Diana Nyad

Diana Nyad (née Sneed; born August 22, 1949) is an American author, journalist, motivational speaker, and long-distance swimmer.

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 teething 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 won three Florida state high school championships in the backstroke at 100 yards.

After graduating from Pine Crest School in 1967, she entered Emory University, but was expelled for jumping out 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 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.

She began training at his Camp Ak-O-Mak in Magnetawan, Ontario and set a women's course record of 4 hours and 22 minutes in her first race, a 10 mi 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 gained national attention in 1975 when she swam around Manhattan (28 mi) in record time, and in 1979 when she swam from Bimini, The Bahamas to Juno Beach, Florida (102 mi).

In 1975 she broke the 45-year-old record for circling Manhattan Island (7 hrs, 57 min).

Nyad has written four books: Other Shores (1978) about her life and distance swimming, Basic Training for Women (1981), Boss of Me: The Keyshawn Johnson Story (1999) about NFL wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson, and Find a Way (2015).

She has also written for The New York Times, NPR's "All Things Considered", 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 hosted the public radio program "The Savvy Traveler".

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.

Over two days in 1979, Nyad swam from Bimini to Florida, setting a distance record for non-stop swimming without a wetsuit.

As of 2006, she was a (long-time) weekly contributor to National Public Radio's afternoon news show All Things Considered (appearing on Thursdays) as well as the "business of sport" commentator for American Public Media's 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.

By early January 2010 Nyad began training for a summer attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida, a distance of over 110 mi 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.

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.

In addition, she was the subject of a short documentary "Diana" by the digital channel WIGS in 2012.

In 2013, on her fifth attempt and at age 64, she swam from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida, a journey of 110 miles, allegedly 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 used a protective jellyfish suit, shark divers, and electronic shark repellent devices.

Her crossing from Cuba to Florida was denied ratification due to incomplete documentation, conflicting crew reports and rules from an organization that did not exist at the time of the swim.

Guinness World Records revoked Nyad's achievement.

Her 2013 swim and partnership with Bonnie Stoll was dramatized in the 2023 film Nyad.

The documentary film The Other Shore was released in early 2013, some months before Nyad's first successful swim from Cuba to Florida.