Last week Diana Nyad was at it again. The open-water swimmer got enormous attention for attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida. She failed about halfway, after swimming for twenty-nine hours. Nyad will be sixty-two on Monday. Staying awake for twenty-nine hours would be a challenge at that age, let alone swimming thse so-called shark-infested waters.<\/p>\n
She had some famous swims in the seventies (she swam around Manhattan in under eight hours in 1975 and set a record for non-stop swimming without a wetsuit, one hundred and two miles from Florida to the Bahamas in 1979, that lasted for twenty years). <\/p>\n
Nyad played on the women’s pro hardball tour in the seventies as well. In 1976 she famously opened the Manhattan Squash Club in the Grace Building with an exhibition match against George Plimpton. She was a fierce player (broke a rib once) and I ended a chapter in my squash book with a lovely quotation from her in 1978: “It is a game of aggression and intimidation. And women need to learn that they can go out and push somebody out of their way and hit the fuckin’ ball.”<\/p>\n