Even though I saw it on the news at the time, I still find the story of Diana Nyad’s record-breaking unassisted swim from Cuba to Florida almost impossible to believe. She was 64 years old at the time. Before she started training, she hadn’t swum for 30 years. And what she did was not simply impressive for her age, or because she was the first woman to do it: it would have been gobsmacking for anyone, of either sex, of any age.
Wearing only a thin fabric suit, she swam through some of the most treacherous waters on Earth – against the currents and eddies of the Gulf Stream in the shark-infested Straits of Florida. It took 53 hours and she didn’t sleep or even stop while covering a distance of 110 miles – more than five times the length of the Channel swim. It was a feat that most open-water experts had concluded was impossible without a shark cage. Swimmers, including Nyad, had tried and failed at it for years. She first attempted it in 1978 at the age of 28. Two years later, she retired from competitive swimming for good and spent the next 30 years working as a sport broadcaster.
And then when Nyad reached the age of 60, her mother died, and she decided she was going to try again.
“I just didn’t want to have any regrets. I kept on thinking about all the things in my life I could have done differently. My mother had died at 82 and I realised I might only have 22 years left and I just wanted to make sure I really lived them.”
She gave up 29 hours in after an asthma attack. Later that year, she tried again, and wearing nothing but a swimming costume, she was swarmed by box jellyfish, among the most venomous creatures on Earth. The next year, she tried again, and after more jellyfish and a storm, she failed again. Each attempt was an expedition, with a huge team of shark divers and medics and navigators and kayakers and support staff, most of whom weren’t paid. It had taken over the lives of everyone she knew and her closest friends begged her to give it up. But she wouldn’t. And in 2013, at the age of 64, she finally succeeded.
At the time, it seemed more like a parable than an actual news event. Her name – Nyad – is Greek for water nymph. And it affected people in ways that most sporting epics don’t. When she staggered on to the shore at Key West, her 64-year-old body barely able to walk, her face wrinkled and swollen with salt, hardly able to speak, she looked less like a world-class athlete and more like the survivor of some horrific disaster. And, in effect, she was.
It wasn’t really about sport. It was about withstanding, enduring. “I remember coming out and seeing the faces of the crowd on the beach just so emotionally wrought. I realised afterwards, they weren’t weeping because somebody finally made it or somebody set some sports record. They were weeping because they saw someone who refused to give up. And everyone has experience of that, whether it’s fighting cancer or raising a difficult child or whatever.”
She grew up in Florida and Cuba, the forbidden land, felt like it was just across the water. Now she lives in Los Angeles but I meet her in London to talk about her memoir, Find a Way, the story of her swim and the 64 years it took to get there. Though, it turns out, she’s really in town for Wimbledon with her best friend, Bonnie, who was also her chief “handler” for the swim, and has been “hanging out with Martina [Navratilova] and Billie Jean [King]. We’re old friends. In women’s sports, I think much more than men’s sports… it’s more like a family. We all know each other.”
Men beat women in almost every sport there is. They are simply built differently. It’s only in the ultra-marathon category, where it becomes as much of a mental discipline as a physical one, that the differences melt away. “If I were going to stand on a beach, and let’s say we had 100 of the best long-distance swimmers in the world, it would be mostly men and a few women. And if we were just going to swim from here to just over there, I’d probably be last. Now, if we’re going to cross the Channel, it’s getting closer. But it’s only if we’re going to go 100 miles that brute strength and brute speed is not the issue. It becomes much more about who can resist pain, who can manage their energy, who has a steel-trap mind to be able to withstand it.”
Resisting pain, managing energy, having a “steel-trap mind”: these are all things that Nyad has. Just two months before her final attempt, she watched with bated breath while one of the strongest swimmers in the world, a 28-year-old from Melbourne, Chloe McCardel, attempted it. She was stung by a box jellyfish 11 hours in; it was the most excruciating pain of her life, she told the press. “I’m never coming back. That’s it.”
Nyad, on the other hand, came back. Most people who were stung by a box jellyfish died, she said. “Ninety per cent of people who have been touched by that tentacle of that animal die instantaneously. It’s the deadliest poison on Earth today. No spider, no eel, no manta ray, no snake has a poison that is that effective. It paralyses your spinal cord and stops your breath.”
She didn’t die, but she screamed in agony; a medic jumped in the water to help and he too was stung. He was pulled out in excruciating pain, but Nyad refused to get out. She carried on all night and all the next day and it was only when she was stung again the next night that she was, finally, pulled out of the water. “It was awful, awful,” Bonnie tells me when I talk to her later. “I mean, she absolutely 100% stopped breathing. She was dead.”
