Endurance at a Deity Level. Digging Deep (Way Deep).

This Sunday’s NY Times Magazine has a must-read article on Diana Nyad, a marathon swimmer: “Marathon Swimmer Diana Nyad Takes On the Demons of the Sea.”  Her endurance is unimaginable.  She was a swimming prodigy as a youngster.  She suffered sexual abuse throughout high school and sought refuge in the water.  She swims in shark invested waters. Subjects herself to jelly fish stings and endures “chafing, nausea, hypothermia, swollen lips, an irritated mouth, diarrhea, sleep deprivation.”  And she’s still at it at 62 years old looking to swim 103 miles from Havana, Cuba to Key West.  Many ask her why she does it and she thinks:  “I’m a rare breed. There aren’t many people in the world who can do this.”  Oh, you are so right on that point.  Excellent article worth reading in its entirety – here’s some of my favorite excerpts:

• Today Diana Nyad is swimming for four hours. She does this four days a week in the 50-meter pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center, in Pasadena, Calif. Her stroke is rhythmic, high in the water. It’s hard to judge how old she is by looking at her. Her back is well muscled. Her legs are girlish — shapely and short. Her skin is as weathered as a crocodile handbag. Her arms are covered with jellyfish scars.
• When Nyad swims in a pool, she counts in her head, ticking off laps, first in English, then in German, then in Spanish, then in French. (Nyad is fluent in all but German.) The goal is to focus her mind on repetitive thought, as a yogi does with a mantra. But when Nyad swims in the ocean for a long time — 8 or 10 or 12 or even 24 hours — she doesn’t just count, she sings. She’ll do “It Ain’t Me, Babe” 10 times, interspersed with the quatralingual counting, then sing “Paperback Writer,” 10 times, followed by quatralingual counting again. Nyad keeps in her head a playlist of 65 songs. Some are for daytime swimming; others for nighttime. Nyad knows each one intimately, how many seconds each takes, how many strokes. “When I complete 2,000 ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’s, Bob Dylan version, I know I’ve gone 4 hours and 45 minutes exactly,” Nyad says. “I never lose track.”
• Nyad doesn’t swim fast — just over two miles an hour — but she swims steadily, rocking hard to each side to ease the strain she feels in her shoulders, slipping her lead arm into the water at a shallow angle to save what’s left of her rotator cuff. Next summer, Nyad will try, for the fourth time in her life, to swim the 103 miles from Cuba to Florida, where she grew up. When you have such extravagant athletic dreams to pursue and you’re 62 years old, body parts wear out.
• To be a person possessed by marathon swimming is not an easy lot. Nyad describes it as “the loneliest sport in the world.” And when it’s not lonely, it’s awful. A marathon swimmer can expect chafing, nausea, hypothermia, swollen lips, an irritated mouth, diarrhea, sleep deprivation. In the 1970s, Nyad was one of the best in the world.
• She broke the speed record swimming around Manhattan. She set a distance record — for men as well as for women — by swimming 102.5 miles from the Bahamas to Florida. She once lost 29 pounds in 40 hours of swimming.
• “That’s when I knew I could do it,” Nyad says. “Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.”
• “…she sought to learn from these epics how “to dig deeper and deeper into your gut until you arrive at that same core of pride and dignity that the survivors know.”
• At 60, Nyad wanted to feel damn good again. “People ask: ‘What’s in it for you? Is it all masochism? Is it just that it feels bad and then good to be done?’ No,” Nyad says. “When I’m out there, I’m thinking to myself: I’m a rare breed. There aren’t many people in the world who can do this.”