This article originally appeared in the October 1975 issue of Esquire. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access.
On God's dry land she is a twenty-five-year-old ex-Floridian who earned Phi Beta Kappa at Lake Forest College and who is now closing fast on a Ph.D. in comparative lit. from New York University. In hell’s cold water she is an even greater astonishment: the world’s first-ranked woman in marathon swimming, a sport that rarely shows up on the sports page, one in which nobody earns $100,000 a year, and which never is on television Monday nights.
Her long-distance baptism came five years ago in a relatively modest ten-mile event on Lake Ontario. The final score, sports fans: a new world’s record and the first defeat for the great two-legged mammal from Holland, Judith De Nijs.
Last year, Diana Nyad scheduled a round trip. She swam thirty-two miles north to south across Lake Ontario, against the considerable current of the Niagara River; she was the first person ever to do so. This first leg consumed eighteen hours and twenty minutes, or about the time it would take to play seventy-three consecutive quarters of pro football. She rested, regreased her body, chatted with the press. Elapsed time: fifteen minutes, or the time between hockey periods. Then Diana Nyad got back in the water for her return. The news photo above shows her condition two hours later—passed out cold. By the time you read this, she will have tried it all again; and if Nolan Ryan didn’t pitch a no-hitter that day in August, or if Johnny Miller didn’t win a $250,000 tournament, your sports editor may have passed on the results of Diana Nyad.
Hockey pro Bobby Hull, tough and mean, once told Diana Nyad he wouldn’t swim Lac St. Jean for a million dollars. Well, different strokes for different folks. Though she’d prefer not to, Diana Nyad will go those twenty-five miles for nothing, or at least not for a lot of money. She will go for other reasons. These reasons are found in Diana Nyad’s account of the big swim. —Judy Klemesrud
I have been working on swimming since I was ten, four hours a day or more, every day, skipping the greater part of my social life, not a huge sacrifice, but something. I have put more grueling hours into it than someone like Jimmy Connors will ever know in a lifetime. I don’t begrudge him his talent in that particular sport. There is simply no way he could comprehend the work that goes into marathon swimming.
What I do is analogous to other long-distance competitions: running, cycling, rowing, those sports where training time far exceeds actual competition time. But swimming burns more calories per minute than anything else. The lungs, heart and muscles must all be working at peak efficiency for this sport, which doesn’t require brute strength but rather the strength of endurance. I can do a thousand sit-ups in the wink of an eye—and I never do sit-ups on a regular basis. I’ve run the mile in 5:15, not exactly Olympic caliber, but better than most women can do. My lung capacity is six point one liters, greater than a lot of football players. My heartbeat is forty-seven or forty-eight when I am at rest, this is compared to the normal seventy-two for other people. A conditioned athlete usually has a heartbeat of sixty plus. These characteristics are not due to genetics—I attained them by swimming hour after hour, year after year.
My first marathon, the ten-miler at Hamilton, Ontario, scared me to death. Judith De Nijs, the best in the world throughout the Sixties, was there, saying that if a woman ever beat her she would retire from the sport. She came over to me and said, “Vell, I hear you’re a very good swimmer. Vell, you are not going to beat me.” She put on her cap and walked away. I thought, whew. I swam the race and beat her by about fifteen minutes, which is a lot for a ten-miler. Judith De Nijs never swam again.
Greta Andersen was the same way. She swam the Channel I don’t know how many times, as well as the Juan de Fuca Strait, and sixty miles across Lake Michigan. She beat every man she swam against at least once. She could have gone on forever. But she said that if another woman ever beat her, she’d quit. When Marty Sinn beat her, Andersen kept her word.
I’m not like that. Sandra Bucha has beaten me a couple of times in individual swims. I’ve been beaten by Corrie Dixon. They were better than me on those days.
Because I’m interested in people who are involved in exploring their potential, there is no one group I can respect more than marathon swimmers. When I’m in a hospital bed in La Tuque, for instance, after swimming in a twenty-four-hour team race, weak from exposure and nearly having frozen to death, and next to me is the guy I passed at three in the morning, we look at each other as if we’re kings of the mountain. We have a love for each other, a close camaraderie.
There is considerable anxiety before a swim. I don’t know until the day of the race whether the wind will be whipping up fifteen-foot waves or whether the surface will be glass. On the morning of a swim, our trainers wake us at around three a.m. for breakfast. We see the press, we eat. Nobody talks. The tension in the room is amazing. I never look at the swimmers; I look out at the lake and wonder what it will do to me, whether I’ll be able to cross it. The race is more than me versus my competition. There is always the risk that I may not conquer the water.
At breakfast I have five or six raw eggs, a lot of cereal, toast and jam, juice. For my feedings during the race from the boat, I drink a hot powdered liquid that provides me with thirteen hundred calories and more protein per tablespoon than a four-ounce steak. It gets my blood sugar back up. In a race my blood sugar drops below metabolism level in three minutes. A cup of this stuff every hour barely helps. Before the hour’s up my sugar is way down. I can feel it. I feel depressed. But if my protein level stays high, I’m not really in trouble.
