Distance Swims
- 1974: In June 1974, Nyad set a women's record of 8 hours, 11 minutes in the 22-mile Bay of Naples race.
- 1975: At age 26, Nyad made national headlines by swimming 28 miles around the island of Manhattan (New York City) in just under 8 hours (7 hours 57 minutes.) An account of her swim, published the next day, stated Nyad was "5 feet six inches tall" and weighed 128 pounds.
- 1978: At age 28 she first attempted to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West. Diving into the ocean at 2PM on Sunday August 13 from Ortegosa Beach (50 miles west of Havana), she swam inside a 20 X 40 foot steel shark cage for nearly 42 hours, before team doctors removed her during the 7 o'clock hour on the morning of Tuesday August 15 due to strong Westerly winds and 8-foot swells that were slamming her against the cage and pushing her off-course towards Texas. She had covered about 76 miles, but not in a straight line.
- 1979: In what was to be her last "competitive" swim on her 30th birthday (August 21–22, 1979), she set a world record for distance swimming (both men and women) over open water by swimming 102 miles from North Bimini Island, Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Florida (without the use of protective shark cage). Thanks to favorable winds and a following sea she averaged 3.7 miles per hour and completed the swim in 27 and one-half hours.
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, more importantly, the positive mental stamina to be able to complete the Cuba-to-Florida swim: sports physiology studies have shown that in "extreme" marathon-type activities mental determination is a more important factor than the physical energy of youth. Research published by the Mayo Clinic in 2008 indicates there are beneficial effects of endurance training on age-related cellular dysfunction.
Read more about this topic: Diana Nyad
Famous quotes containing the words distance and/or swims:
“Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)