping of the spirit to feel it all slip away from me.”
“It’s hard for me to remember even now—the heartache the day we went and packed up, after all the training, the fund-raising,” she told me. “Now you’re waiting until next July. And training again.” Relinquishing the Cuba swim did not feel like an option. When she returned to L.A., she was “just looking up a mountain of knowing I was going to go back. Because there is no way I’m not going to do that fucking swim.” The waiting and the training would be their own test of endurance.
A pronounced ability to tolerate pain is common among marathon swimmers. Agony in the sport is a given. The body suffers from being immersed for days in salt water: when a swimmer swallows water as she breathes, it abrades the soft tissue of the lips, the tongue, and the throat. The throat starts to swell shut; in one case, Munatones said, “they literally had to cut the person’s throat to get air in.” Salt water is nauseating, and swimmers, already seasick from being thrown by waves, vomit during marathons, losing valuable calories.
The water in the Straits of Florida, where Nyad wanted to swim, is relatively warm. But even the balmiest seawater is colder than body temperature, and hypothermia is a grave danger. Blood flows to the body’s core to protect the vital organs, and, as the condition progresses, the extremities fail. The victim becomes confused and can lose consciousness; in the worst case, her heart stops. Most swimmers tolerate a certain degree of hypothermia. The problem is that by the time a swimmer is dangerously hypothermic she has stopped feeling cold. “Every year, people get in trouble,” Munatones said. “When their crew pulls them out, they seem catatonic, their blood pressure is low, their eyes roll back in the sockets.”
Swimmers call the process of acclimating the body to cold and seasickness “hardening”: the earned capacity to survive for long stretches underwater, where humans are not designed to be. People who excel at this tend to be exceptionally good at refocussing their minds when confronted with pain or danger. Recently, Nyad took part in an experiment with a psychiatrist at the University of California San Diego, in which subjects’ air supply was restricted for undisclosed intervals and their panic response measured, using MRIs. Nyad stayed as calm as Navy SEALs who participated in the experiment. Open-water swimmers tend to have “a survival mentality,” Munatones said. “You literally have to go to the edge. With athletes in general, they say that, but normally that means jump high or run fast—it’s not a matter of life or death.
“Every open-water swimmer I know, they make lists,” he continued. “They remember their exact time, to the second, of a swim they did twenty years ago; they count their strokes.” When Nyad takes a long flight, she buys a family-size pack of M&M’s. In her seat, she takes the candy out of the bag, counts it, and puts back an equal number of each color. (She eats the extras.) She divides the length of the flight by the number of remaining M&M’s and then eats them at even intervals, keeping track of what color she pulls out of the bag every time. “I want to finish them exactly when I land,” she said. “Of course, if you don’t land on time, then you’re screwed, and your whole O.C.D. personality is in crisis.” On training swims for Cuba, if she got to her point of exit ahead of schedule, she would continue swimming around until she’d hit her planned duration to the second.
Open-water swimmers must be able to control their minds—it is all they can control, unlike the weather, the sharks, the currents. “They feel sick or cold or whatever, they have to be able to think of something else to continue,” Munatones said. “Open-water swimmers have to be able to compartmentalize.”
Nyad’s mother, Lucy Curtis, was born into a wealthy family, which made its money from a product called Soothing Syrup, and “used to live where Tiffany’s is now,” Nyad told me. But Lucy’s mother didn’t want her, and she was sent to France to be brought up by relatives “who knew Matisse and Gauguin” and lived “literally right next door to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.” She was seventeen when the war came to Paris, and, with her American passport, she escaped. “She got together with a group of people and—by bicycle and by walking through the South of France—they got across the Pyrenees and into Portugal, where they took a boat to Manhattan.”
Lucy married Aristotle Nyad, a Greek Egyptian who looked like Omar Sharif and was a wonderful dancer. Diana often does an impression of him in speeches. “He called me over when I was five years old, and he had the large Webster’s dictionary open, and he said, ‘Dahling, I am waiting for five years, till you are ready to hear this moment,’ ” she told a TED conference in Berlin. He pointed to the word “naiad,” and explained that in Greek myth “these were the nymphs that swam in the lakes and rivers and the oceans to protect them for the gods! The modern definition says ‘girl or woman champion swimmer.’ This is your destiny, dahling!’ ” She started getting up at four-thirty or five every morning to swim for two hours before school, with an hour of sprints at lunchtime; after school she got in the pool for another two hours. “I would be so tired at night I couldn’t eat dinner,” she said.
