Background and career
Diana Nyad (née Sneed; born August 22, 1949) is an American author, journalist, motivational speaker, and long-distance swimmer. Nyad gained national attention in 1975 when she swam around Manhattan (28 mi or 45 km) in record time. She has written four books and articles for various publications, hosted the public radio program The Savvy Traveler, appeared on the television shows CBS News Sunday Morning and Dancing with the Stars, and been a long-time contributor to the public radio programs All Things Considered and Marketplace. In 2013, on her fifth attempt and at age 64, she claims (it has never been ratified) that she swam from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida, a journey of 110 mi (180 km), completing the third known swim crossing of the Florida Straits after Walter Poenisch in 1978 and Susie Maroney in 1997. Both of those earlier efforts involved a shark cage and, in Poenisch's case, fins and several short rests on his escort craft. Nyad did not use fins or a cage, but did swim with a protective jellyfish suit, shark divers, and electronic shark repellent devices. Her crossing from Cuba to Florida was not conducted under the supervision of an organized sporting association, and ratification of the accomplishment was later denied by the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) for various reasons including incomplete observer logs with a 9-hour undocumented gap in observations, conflicting crew reports, nearly a decade of delay in providing documentation to seek formal ratification, dubious claims about the rules followed for the swim, and "backdated and falsified documentation". Guinness World Records initially certified Nyad's achievement, but revoked its certification after considering the findings by WOWSA. Her 2013 swim and partnership with athlete and businesswoman Bonnie Stoll were dramatized in the 2023 film Nyad, based on her 2015 memoir Find a Way.
Nyad was born in New York City on August 22, 1949, to Lucy Winslow Curtis (1925–2007) and stockbroker William L. Sneed Jr. Her mother was a great-granddaughter of Charlotte N. Winslow, the inventor of Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a popular morphine-based medicine for children's teething pain that was manufactured from 1849 until the 1930s. She is also a great-grandniece of women's-rights activist Laura Curtis Bullard. The Sneeds divorced in 1952, after which Lucy Sneed married a man known as Aristotle Z. Nyad, who later was revealed to be Aris Notaras, an individual with multiple aliases. Notaras, who had a complex history involving legal issues and a conviction for smuggling, adopted Diana following the marriage. The family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she began swimming seriously in seventh grade. She was enrolled at the private Pine Crest School in the mid-1960s, swimming under the tutelage of Olympian and Hall of Fame coach Jack Nelson who, she has said, molested her beginning when she was age 14 and continued until she graduated from high school. She has also said she learned several years later that another girl who trained under Nelson had also been molested, and said the two of them had brought their accusation to the headmaster of the school, but that no clear action was taken and Nelson resigned at the end of that school year. She won two Florida state high school championships in the backstroke at 100 yards. She dreamed of swimming in the 1968 Summer Olympics, but in 1966 she spent three months in bed with endocarditis, an infection of the heart, and when she began swimming again she had lost speed. After graduating from Pine Crest School in 1967, she entered Emory University, but was expelled for jumping from a fourth-floor dormitory window wearing a parachute. She then enrolled at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where she resumed swimming, concentrating on distance events. She soon came to the attention of Buck Dawson, director of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Florida, who introduced her to marathon swimming. She began training at his Girl's Camp "Camp Ak-O-Mak" in Magnetawan, Ontario and set a women's course record of 4 hours and 23 minutes in her first race, a 10-mile (16 km) swim in Lake Ontario in July 1970, finishing 10th overall. After graduating from Lake Forest College in 1973 with a degree in English and French, Nyad then enrolled in a PhD program for Comparative Literature at New York University in 1973 and also pursued her marathon swimming career.
Nyad has written four books: Other Shores (1978) about her life and distance swimming, Basic Training for Women (1981) describing a physical fitness program for women, Boss of Me: The Keyshawn Johnson Story (1999) about NFL wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson, and Find a Way (2015) about her quest to swim across the Florida Straits. She has also written for The New York Times, Newsweek, and other publications. Nyad and former professional racquetball player Bonnie Stoll formed a company called BravaBody which is aimed at providing online exercise advice to women over 40. Nyad succeeded Rudy Maxa as host of the public radio program The Savvy Traveler, produced by Minnesota Public Radio, in July 2001 and remained host until the show ended in 2004. Nyad was the subject of a short documentary "Diana" by the digital channel WIGS in 2012. As of 2006, she was a (long-time) weekly contributor to the National Public Radio afternoon news show All Things Considered (appearing on Thursdays), as well as the "business of sport" commentator for the American Public Media public radio program Marketplace business news. She was also a regular contributor to the CBS News television show Sunday Morning. An analysis of Nyad's ability to dissociate during her marathon swims was covered by James W. Pipkin. The documentary film The Other Shore was released in early 2013, some months before Nyad's swim from Cuba to Florida. In her 1978 autobiography, Nyad described marathon swimming as a battle for survival against a brutal foe—the sea—and the only victory possible is to "touch the other shore".
Nyad played in the 1979 Women's World Open Squash Championship, where she lost in the first round to Swedish player Katarina Due-Boje. The same year, she was part of U.S. national team at the World Team Championships. They finished, without winning a match, as 6th.