I would say that eighty percent of success in a race is due to mind. Before starting, all natural reserves are working for me, my adrenaline; everything. Once out there, it’s a matter of mental guts. After twelve hours in cold water, my blood sugar down, I’m seventeen pounds lighter, exhausted, it takes more than knowing I’ve trained hard for this. I have to dig down deep.
I’ve done some marathon running, but the isolation in long-distance swimming is more extreme. I’m cut off physically from communication. The water sloshing over my cap leaves me virtually deaf. I wear tiny goggles that fit just over my eyes—they’re always foggy, so I can’t see very well. I turn my head to breathe on every stroke, sixty times a minute, six hundred strokes every mile for hours and hours. As I turn my head I see the blur of the boat and some people on it.
These countless rhythmic hours make marathon swimming unique. John Lilly, the dolphin experimenter, has found that a subject floating in a tank with eyes and ears covered becomes disoriented, slipping into a near dream state. During a long swim I’m left with my own thoughts. My mind drifts in a mesmerized world. It’s hypnotic. My subconscious comes to the fore. I have sexual fantasies and sometimes flashbacks to my childhood. It’s dreaming hours on end. All I hear is the water slapping and my arms whistling through water. All I see is fog. It is extremely lonely.
I’m strong at the beginning of a swim, then I have low points. I know the pain in my shoulders will be bad all the way. I’ve rolled over on my back, thinking this body will not do another stroke. Sometimes at a low point a swimmer will get out. In ten minutes he’s saying to himself, “Why didn’t I stick it out? I could have made it. I could have come back around.” That’s happened to me, too, when I couldn’t get back into it.
In rough ocean, I have thrown up from beginning to end of a thirteen-hour swim, swishing around like a cork, violently sick to my stomach. I would do anything to stop this feeling—and the only thing that will is to be on dry land. But I can put up with it—I have to. In my first year of marathon swimming, I got out because of seasickness. Now I get just as seasick and stick it.
Fatigue, pain, and huge waves are manageable. The toughest condition is cold water. Cliff Lumsdon, my trainer since 1972, swam in the Canadian Nationals in 1955. Lake Ontario was forty-five degrees. The life expectancy for a normal-weight person in forty-five-degree water is something like forty minutes. A marathon swimmer has only a film of grease for insulation, which wears off after a little while. After one hour, everyone was out of the water but Lumsdon. The temperature simply couldn’t be handled. But Cliff stayed in for the entire fifteen miles, finishing in nineteen hours, eighteen minutes. He went through a substantial recovery period but was never hospitalized.
My coldest time was training on Ontario for the Capri to Naples race in 1974. I was supposed to leave later that day for Europe, but thought, why waste the time? Why not swim for an hour, just to loosen up? I did a thousand strokes out, then stopped to turn around, empty my goggles, get a sighting onshore. But I realized I hadn’t been feeling my legs. I couldn’t bring them to the surface. My skin was lobster red. My breath stuck in my throat. I tried to scream to some boys onshore, but nothing came out. I started to swim a slow breaststroke. My hands were so cold I couldn’t close my fingers. People onshore finally saw I was in trouble. By now I was onto shallow rocks. A man waded out and grabbed me under my arms to lift me out of the water. His hands, his ninety-eight-point-six-degree hands, burned my skin. They took me to the hospital and put me in a warmer. I had severe burns all the way through the Capri-Naples race.
The temperature that day in Ontario was forty. I’d been in the water an hour. It freaks me out when I think Cliff lasted nineteen hours in forty-five-degree water. I just couldn’t do it. My body weight is less than his, but still----I really have to psych myself up for cold water.
There are still a few bodies of water I want to conquer. I’m considering all of the five Great Lakes in the summer of ’76. Each lake is a different challenge.
The lakes are pretty cold. Superior is so cold I’d have to cross it at the shortest point. A legal marathon may be undertaken only in a regular racing suit, cap, goggles, and grease—no flotation devices, no insulating suit. Even at the shortest crossing, Superior may be impossible, given these requirements.
I’ve found suitable start and finish options for each lake. I could swim from Michigan City to Chicago, for instance, which is thirty miles; or from Benton Harbor to Chicago, which is sixty. My route will depend on how cold the water is. Distance doesn’t mean anything to me; it’s the condition of the water that counts.
Marathon swimming will never be as popular as other sports for obvious reasons. Spectators can only watch the finish, not the whole process. It’s like the Tour de France—the most popular cycling race in the country and you can’t see anything. But there is empathy among the spectators when the contestants stop for the night. You see their huge legs, muscular bodies dust-covered and sweaty, their power exhausted.
There is the same empathy at the end of a marathon swim. People have spent the whole day waiting. From a mile out I can hear clapping and screaming. The people realize I swam from a place they couldn’t see on the clearest day. They know I may faint when I arrive. They share with me the most extreme moment of all—for after the pain, the cold, the hours, the distance, after the fatigue and the loneliness, after all this comes my emergence. And my emergence is what it’s all about.
