“I still had 14 or 15 hours to go. But for me that’s a training swim.” *nods*
Ariel Levy profiled 64-year-old long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in this week’s New Yorker. The piece is paywalled, but get to it if you can. Levy details Nyad’s five attempts at swimming from Cuba to Florida, an obsession that began when her mother would tell the young Diana, standing on the shore in Fort Lauderdale, “It’s so close you could actually swim there.” So she did, naturally. The entire thing’s fascinating, but it’s this little excerpt that gets at The Type Of Person You Might Have To Be To Attempt To* Swim From Cuba To Florida On Five Separate Occasions:
When Nyad takes a long flight, she buys a family-size pack of M&M’s. In her seat, she takes the candy out of the bag, counts it, and puts back an equal number of each color. (She eats the extras.) She divides the length of the flight by the number of remaining M&M’s and then eats them at even intervals, keeping track of what color she pulls out of the bag every time. “I want to finish them exactly when I land,” she said. “Of course, if you don’t land on time, then you’re screwed, and your whole O.C.D. personality is in crisis.” On training swims for Cuba, if she got to her point of exit ahead of schedule, she would continue swimming around until she’d hit her planned duration to the second.
Open-water swimmers must be able to control their minds — it is all they can control, unlike the weather, the sharks, the currents.
Also: the jellyfish. The magazine has video up of Nyad getting stung by “a swarm of box jellyfish, the most venomous creature in the ocean.” It’s official: I’m never swimming from Cuba to Florida.
*See also.