Aristotle Nyad was a con man, and the family—Lucy, Diana, her sister, Liza, and their brother, William, who was schizophrenic—had to move frequently to keep ahead of the people he had lied to and stolen from. “My father, I always thought, was, you know, scary and fun,” Nyad said. “Magnetic and terrifying.” She adored her mother, but described her as weak. Aris, as he was called, had a violent temper, and several times Lucy had to go to the hospital after he attacked her. Diana became skilled at diverting her attention, focussing on the goals she set for herself at school and in the pool.
Her parents broke up when she was a teen-ager, and she did not see Aris for twenty years. One day, when she was living with Nina Lederman, on West Eighty-sixth Street, he showed up at their apartment at four in the morning. “He says, ‘Dahling, please, I want to see you. I love you so much.’ He’s wearing a white dinner jacket. He’s got a bucket of some incredibly expensive champagne. He’s got fresh-squeezed orange juice. He says, ‘Dahling, oh, I have thought of you every day for twenty years!’ ” He stayed that night and the next, when Nyad and Lederman were having a dinner party. “He makes a salmon with homemade risotto,” Nyad told me. “Gets these expensive Greek wines. Comes back at night with flowers for every woman at the party. Shows the men card tricks. Dances. We stay up till dawn. Everybody calls me the next day and says, ‘Your father is the most fascinating person alive, and his work with the U.N. is just incredible!’ Then the next person calls and says, ‘To be a professor of classics at the Sorbonne and to make it all the way over for this party was just amazing.’ They’re going to find out the truth when he’s gone. But he’s gone. And I never saw him again. Poof. Gone.”
Throughout Nyad’s childhood, Aris had disappeared and reëmerged, and once she reached puberty it was better if he was away. When she was eleven, he took her to the beach one afternoon, and when they stopped after swimming to wash off the sand he put his hand between her legs. “Like he could grab my crotch and hold it in his hand and look at me, like, ‘I got you—I got you right here. And I know how humiliated you feel, and this is fun.’ ” After that, Nyad strategized how to get to her room without crossing his path when she got home from school. She felt safest and most free underwater.
As a seventh grader at the Pine Crest School, in Florida, Nyad found a mentor: Jack Nelson, her swimming coach, a former Olympian, who convinced her that with his help she could become a star. “Finally, there’s somebody who truly is a leader and cares about me and thinks I’m going to capture the world,” Nyad told me. Within a year, she had won state championships in the hundred- and two-hundred-metre backstroke. “I had him on a pedestal—he was it. I was just dying for some leadership and I selected him. And I told him a lot of those stories about the parents.”
So it was devastating when he forced himself on her, when she was fourteen, one afternoon as she was resting at his house before a swim meet. Throughout high school, Nyad says, he persuaded her to meet him in hotel rooms, at his office, in his car, and molested her. She would never be a great swimmer without him, he said, and this was what he needed from her in return; he told her that she had instigated the relationship by writing “I love Coach Nelson” on the cover of a notebook. Years later, Nyad disclosed the abuse to a former teammate, who said that she’d had the same experience. They reported him to the headmaster, and Nelson left at the end of that school year. He went on to become the swimming coach at Fort Lauderdale High School, and in 1993 Fort Lauderdale named him its man of the year. In 2007, Nelson made a statement to the Fort Lauderdale police denying the allegations of abuse; Nyad, he claimed, had told him once that she “wanted to be a writer, and wanted to have the ability to write things that were not true and make people believe them.”
Nyad told me, “A lot of children who grew up with incest say, ‘Oh, I love my father—it’s very complicated.’ With the coach, for me, it’s not complicated. I’ve had all kinds of fantasies of being out in the woods and tying him to a tree and putting his penis on a marble slab and walking around with a hatchet and watching him cry and plead, and I’d say, ‘Oh, remember me? Remember when I was crying? You didn’t seem to care too much about my feelings.’ And then leaving him to bleed to death.”
When Nyad was in college, her mother revealed that Aris was her stepfather, and that her real father had left when she was three years old. By the time Aris died, in 1998, Nyad had already made peace with her memories of him. “People say, ‘Where’d you get this drive?’ ” she told me. “Early on, I thought, I’m in this alone. I’m going to be taking care of myself.”
On the evening of August 7, 2011, after a second year of non-stop training, Nyad and Stoll and their crew set out from Havana Harbor. “There was just no doubt in any of our minds, We’re going all the way,” Nyad said.
