Not even 12 hours after Diana Nyad put a stop to her swim, she returned to the blue marina where some of her many training hours over the last two years had begun and ended. She arrived on time as she always does, smiling and personable as usual, for a press conference. It was Tuesday, August 9, and she hadn’t slept since early Sunday morning. Instead, she had traveled 56 miles through the Florida Straits, turning her arms over some 90,480 times in the Gulf Stream for almost 30 of those hours, turning her head to breathe half that many times. At the Tuesday, August 9, 2011, 6pm press conference in Key West, here is some of what she said:

“Friday and Saturday there was turbulence on the coast, and my adrenalin was flowing hard when Bonnie [head swim handler and best friend] and I arrived in Havana on Saturday. There were morning to late afternoon winds onshore Sunday, but by the 7:45 pm start time, the water was like glass and warm. It was as if the angels had come down and calmed the waters with their wings. I looked out from our balcony in Cuba an hour before and said to Bonnie, It’s our time, let’s go.

“After an hour and a half in the water, the winds came up and it wasn’t swimming weather at all, but you’ve just got to accept that on long distance swims. Wind and weather are relatively unpredictable and they vary, so I decided not to focus on the conditions and just put my head down and stroked through it; maybe it would get better.

“I began training last year after not swimming for 30 years and by the end of the summer, I had a torn tendon in my left shoulder. It became such a worry by January that I learned to alter my stroke entirely to compensate for it. Babying my left shoulder became such a preoccupation that, one day, I looked at the inside of my car and thought, My car looks like a cryogenics lab! I never thought to worry about the right shoulder.

“In the third hour of the swim when the waves that had started did not seem to be subsiding, my frame of mind was to power through them: I extended my right arm underwater for a big pull and felt something wrong, a strain and then excruciating pain. I tried to find a catch-place, some way to use my right shoulder to push the water back without pain but there wasn’t any way to work it without a sharp, wincing pain on every stroke. So I thought, Maybe the waves will subside and make it better, but that never happened. Then I thought, Here I am, I’m going to have to live with it and I’ve done it before, let’s go.

“I’m very allergic to Ibuprofen, so I don’t use the over-the-counter painkillers that have it in them. The kind I do use was the one thing I’d forgotten to bring in my swim bag, but there was a bottle of that kind within reach so I was given a pill from it. (I learned later that this was around the 18th hour of the swim, at 1:30 Monday afternoon.) Within 20 minutes, I started wheezing, short of breath. Now, I’ve never had an asthma attack while swimming, though I have once before on dry land. The seizure of it during this swim lasted 11 hours.

“I swim at 52 strokes per minute with or without pain and move at about 2 mph through the water consistently. We have always understood that the way to keep forward progress, without losing too much to the current or drifting back when I tread water during feedings and hydrating, was to train till we got smooth and fast. So from training, Bonnie and I had it down—every hour and a half, we were working those feedings in under two minutes. We had also attended to the hydration issue that came up last year, after my 24-hour training swim. A friend invented this ingenious pulley system where I could keep moving while drinking water through a tube every 45 minutes. So the waves didn’t matter to me; the pain didn’t matter. We were making progress and we knew I could make it from Cuba to Florida.

“I had the training and the desire; so perfectly prepared with the right people and such unswerving dedication in and around me. The one thing that had never occurred to me was that I might have a severe allergic response to something in an over-the-counter pill I thought I knew. We tried everything during those 11 hours to counteract it but I just couldn’t breathe. Once the asthma hit till it was over, I couldn’t go more than 30 strokes without turning over to gasp for enough air to be able to do 30 more strokes again. If you can’t breathe in enough oxygen to fuel your muscles, they stop working; everything goes into distress. Bonnie Stoll and Dr. Michael Broder from the escort boat, the Voyager, tried everything, but it was no use. I would roll over and try to hold my place till I could get enough air but my lungs were in distress, my muscles in distress, they need oxygen. I guess the jellyfish stings didn’t help either, but I wasn’t even thinking of them.

“It got so that I couldn’t do even a minute of swimming before I was oxygen depleted. So then it became 30 seconds of swimming and three minutes of floating on my back, and that’s a desperate cycle. Turbulent seas and my shoulders couldn’t stop me, we knew that. But if I couldn’t move forward more of the time than I had to spend treading water to rest and gasp for air…

“As we moved into the night, Bonnie even convinced me to do the breaststroke, and when the currents cooperated I was going 3mph, and I thought, I don’t care if it takes 80, 90 hours, I can do this! With Bonnie from the boat, at each one of those 200 strokes, every stroke, yelling, You’re doing it, Diana, you’re doing it, I started to believe again, We’re going to make it. But I was hyperventilating. Eleven hours of asthma had just depleted my reserves. Finally, I went over to the boat and said, Let’s get real. I asked David, my navigator, how many more hours to Key West and he said, about 30, and I knew: my mind was willing but in this state of seizure my body couldn’t make it. Unlike in 1978, this time I made the decision to stop the swim. I knew there was nothing more that could be done.

“I also know that those 29 hours I spent were more difficult than any 60 hours I would have done with my lungs functioning normally and not compromised. I know that I wanted to make this swim not for the athletic record but to remind myself to live, not just exist. There is a shocking view of the finality of life that comes to you as you get older, and I want my response to it to be, This is my time to live all of it. I want to live the way that we all know is within our grasp, if we so choose: to be the greatest parent, to create the work we’re capable of, to support each other in our dreams, to be the greatest friend. I want to rise to that commitment every day, to find the best self I am, to go to sleep every night feeling I’ve fully lived the day.

“I grieve that this swim didn’t let me show what a great swimmer I am. But I was the best person I could be yesterday.” [My emphasis — Ed.]

–Diana Nyad

(Candace Lyle Hogan, reporting on August 9, 2011, 6pm press conference after Cuba swim)