Diana nyad swimmer biography of abraham
Who is Diana Nyad? Only the first person to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys without using a cowardly shark cage. It was a journey of about 110 miles, and it took her 53 hours. Also? She’s 64, this was her fifth and final attempt, and she almost died when she tried it last year. She staggered onto the shores of Key West yesterday at 2 p.m., her lips swollen, looking about as confused as you’d be after swimming for 53 hours, and managed to stay upright long enough to give a victory speech:
There’s only one thing to say about someone like that, who made her first attempt to do the swim in 1978 and never quit trying, despite jellyfish, shark threats, exhaustion, asthma attacks, and dehydration. And that thing is this: She’s a badass of legendary proportions. She’s a badass of history.
Sometimes, though, you can only determine exactly how badass somebody is by comparison. To provide a scale, here are 25 badass situations that still aren’t as badass as Diana Nyad’s swim.
1. Sharks.
2. Jellyfish.
3. Rambo.
4. Rambo riding a shark.
5. Rambo riding a jellyfish.
6. Rambo riding a mythical jellyshark.
7. A shark riding a jellyfish that is itself riding Rambo.
8. A shark riding a jellyfish riding Rambo on a frozen football field.
9. A shark riding a jellyfish riding Rambo on a frozen football field, tackling Saddam Hussein.
10. Rambo riding a jellyfish, tackling a mythical jellyshark named “Saddam Hussein” on a frozen North Korean football field.
11. The same as above, except the jellyshark named “Saddam Hussein” is coached by Nick Saban.
12. And Nick Saban is riding a shark.
13. The shark’s name? “Neil Armstrong.”
14. Yes, the shark has walked on the moon.
15. The shark’s moonwalk is his fifth-most impressive story.
16. Because the shark can talk.
17. So we’ve got Rambo riding a jellyfish on a frozen North Korean footbal
Diana Nyad is a special kind of swimmer. She is the kind of swimmer who, at twenty-six years old, was possessed to swim uninterrupted around the island of Manhattan. She is the kind who swam over a hundred miles, three years later, at age twenty-nine, from the Bahamas to Florida. She is the kind who sets records not concerned with speed or medals but rather with endurance and pluck. Nyad established herself as a world-class distance-swimmer in the 1970s, when she was in her twenties (she appeared on The Johnny Carson Show, if that is any indication of her past renown), and in 2010, after thirty years out of the water, decided to give the sport another go. This time she had her sights set on a goal even harder and more ambitious: swimming continuously from Cuba to Florida. That’s over one hundred miles, sixty hours, and about two hundred thousand strokes. At the time, she was sixty years old.
I learned about Nyad just like most other people: through the swell of press that surrounded her attempts at swimming this distance. Since announcing her aim, Nyad has given many interviews and granted over a hundred press requests of various kinds (I contacted Nyad for this piece through several members of her press team). As I began to follow her story more closely, I tracked her in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, ESPN, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and scores of other media outlets. I watched her multiple CNN specials with Sanjay Gupta without once getting up, and her 2011 TED talk after that. As I did more research, I became increasingly gun-shy about speaking to her. In the wake of all of this public exposure, I wondered, was there anything original to ask Nyad? And would I be any match for her commanding personality, so evident in her television specials and her own radio program, The Score? I swam on the morning of our interview to get my mind into shape. The answers to my questions turned out to be: yes (to the first) and no (to t Diana Nyad is an American distance swimmer, journalist, and publisher. She holds the hold of swimming across the channel unaided from the Cuban island to Florida. Diana Nyad was born in New York in August 1949. Her original name was Diana Winslow Sneed. She is the daughter of William Sneed Jr. and Lucy Winslow Curtis. In 1952 she saw her parents’ divorce when she was only three years. Mary Curtis remarried Aristotle Nyad. Aristotle, a Greek-Egyptian by heritage, legally adopted Diana. She became Diana Nyad. She moved with her parents from New York to Florida. She enrolled at Pine Crest School graduating in 1967. She got admission at the Emory University to study a degree course. When she was expelled for a daredevil jump from a fourth-floor window, she joined Lake Forest College. In 1973 she graduated from college with an Arts degree majoring in English and French. Nyad started swimming early in life. She enrolled for competitive swimming lessons while at Pine Crest School. She trained under the watch of a former American Olympian Jack Nelson. Under his tutelage, Nyad became a record winning athlete swimmer in the Florida high school swimming competitions. She won three state high school competitions. She switched to the more rigorous long distance marathon swimming while in college. She got the support of Buck Dawson, a renowned hall of fame swimmer from the Florida International Swimming Hall of Fame. She moved to Ontario, Canada for the marathon swimming training. Nyad participated in a few competitions setting a world record in the 16-kilometer swimming competition in Lake Ontario. In 1974 she competed in Italy. Nyad set a new women’s record in the Bay of Naples swimming competition. In 1975 she became the first woman to swim around Manhattan New York, setting a record of eight hours. She continued with her endurance training and set a new record by At the age of sixty-four, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad became the first person to swim the 111 miles from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage, a Herculean feat that had eluded her when she made the attempt three decades earlier, in peak form. Nyad discusses her new memoir, Find a Way, a passionate story of this heroic adventure and the extraordinary life experiences that have served to carve her unwavering spirit, with Cheryl Strayed (Brave Enough). Always that swim has been for me about living large, about turning 60 and feeling the grip of existential angst—Who am I? And I the person I can admire?—much more than an endurance event. And the people who were on the beach that day—the crying, weeping thousands of people, and the millions of people who have gotten a hold of me—they’re not [all] swimming fans . . . They’re people who want to live that message: You never, ever give up and you will get to your other shore. – Diana Nyad Two hours before the end of this thing, now the palm trees are in full sight. And I asked my team—it’s 44 people, this is a true expedition: you’ve got Dr. Angel Yanagihara, the world’s leading box jellyfish expert from University of Hawaii; you’ve got your shark team, which I mentioned earlier; you’ve got a navigation team (this is an extremely difficult mathematical navigation); you’ve got the medical team; I’ve got my own personal team, which is nutrition and rousing that drop of courage when you don’t think you have anything left—it’s a big expedition. And two hours from the end, more of less, when we’re pretty sure we’re making it to the end, I ask my team to come over and make a semi-circle of boats, and we stop. And I cried like a baby. And I said, ‘You know, I guess I’m going to stumble up on that beach pretty soon, and I guess somebody is going to take my picture, but don’t you ever forget—because I will never forget—that we did this together. We made history together. Diana Nyad Biography, Life, Interesting Facts
Early Life
Budding Swimmer
Diana Nyad & Cheryl Strayed