Distance swimmers spend most of their athletic life staring down into murky water, isolated by sensory deprivation. “You are swimming essentially blind and deaf,” Munatones told me. “Imagine doing the New York Marathon and not being able to see around you. Most people would finish the marathon crazy—in fact, they wouldn’t be able to finish at all.” Nyad gets through the hours by singing songs in her head—Neil Young, the Beatles. She counts in sets of a hundred, first in English and then in German, Spanish, and, finally, French. She thinks about a one-woman show she wants to perform and fantasizes about appearing on “Dancing with the Stars.”
For the Cuba swim, Nyad followed an illuminated path in the water; her team had developed a streamer studded with L.E.D.s that trailed off a support boat, so that she could swim above it. They couldn’t shine a beam into the water to track her—light attracts animals—so she swam with a little red light attached to her swim cap.
By the end of the first night, she had excruciating pain in her right shoulder—“I feel like it’s going to come out of the socket,” she told Stoll from the water—and the current was pushing them backward. A few hours later, Nyad suffered a severe asthma attack, the first she’d ever had in the water, and every few strokes she had to roll onto her back to catch her breath. Her doctor got in the water to give her puffs from an inhaler, and she pushed on, swimming so slowly that she developed severe chills. “I’m just dead,” Nyad called out to Stoll. “I’m dead.”
At twenty-nine hours, she got out of the water, dehydrated and vomiting. “I just can’t see myself training and dragging everybody along again for another year,” she told her supporters when the team pulled up onshore in Key West. She cried a little as she said, “I think I’m going to have to go to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.”
Six weeks later, she tried again. The weather and the water were flawless. “It was like glass the whole time,” Nyad said. She had been reading Stephen Hawking, and, at dusk, as she was enveloped by the dark sea and sky, she thought about the limits of time and space. Suddenly, at about 8 P.M., she felt a pain like nothing she’d ever experienced—like being “dipped in hot burning oil and your body is in flames.”
She had been stung by a swarm of box jellyfish, the most venomous creature in the ocean—an almost mythological monster with twenty-four eyes and three-foot tentacles that inject a poison that can cause cardiovascular collapse and cerebral hemorrhage. “I feel it in my back and then I feel it in my lungs,” Nyad recalled. “Just frozen in agony.” An emergency medical technician jumped in to wipe away the gelatinous tentacles and was stung in the process. He got back on the boat, injected himself with epinephrine, and collapsed on deck, able to take only three breaths a minute. Nyad stayed in the ocean, treading water, screaming and gasping for air.
After the worst of it dissipated, she picked up her stroke again. At five in the morning, a medical team from the University of Miami arrived to attend to her. “It was like an I.C.U. in the water,” she said. She was given prednisone and oxygen, and then she kept swimming. At dusk, she was stung again.
Nyad’s nephew Timothy Wheeler, who was working on a documentary about the swim, filmed her as she was pulled from the sea: her face is riven with terror, and then she closes her eyes and goes blank as the medical team administers oxygen. Stoll screams at her to keep breathing and not to fall asleep. Finally, air starts coming in and out of her nose, fogging the oxygen mask.
Nyad insisted on continuing after a few hours of treatment; if she returned to the precise G.P.S. coördinates where she’d stopped, she could at least attempt a “staged” swim. But she was too weak to swim half the time she was in the water, and the team was being swept off course. After thirty-seven hours, the navigators gave Nyad bad news. “They said, ‘Do you want to go to the Bahamas?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t fucking want to go to the Bahamas!’ And they said, ‘Then it’s over. We’re done.’ ” Stoll told Nyad, “I watched you almost die last night. I really did. And I don’t think I can do that again.”
Still treading water, Nyad said, “Other people may go through this, but they’re younger, and they’re going to do other swims.” She looked ruined, bereft. “This is the end of it. This is the end.”
One afternoon during my visit, Nyad met with an accountant she was thinking of hiring. “All my life, whether I’ve had money or not had money, it’s the one area where I’ve been disorganized, incompetent, and haven’t done well by myself,” she told him. (Minutes before, she had left her wallet behind on the counter at a Jamba Juice.) When she was hired as an announcer on “Wide World of Sports,” she made three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. “In the nineteen-seventies, it was a lot of money,” she said. “I gave it all away, took care of my friends—we went on some bad-ass trips to Africa.”
Nyad is capable of incredible discipline, but she can be surprisingly unheeding: she never opens her mail and rarely has anything in her refrigerator. Until 2006, she had a business manager, but things ended badly. One day, she went to the hospital for shoulder surgery, and was told that she hadn’t had health insurance in years. Even now she seemed not to fully understand her own finances. She asked the accountant, “If I get paid fifty thousand dollars for a speech, what tax bracket am I in?” He explained that it depended how many speeches she gave a year.
