Discover the Best Books Written by Diana Nyad

Diana Nyad is an American author, journalist, motivational speaker, and long-distance swimmer. Nyad gained national attention in 1975 when she swam around Manhattan (28 mi or 45 km) and in 1979 when she swam from North Bimini, The Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Florida (102 mi or 164 km). In 2013, on her fifth attempt and at age 64, she became the first person claiming to have swum from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage, swimming from Havana to Key West (110 mi or 177 km). However, any recognized swim body has not formally ratified this. 

Nyad was also once ranked thirteenth among US women squash players. Nyad was born in New York City on August 22, 1949, to stockbroker William L. Sneed Jr. and his wife Lucy Winslow Curtis (1925–2007). Her mother was a great-granddaughter of Charlotte N. Winslow, the inventor of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a popular morphine-based medicine for children teething that was manufactured from 1849 until the 1930s. She is also a great-grandniece of women's-rights activist Laura Curtis Bullard.

The Sneeds divorced in 1952, after which Lucy Sneed married Aristotle Z. Nyad, a Greek-Egyptian land developer who adopted Diana. The family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she began swimming seriously in seventh grade. She was enrolled at the private Pine Crest School in the mid-1960s, swimming under the tutelage of Olympian and Hall of Fame coach Jack Nelson who, she has said, molested her beginning when she was fourteen years old and continuing until she graduated from high school, as he did with other girls he coached. 

She won three Florida state high school championships in the Backstroke at 100 and 200 yards (91 and 183 m). She dreamed of swimming in the 1968 Summer Olympics, but in 1966 she spent three months in bed with endocarditis, an infection of the heart, and when she began swimming again, she had lost speed.

After graduating from Pine Crest School in 1967, she entered Emory University but was eventually expelled for jumping out a fourth-floor dormitory window wearing a parachute. She then enrolled at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where she played tennis for the Foresters and resumed swimming, concentrating on distance events. 

She soon came to the attention of Buck Dawson, director of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Florida, who introduced her to marathon swimming. She began training at his Camp Ak-O-Mak in Magnetawan, Ontario, Canada. She set a women's world record of 4 hours and 22 minutes in her first race, a 10-mile (16 km) swim in Lake Ontario in July 1970, finishing 10th overall. After graduating from Lake Forest College in 1973 with a degree in English and French, Nyad returned to south Florida to continue training with Dawson.