It would have been infinitely hard enough if one had been twenty years old. Imagine at sixty-four. And yet Diana Nyada New York long-distance swimmer, had made up her mind that she had to accomplish this feat at all costs. She had already tried four other times, without success. So she continued with grueling training, averaging nine hours a day. Only by persevering, she told herself, could she do it.
The undertaking he had welded into his head was this: swim the distance between Cuba and Florida.In total they are 177 km of open sea, in a stretch notoriously infested with sharks, tons of jellyfish and crossed by treacherous currents. But she doesn’t want to know about giving up. And, the September 2, 2013succeeds in its sensational intent.
The very long arm swing in the Key West Sound is followed meter by meter by a National Geographic crew, which documents the new record. The story has thus become the ideal subject of a feature film directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster.
To bridge that turbulent distance, Diana It took 53 hours. The previous times she had been stopped by tiredness and also by gigantic schools of jellyfish, which forced her to make an impossible detour. She didn’t want to worry about the sharks, however: she swam the whole time without any protective cage. During the journey, exhausted by the inhuman effort to which she was voluntarily subjecting herself, she often vomited. The heart of a sixty-four-year-old, the muscle fibers of her arms, chest, back and legs, were stressed to the limit.
To get to the bottom of such a project, the documentary explains, it is first of all necessary to train resistance well beyond the norm. But even this alone would not be enough. The other stratagem is then to lower the pace to a minimumor, to dilute the effort. Diana, for example, covered just over 3 km for every hour of swimming. Going slowly was vital, but the effort was still extreme.
The other pitfall Nyad had to overcome was that of potential hypothermia. For this reason he wore a one-piece swimsuit (the basics) and understood that he could not interrupt his swim even for a few seconds, because it was essential to always maintain a constant rhythm, and therefore a constant temperature inside the body. Add to this that the level of concentration, in the absence of sleep, decreases vertically.
Finally arrived in Florida welcomed by a crowd gathered in
beach, at the moment Diana managed to utter only three words before eating and resting: it was hard. Then he added: “Never give up. You’re never too old to pursue a dream”.