She was going to make some money soon, she said, writing an inspirational book about her life. “All the biggest editors and publishers are interested; they’re all calling it probably the biggest memoir of the decade!” she said, with guileless wonder. “I’m sixty-four years old. I want to take care of myself and not be stupid this time around.” The accountant asked if she had a spouse or a partner. “Not right now,” she said, but explained she had friends she wanted to provide for, so that when they were old “we always have a place to live and a little money to travel.”
Nyad has not had a serious relationship in decades. (She had an affair at the end of her time with Lederman, and, she says, “I think part of my not being with someone else all these years was because I deserved to punish myself.”) But she and Bonnie Stoll are very much a team. They have matching tattoos that say “one heart, one mind,” in Japanese. They talk and text constantly and see each other daily—Stoll lives ten minutes from Nyad, in a modern house with a Leni Riefenstahl photograph of Jesse Owens, which Nyad bought for her, hanging in the living room. “She does as much for me as I do for her,” Stoll told me. “I don’t want to be on Diana’s coattails; that’s not my position.”
After the near-fatal swim in 2011, Stoll and Nyad were deeply divided about whether to finally let go of the Cuba dream. Stoll had become convinced that there was something almost suicidal about persisting. She told me, “Sometimes Diana’s not very evolved—and it pisses me off! She can react out of desperation. She can be desperate.”
“My journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat,” Nyad told an audience a month after her third failed attempt. “Sometimes if cancer has won, if there’s death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean is still there. I don’t want to be the crazy woman who does this for years and years and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida and I will swim from Cuba to Florida.”
Nyad has always believed that a champion is a person who doesn’t give up. (In high school, she hung a poster on her wall that read, “A diamond is a lump of coal that stuck with it.”) But another kind of person who doesn’t give up is a lunatic. “I sort of thought, Oh, she’s crazy—and she is on some level crazy,” Nyad’s friend Karen Sauvigne told me. Sauvigne, a former triathlete who completed a four-hundred-mile bike ride when she was sixty, said, “On some level I can approach understanding.” But, after Nyad’s friends saw photographs of her face swollen and disfigured by stings, Sauvigne said, “we were all, like, Give it up, girl.” Candace Lyle Hogan, a former girlfriend who has accompanied Nyad on every Cuba swim since 1978, told me, “I’m afraid from Day One that she’s going to die. That body of water is a wilderness still. It’s strange out there.”
On August 18, 2012, Nyad made her fourth attempt. She swam for fifty-one hours and was stung repeatedly by jellyfish. (At night, she wore a protective mask that left only her nose and lips exposed: she was stung on the mouth.) When her team finally pulled her out, there were sharks in the water around her and a severe tropical storm above. Nyad resisted, “shaking her head angrily,” according to a live blog that Hogan kept on the boat, though there was “lightning, thunder, and roiling winds tossing her tiny escort vessel up and down on the waves.” She relented only when they convinced her that lightning might kill one of the kayakers.
Stoll told Nyad that she would not accompany her on a fifth attempt at Cuba: she was increasingly disturbed by her friend’s inability to accept defeat. “It didn’t matter how many people—experts!—told her that the Cuba swim couldn’t be done,” Stoll said. Munatones told Nyad, “I don’t think it is physically, humanly possible. There are just too many variables.”
“By this summer,” Nyad told me, “everybody—scientists, endurance experts, neurologists, my own team, Bonnie—said it’s impossible.” But Nyad was convinced that with each failed attempt she’d learned something. She enlisted Angel Yanagihara, the world’s foremost box-jellyfish authority, and collaborated with a prosthetics expert to produce a silicone mask, with eyeholes for goggles and bite plates that secured the mask over Nyad’s lips while still allowing her to breathe. Munatones said that swimming in that protective gear would be like “wearing lead shoes to walk up Mt. Everest.” Nyad, on her Web site, acknowledged that the mask “slows me down, by about .3 mph. And it forces me to swallow much more seawater than good for the stomach. But I simply need to remember, when enduring the difficulty of the mask, that it protects me from stings. . . . No other way.” She had a simple plan for dealing with the weather this time. She e-mailed her team, “We will not, under any circumstances, interrupt the swim for storms this year . . . no matter how severe.”
Stoll thought that no amount of preparation could suffice. “Something can always go wrong and something always will go wrong,” she told me. But at the last minute she decided to go with Nyad, anyway. “I didn’t want to have regret. If this is what Diana was going to do, then I’m with her.”
In Havana, the night before the swim, Nyad felt a cold coming on. Hogan gave her a massage before she went to sleep, and she woke up ten hours later “feeling fantastic,” she told me. Before a swim, she forces herself to keep her adrenaline contained, so she has energy available to fend off crisis. “When something means a lot to me, I don’t want to give it a lot of dispersed energy. I want to keep it within myself.”
