Key West Misfits

“Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.” - Hemingway

Diana Nyad, a marathon swimmer who broke records and achieved a number of firsts in the sport. At the age of 60, she decided to complete the feat she wasn’t able to when she was 28—swim the more than 100 miles from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage, powered only by her stubborn will and swimming prowess.

The Cuba to Florida crossing, through the Florida Straits, has long held a mystique for marathon swimmers for its challenging conditions. Unlike the English Channel, where the water temperature averages about 62F, the Florida waters are warmer, in the 80F range, but that also means they are home to dangerous marine life—most notably sharks and box jellyfish, whose stings can transfer enough toxin to paralyze and even kill a person. The Gulf Stream also makes the currents quixotic, so if a swimmer isn't guided by a seasoned navigator, she could find herself pushed off course into the Gulf of Mexico or toward the Bahamas. A few people had attempted it, but only with shark cages, including Nyad during that first try in her 20s. It took four additional attemptsspanning four years, but on Sept. 2, 2013, her face and mouth swollen after more than 53 hours in the water, Nyad stumbled on to the shore in Key West, claiming to be the first person to successfully make the swim unassisted.

That dream began when Nyad, as a 9-year-old living in Fort Lauderdale through the Cuban Revolution and influx of Cubans fleeing to the U.S., asked her mother why she couldn’t see Cuba from the beaches of Florida. Her mother told her it was just over the horizon, close enough that as the competitive swimmer Nyad already was as a young child, she might actually be able to swim there someday.

Nyad acknowledges that she can come on strong, and attributes that in part to a coping mechanism for dealing with sexual abuse by her swimming coach when she was a teen. “I am something of a show-woman, with a gregarious personality if I say so myself,” she says. “But my coping mechanism was to put it on that much thicker. I was just blustery, and would think, ‘Get out of my way,’ I’m going to do this,’ when I was really feeling worthless and my self-esteem was crushed. It took a decade, maybe more, before I started to feel that I could be that gregarious person but not put on as big a show.”