• Submitted by: manso
• Sports
• 09 / 01 / 2010

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Diana Nyad’s Cuba swim attempt 32 years later has everyone talking! Wow, it’s been that long since she tried to swim from Cuba to Florida? Nyad is now 61 years old. You go girl!

Truly, what an inspiration this woman is. It’s hard to believe it was 32 years ago that she first attempted the Cuba to Florida swim.

She was 28 years of age at the time, when she first tried to swim the 103 miles between Cuba and Florida. After 42 hours of swimming, she was convinced by her trainer to stop amid a myriad of problems – the eight foot waves, her hallucinations and the fact that they were off course.

She took her last swim in 1979, after her record setting swim from the Bahamas to Florida. Yep, you read that right. For 30 years she did not take a dip in the water. It wasn’t until she turned 60 last year that she felt she needed a challenge.

She told AOL News:

    “I had really started to feel less and less relevant. I wanted to feel again like my best days were not behind me. I just didn’t want to fade away.

    I wanted to feel unwavering commitment again. To have what seemed like an impossible goal, and go for it.”

She began her training last year. When she did the attempt in 1978, she did so in a shark cage. This time around, she’ll be swimming without one. Scary, yes, but Nyad is confident that the ‘shark shield‘ she will be using will ward off the sharks.

Yikes!

    “They tested it in Australia,” she says. “They put a bloody leg of a cow on a surfboard and then watched from a helicopter. Within minutes, hundreds of sharks came and just tore the thing apart. Then they did the same thing with the shark shield device. Nearly 5,000 sharks were in the area, but none touched it.”

When will her swim take place, you ask? As soon as she receives her travel visas from the Cuban government. She tweeted last week, ‘Currents are flowing in the right direction. Gulf waters are super warm. Visas, visas, Oh where are my Cuban travel visas?’.

I wish her the best of luck! What are your thoughts on Diana Nyad’s Cuba swim attempt after all these years? If she is successful, it definitely solidifies what she believes – ‘60 is the new 40.’

By Jeanette

Source: http://sports.rightpundits.com/?p=5104