Diana Nyad, 10 Years Later

By Rick Boettger

Below is the story I wrote about Diana Nyad’s famous swim, being celebrated this coming Saturday October 21st from 1-4 pm at the same spot on Smathers Beach where she touched down 10 years ago.  She liked it, writing the following on a copy of the print edition: “Rick, what a heartfelt piece.  So grateful for you to express the importance and [??] of my deserving team.  FIND A WAY  Diana Nyad”

It’s a Team

“Don’t give up.  You’re never too old.”

By Rick Boettger, Columnist, from the Sep 12-18. 2013 edition of KONK Life

Diana Nyad richly deserves her fame, but it is her anonymous team I want to praise today.

I doubt anyone got more foolishly caught up in Nyad fever than I did.  At one point my feet were burning on the sidewalk as I sought my bike which I thought had been stolen, and I’d blown out my oh-so-precious voice by cheering wildly, and I thought, “Hm. Burned feet.  Lost bike.  Ruined singing. But I saw Diana step out of the water.  Good choice! I’d do it again!”

Like thousands of others, I’d gone to Smathers when DianaNyad.com said she was ready to arrive.  Biking in the long way from the airport, I got more and more excited as I got closer to her flotilla closing in on the shore.  Finally one guy with binoculars answered “Yes” when I asked if he could see her yet.  So I quickly parked and locked my bike, making sure to have no memory at all of where I’d left it.

Looking out with my own binoculars, I could barely see what I thought was a swimmer.  Our view was blocked not only by dozens of watercraft, but by maybe 100 waders. So I stashed my dress sandals in my basket, put my wallet and keys in my shirt pocket, and waded into the shallow beach waters up to my chest.

What everyone soon saw was that she was coming in a few hundred yards down from where all the media were.  So I waded over some nasty marl to get closer.  And suddenly, there she was, stroking broadly out from behind the last boat that had hidden her from my view,

I and  dozens of other waders struggled to keep up with her as she clearly had saved something up to bring it home strong as she finished her epic journey.  At the very end I got to within just about 20 yards as she first tried to stand up.  Apparently no one on her crew could touch her yet, as she fell back into the water.  Any swimmer knows how hard their first step is after even an hour in the water, so of course 53 hours would make it impossible.  But it was still agonizing to see her fall, solitary, and have to get up on her own, after such a long, painful struggle, not just 53 hours, but four grueling, often humiliating years.

But that gave me time to catch up and be just a few feet away as she made the last few steps into the arms of her best friends, legally on the shore. As I and everyone else there cheered this climactic moment, I first realized my throat felt funny. Duh—I had been cheering like a maniac for the last 10 minutes, using my finely-tuned opera vocal chords like a beast in the jungle, caught up in a primitive celebration of mass hysteria.

We all shut up when she raised her hand to speak. What words, better than Armstrong’s on the moon (maybe because she had all of those failing years to perfect them): “Don’t give up. You’re never too old.”  And: “It looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.”

Diana, thank you. Of course.  Think of the hundreds of people caught up in your dream, making it their own, donating hundreds of hours of their time, their passion, their money, and their loving support.

Who suffered for years as you, their brave heroine, struggled and failed, flailed by box jellyfish that made your suffering hideous to behold.  They did not just see the frightening photos for a moment, like us readers turning the page.  They saw you on the cross in the cruel  currents of the straits time after time, trying so hard, valiantly through through pain, hour after hour, helplessly watching you swim when it was past all hope.

And your failure was their failure too. They read the daily paper’s last April Fool edition making acidulous fun of you—and them—writing that nobody gave a shit whether you made it or not.  Were they Sancho Panzas to your Dona Quixote?  Some begged you to choose a different 100-mile challenge: it’s not that they thought YOU couldn’t do it from Cuba, but they didn’t believe that any human could, having seen what you’d gone through.

But you all somehow took that windmill down.  Team Diana, we salute thee.

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