1974: In June 1974, Nyad set a women's course record of 8 hours, 11 minutes in a 22-mile (35 km) race in the Gulf of Naples. 1975: At age 26, Nyad swam 28 miles (45 km) around the island of Manhattan (New York City) in just under 8 hours (7 hours 57 minutes), breaking a 48-year-old record (unofficial, set by Byron Sommers in 1927). An account of her swim was published in the New York Times the next day. 1978: At age 28 she first attempted to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, one year after the Kennedy-era travel restrictions were lifted. Diving into the ocean at 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 13 from Ortegosa Beach (50 miles; 80 km west of Havana), she swam inside a 20-by-40-foot (6.1 m × 12.2 m) steel shark cage for nearly 42 hours, then team doctors removed her around 7 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, August 15, due to strong easterly winds and 8-foot (2.4 m) swells that were slamming her against the cage and pushing her off-course towards Texas. She had covered about 76 miles (122 km), but not in a straight line. 1979: On her 30th birthday (August 21–22, 1979), in what was to be her last "competitive" swim (at least until 2013), she swam from North Bimini Island, Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Florida (without using a protective shark cage or a wetsuit), an endeavor contemporaneous reports gave as 60 and 89 miles. Later accounts increased the distance to 102.5.
By early January 2010 Nyad began training for a summer attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida, a distance of over 110 miles (180 km) which is the equivalent of five English Channel swims via the Strait of Dover. Taking up residence in the Caribbean island of St. Maarten from January through June, she went for 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-hour-long swims every other week. She then moved her training to Key West and, while waiting for favorable weather conditions, she embarked on a 24-hour swim. On July 10, she reserved a 35-foot fishing vessel to take her 40 miles (64 km) out to sea. At 8:19 AM she jumped overboard and began swimming back towards Key West, with the boat following her. At 8:19 AM the next day her handlers helped her back on board, still about 10 miles (16 km) from land: she said she felt "tired and dehydrated" but still "strong" and "easily able to swim another 20 hours without any problem." On July 10, 2010, at the age of 60, she began open water training in preparation for a 60-hour, 103-mile (166 km) swim from Cuba to Florida, a task she had failed to accomplish thirty years prior. When asked about her motivation, she answered "Because I'd like to prove to the other 60-year-olds that it is never too late to start your dreams." She was scheduled to make the swim in August/September 2010, but bad weather forced her to cancel; she rescheduled for July 2011. In an October 15, 2010, interview with CNN, Nyad said she was trained and would be ready to swim by July 23. While training in St. Maarten, she sat for an interview that was published March 25, 2011, by the island's online news agency, The Daily Herald, remarking that "It's a large operation, like an expedition. We've got about 25 people, navigators, managers, boat crew, weather routers, medical people, shark experts, you name it. That's the time also when the water starts to get to its hottest. I need the hottest possible ocean. As soon as we hit the right forecast, we'll be off to Havana. We won't know the exact starting point probably until the night before. And we don't know exactly where landfall will be...I'd love to wind up in Key West, but it will depend on trajectory of the Gulf Stream." Nyad estimated that the cost of her "expedition" was about $500,000. Nyad moved her training site from the Caribbean island of St. Maarten to Key West, Florida in June 2011. She was joined by key members of her support team on June 28, to wait for ideal weather conditions that typically occur only during the summer doldrums in July and August. For the marathon swim to be feasible, two main weather conditions needed to come together at the same time: a combination of low-to-light winds (to minimize sea chop), and water temperatures in the high 80s °F (high 20s/low 30s °C). These relatively "high" water temperatures produce a twin challenge: in the first half of her swim, the warm water would dehydrate her body, while in the second half, her body temperature would drop and she would face potential hypothermia. Nyad had bulked up her physique to about 150 pounds/70 kg (15 pounds/7 kg more than she weighed in 2010) to help counter the loss of body mass during her grueling swim. Nyad was to be escorted by a paddler in a kayak equipped with an electronic shark repellent known as a Shark Shield. To keep Nyad swimming in a straight line, her specially designed, slow-moving catamaran support boat deployed a 10-foot (3.0 m) streamer: a long pole keeps the streamer several yards away from the boat, and the streamer was designed to remain about 5 feet underwater, so that Nyad can swim above it, much like following a lane line in a swimming pool. At night, the white streamer was replaced by a string of red LED lights. Writing in her blog in July 2011, Nyad stated that the development of the submerged guide streamer, in early summer 2011, may be the single greatest aid to her marathon swim. In all of her previous swims, she had trouble keeping the support boat in sight and was prone to veer off-course. Keeping a boat headed in a straight line, in the ocean, while moving at only 1 to 2 knots is very difficult, and her catamaran was equipped with thrusters and a special sea anchor (in case of following seas) to stabilize its course. Several experts who attended the 2011 Global Open Water Swimming Conference in New York City on June 17–19, 2011, expressed their strong belief that Nyad had both the physical ability and the positive mental stamina to be able to complete the Cuba-to-Florida swim. However, a record stretch of high winds and dropping water temperatures prevented her from making the attempt at the time.