Her first night in the water, the mask was agony, abrading her mouth and forcing her to swallow so much salt water that she threw up constantly. On her second night, there was a storm, and the support boats had to move away to avoid hitting her. For two hours, Nyad treaded water, becoming severely chilled. “I really started hallucinating badly,” she said. “I thought I saw the Taj Mahal. I saw all the structure of it and I was talking to the shark guys about it: I thought we got off course and we’re over in India.” Stoll told her that if she came across the Taj Mahal she just needed to swim around it.
“It was choppy out there, but who cared?” Stoll said. “Everything went our way—everything. No sharks, the currents, the wind. We were being pulled in the direction we wanted to go.”
“I was cranking,” Nyad said. “And, even with the rougher seas, we were moving with a good current and with me feeling well. And when I came to put on the mask at night Bonnie said, ‘I want to tell you something. You’re never going to have to put this mask on again.’ ”
The navigation team had calculated that the swim would take three nights—maybe four—but the current and the conditions indicated that they would arrive in Florida before sunset on the third day. Stoll told me, “It was like Mother Nature just said, You know what? Let her fucking go.” In the water, Nyad recalled, “I’m starting to think, Oh, my God, I’m going to make this thing. Before that moment, you have no idea when you’re going to finish. Is this going to be four days, and you’re going to have to find a way not through this night but through the next night?” When she lifted her head to breathe, she saw light along the horizon, and a thrill went through her: “I saw the sun was coming up. I saw this really white light.” But it was better than sunshine. “Bonnie said, Those are the lights of Key West. And I cried. I still had fourteen or fifteen hours to go. But for me that’s a training swim.”
As Nyad approached land, the team on the boat saw it before she did. “My vision’s real bad now—my swim-clouded, hallucinatory vision,” Nyad recalled. “But I see all the shark divers getting in and Angel Yanagihara getting in, and I just felt like there were a lot of people in the water all of a sudden.” They were nearing the reef just off Key West. “I started thinking of all the places I’d trained and all the people who helped, all the fund-raisers,” Nyad said. “I remember the first attempt, and how it was so upsetting to be told that you’re so off course you’re never going to make it. Once we crossed the reef, it was not really a euphoric celebration but just, You didn’t give up. You fucking didn’t give up.”
At two in the afternoon, Nyad stumbled through the shallow water onto the sand, where hundreds of people had gathered to cheer her on. Her lips were as swollen as a clown’s. She staggered like a toddler taking her first steps. Stoll stood in front of her, a few feet up the shore, urging her forward, until finally Nyad stepped out of the water and fell into her arms. She managed to tell the crowd, “You’re never too old to chase your dream.”
Late this fall, to raise money for charity on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, Nyad had a two-lane pool installed in front of Macy’s, in Herald Square, and for forty-eight hours she swam back and forth through the calm, chlorinated water. Every fifteen minutes, another person joined her for a shift in the second lane—a high-school student from a local swim team, her friend Jacki from L.A., Richard Simmons. During the day, there were throngs of people standing and staring, but by four in the morning it was frigid and dark, and the crowd had shrunk to a dozen spectators who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “She’s been in there for how long?” a waitress getting off her shift asked.
It was Nyad’s second night in the pool, and as she swam up to the edge so that Stoll could feed her peanut butter she was starting to sound less coherent. (At one point, she asked when they were going to start using “the other pool.”) “When she’s been in the water for a long time, she turns into her mother, my grandmother,” Timothy Wheeler said. Lucy had Alzheimer’s disease at the end of her life, and there was a similar sense of disorientation and vulnerability. “Her voice, her facial expressions—everything.”
At the edge of the pool, Nyad didn’t look strong and confident, as she does on land. She looked weary and pickled and frail. She drank water through a straw that Stoll gently guided into her mouth, then started retching and threw up into a plastic garbage bin, which Stoll held out for her. Stopping to vomit made her cold, and she shivered in the water. It was hard not to wish that she would just stop swimming and get into bed.
Other people came and went from the pool, swimming beside her, in synch or not, sharing a little of her journey. The light started coming up, and the sky glowed purple for a while, then grew cloudy and foreboding. Sometimes, there were lots of people cheering her on, and it seemed as if Nyad were at the center of something exciting, and then there would be a lull, and the enterprise would seem dubious and isolated. There were long periods of dullness when time went by slowly, but it seemed to speed up toward the end. Diana Nyad did not stop swimming until her time was up. ♦