But carrying on has been Nyad’s hallmark. She spent months and months finding someone to make her a silicone mask to protect her against the jellyfish. It was painful and chafed but it meant she could carry on. As she has since childhood. Because, as a teenager, a young keen swimmer, she was sexually abused by the person she trusted most: her swimming coach.
“In my 20s, I had so much anger and I think I channelled that into my swimming. But millions of young people go through sexual abuse. It’s part of the societal fabric, unfortunately. And I refuse to let that abuser, that heinous individual who humiliated and terrified me, to win. People have said to me often, don’t you appreciate the fact that that’s what made you this tough?
“But it’s not. Talk to my mother about it. When I was two I was like that. I didn’t need to go through that. As together as I am, and happy, and living a charmed life, that hurt, angry little girl is still a little bit in there. You can’t just erase your past. You just can’t. You are the sum of what you are.”
She discovered, as an adult, that the coach had abused other team-mates and though they succeeded in getting him dismissed from his job, it wasn’t possible to pursue legal action against him, a fact that still pains her. A local statute of limitations meant that because the offences had occurred more than seven years previously, it wasn’t possible to prosecute him.
“There are people now working on it, trying to change the law, as you see with what’s happening with Bill Cosby. It has this deep-seated, cellular-level effect and I don’t think you ever get over it. I could sit for days and days and days, and I did, with psychologists who said, ‘Well, it wasn’t your fault.’ But that’s not what’s going on in your head. People say of Cosby, ‘He’s older now. His vision is not so good.’ But what about all the accusers and what they’ve been living with all these years? Justice is justice.”
For years and years, it haunted her. And she blamed herself for a relationship that failed. “I beat myself up about the things I could have done differently. My mother died and I thought I just didn’t want to live like this any more. I just wanted to put everything I had into it. To tap every ounce of potential that is me. Though I didn’t know it would take so long. I thought it would be a one-year enterprise.”
And now? “Now, it has changed me. It worked. I’m full on, now. I go to bed every night thinking there’s nothing more I could have done that day.”
In her memoir, she recounts a speaking event where she got angry when someone had suggested to her that she was too old for it. “They said, ‘Whoa! You’re in your 60s. You shouldn’t be doing this?’ But you feel how you feel. Age, gender, nothing should be a barrier. I’m not 25, I’m not 45, I’m 66 and I can’t do anything about cosmetic ageing. I look in a mirror and of course my face is going to show the years lived. Same with the body. I carry more fat than I did when I was younger. What am I going to do? Worry about that? Talk about not being in the moment! Any moment I spend fretting that I’m not younger, it’s just a waste.
“The guy was taking my photograph earlier and he said, ‘Maybe this angle would be more flattering.’ But I couldn’t care less. It’s what I do, and what I say, and how I live that’s important, not how I look. My looks aren’t my issue and it’s just very freeing.”
She’s always had an impressive ability to ignore what other people think. She came out as gay in her early 20s and she’s never had any issues about it or tried in any way to hide it.
And although it was a very different time then, she doesn’t mention any prejudice or discrimination in her memoir, though she says that it probably did have an impact on her career. “The president of ABC News and Sports used to have a lunch every Wednesday and I’d take my girlfriend and people would pull me aside and tell me not to. But if you said to me today, ‘You would have been the next Diane Sawyer but you’d have to totally closet that whole gay life and be out about town with a nice-looking guy’, I’d say, ‘Not in a million years, never.’”
She’s been single since she split up with the woman whom she calls the love of her life. But then, the other remarkable thing about Nyad’s story is that in some ways it’s a female buddy tale. She says she couldn’t have done it without her two closest friends, Bonnie and Candace, and it seems likely that this is true. Bonnie encouraged her on, every stroke of the way, and Candace had been at every attempt since her first in 1978.
“Honestly, it’s maybe that’s the thing I’ve worked the hardest on. One thing I love about sports is that you can tell what a body’s been doing. When you see a swimmer like a Michael Phelps, you can see what he’s been doing for hours upon hours every day and when you see a friendship like mine and Bonnie’s, you say, ‘That didn’t happen overnight. That’s a garden that’s been tended.’”
My time is up. She has another interview but I go and find Bonnie and talk to her. She was the one who gave her the news, on the final swim, that Key West was finally in sight. What was that like?
“It was beautiful. It was just…such a pleasure. One of the divers, he was on the boat, and he’d done three tours of duty in Vietnam, and he said, ‘You know, I’ve seen courage before, and I’ve seen will, but I have never seen bravery like this. I’ve never seen anything like this.’ It was something incredible. And that was true for all of us who were on the team, it was incredible to see her do it.”
Find a Way: One Untamed and Courageous Life by Diana Nyad is published by Pan Macmillan (£16.99) on 14 July. Click here to buy it for £13.93
