Endurance swimmer Diana Nyad ended her fourth attempt in nearly 35 years to swim from Cuba to Florida on Tuesday.
According to CNN , Nyad, 62, was about halfway through the 103-mile swim when she was pulled from the water.
Mark Sollinger, a leader of the crew and support team accompanying Nyad in five boats as she made the attempted crossing, said Nyad’s lips and face were very swollen and she was suffering from exhaustion.
Otherwise, he said, she was doing well for “someone who just spent 63 hours attempting something monumental and extremely dangerous.”
As pointed out by Fox News , Nyad’s first attempt to cross the Straits of Florida was in 1978 when rough seas left her battered, delirious, and less than halfway toward her goal.
She tried again twice in 2011 but was forced to halt each of those attempts after being stung by multiple jelly fish .
Nyad insisted Friday she was ready to try it again.
“We all know her mind can handle it,” Candace Hogan, a crew member traveling with Nyad, wrote on the swimmer’s blog. “But there will always be a point where a human body can’t go any farther. What no one knows is where that line is drawn in Diana Nyad.”
If she had completed the feat, Nyad would have become the first person to swim across the Florida Strait without a shark cage. Her goal was to finish the swim in 60 hours so she could celebrate her 63rd birthday on Wednesday in Key West.
Fox News has more on Diana Nyad’s fourth Cuba-to-Florida swim attempt in the video below:
