After three attempts to swim the 103-mile span between Cuba and Key West, and after multiple stings from jelly fish—correct that, make it Portuguese-men-of-war, a profoundly wicked animal that made her face and lips swell up like a collagen injection from Satan—Diana Nyad has announced that she’s packing it in. She has announced that, at age 62, she won’t be trying again.
She got close: on her attempt last weekend, she covered 82 miles by swimming 40 hours straight. Consider this. She’s in warm water, but it’s still colder than her body, so it’s constantly sucking away her warmth. She is in constant motion. She is in shark country. She is beset by a plague of painful Job-like stings. And she guts it out for 82 miles.
Her web site quotes an Ohio journalist thusly: “The toughest athlete in the world is a 62-year-old woman.” We take no issue with this assessment.
Giving in to the pain and risks (she was told that additional stings could cause paralysis and make it difficult to breathe) was obviously, hugely disappointing. But one of the lessons here is that not achieving glory fades pretty quickly, at least on the web. If she’d finished, she would have done the talk show circuit. Maybe a book. A few motivational speeches. And, in a few months, it’s mostly over. By not finishing, the process is constrained and accelerated.
We hope the memory of her effort doesn’t disappear completely. For one thing, we like it that a person can honestly say that she’s in the best shape of her life as she enters her seventh decade. And we like a person at any age, but especially hers, who goes that large: “There’s so much boldness in living life this way,” she said, “and we did it all, and no one can take it away from us.”
Photo of Diana Nyad from her web site, http://diananyad.com
