Diana Nyad getting ready to try again

The KCRW commentator is in Florida with her team, checking weather and training to try again to swim from Cuba to the U.S. mainland. Last year's attempt was scuttled due to via and weather problems. Nyad, now 61, was featured in today's New York Times.

Any day now, Diana Nyad will set out to do something no athlete has ever done: swim all day and all night, then all day and all night, then all day again.

She will swim about 60 hours in the churning sea, 103 miles across the Straits of Florida from Cuba to Key West. Every hour and a half, she will stop to tread water for a few minutes as she swallows a liquid mixture of predigested protein and eats an occasional bit of banana or dollop of peanut butter. She will most likely hallucinate and endure the stings of countless jellyfish. Along the way, sea salt will swell her tongue to cartoonish proportions and rub her skin raw.

“She is up against the most outlandish, outrageous, unbelievable physical endurance activity of, certainly, my lifetime,” said Steven Munatones, a champion open-water swimmer who runs the organization Open Water Source and will serve as an independent observer during Ms. Nyad’s swim. “I can’t imagine being in the ocean for 60 hours. I can’t imagine doing anything for 60 hours. It is inconceivable. It simply is.”

Previously on LA Observed:
Diana Nyad back in town: no swim this year
Diana Nyad going back to sea at 60

Photo: Karen Christensen