Following is the full transcript of Find a Way author Diana Nyad’s TEDx Talk titled ‘Dare to Dream’ at TEDxBerlin conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Dare to Dream by Diana Nyad at TEDxBerlin
Diana Nyad – Marathon swimmer
Yes, you can laugh because the only thing I know how to say in German, I don’t know why, is an eccentric thing, but I say: [German] It’s the only thing I know how to say. So, you’ll see me hanging around at the hotel lobby, I’ll wait all day until it’s the right moment that I can go to the front desk and say: [German] They answer me in a long German phrase, and I don’t understand a word and I say: [German] “Oh, Danke!” And I go off.
But Stephan let me say to you, “Vielen Dank!” It’s in my honor to be invited to be at Berlin TEDx and to listen to all the speakers, Caroline and the rest of you. The lives you are leading are so interesting and inspiring, so, to be among you and, like all of you, to hear the exploits everyday of their lives, it’s a privilege to be with you. Thank you. Yep, thank you.
My father was a Greek Egyptian and he spoke in a very thick accent, which already is entertaining, to live in a home where you don’t understand your parent most of the time. And he believed in fate, like most of the Greeks, he believed in destiny. And he called me over when I was five years old and he had the large Webster’s dictionary open and he said, “Darling, I am waiting for five years till you are ready to tell you this moment. You’re coming here, you’re looking.
And I stood up right away, I had no idea what a swimmer was but I was proud. And I would walk around with my shoulders very tall and broad because you know the word I heard, was ‘champion’. And my father instilled this. So, a few years go by, and sure enough I am a swimmer. And I start swimming and I have a dream of the Olympic games. And I’m 12 years old now and, it’s a sport of discipline. And you spend, even as a young person, you spend a great deal of time, and focus and energy, very serious toward your goal. And my father, 12 years old I am, he calls me into the bedroom one night and he’s very agitated. And he’s walking around with his hands behind his back, and he says, “OK. First of all, I make very big mistake when I show you this dictionary.” Now, you’re a fanatic. Now, you’re getting up at 4:30 in the morning, every morning, 365 days a year, we are talking Christmas. You don’t know your brother and sister any more. You don’t go to church in the weekend, in Sunday any more. You have given up the piano, for swimming! We don’t know to tell our friends where you are for dinner. You are in some training table crazy thing, we just don’t know what to do.
And I stood up, and I said, “That’s right, dad! That’s right. Nobody gets anywhere, nobody gets ahead in life unless you get out of your comfort zone, unless you dream big, you dream extreme. And me, I’m going to stand one day and bow my head and receive the Olympic Games gold medal. And you know how we’re going to do that, dad? Because I’m so glad we had this little talk. I really am. I’m glad we got together because you don’t understand that when I say, “I’m going to go to bed at night,” I don’t mean me, I mean all of you. All the family is going to go to bed. Do you understand me, dad?”
And he said, “Oh! Not only, I do understand you. I need to tell you that your mother and I, we are very, very afraid of you. And I just really called you in tonight to give you the key to the house and wish you good luck because we cannot live this way anymore.”
So that was my parents’ way of being themselves: a French mother, who also didn’t understand entirely the sports, and the muscles, and the green hair, and the whole thing. But time went by and sure enough, I became a champion swimmer. And there was the sprint swimming. And then for 10 years I entered this world of distance swimming. And the swims are cold, they are long, and the Earth is four-fifths water, and there’s a group of people, just like marathon runners, just like mountain climbers, who travel to these places, from the English Channel to the Straits of Gibraltar, to Argentina and the rivers and the oceans down there. And we swim across these areas, and see who can get there first.
And sure enough, at the end of these 10 years of distance swimming, I decided I wanted to do a kind of egomaniacal last swim before I retired. I was just about to turn 30. I thought it’s time to grow up and to get a job and to move on into the rest of my life. And I decided I wanted to swim 100 miles in the open ocean. And the world record at the time was 58. And as my coach said to me, “Why don’t we do 59? Maybe, round it out to 60. But why we are going to bump it up all the way to 100?”
“No!” I said. I want it to be difficult. I want it to take passion. I want it to take an unwavering commitment to be able to get to the other shore. The other border. And it’s important for me to be a border. And we started to gather the Earth’s nautical charts on the floor of my apartment in Manhattan, throwing out the Antarctic Circle and places that weren’t realistic. And there it was, there’s the border, at least in my country, that’s the most famous border in the world, Cuba. It’s been so long since we have not been able to be friends and to share our cultures and our humor and our lives together. It stretches all the way back to 1959, and it goes on today. And I thought, “That’s the swim I want to do.” I want to swim this famous passage, all the way from Havana to Key West, it’s 103 miles. I had already swam 102.5 miles from the Bahamas to Florida, it’s a long way, took a couple of days.
And I remember, on that swim, a couple of days went by, and I was breathing over toward the left, and I saw my trainer, we had had a fight a few minutes before, I was tired. I said something I didn’t mean to say. I was going to apologize later. But as I looked over toward the boat, I saw her looking at me and giving me the finger. And I was incensed! What? After all the exhaustion I’m going through, the effort I’m putting out, I tell you what I am not going to look at her, I’m going to punish her. And I’m going to look over to this boat for a while. And all the people, it’s a big press boat, and all these people were leaning over the boat, and they were all giving me the finger. And I thought, “Well, that’s judgmental!” Can’t they give me a break? Don’t they know, I’m not in my right mind? I’m not thinking well. I’ve been out here swimming for days now, not just hours.
So, I put my head down to think about it for a minute, why are they so angry at me? And I heard the whistles, and I heard the chanting through all the bathing caps. And I looked up and now I saw them. And it was this finger, and they were pointing toward the shore. And they were chanting, “One mile! One mile! One mile!” And I looked up, and it wasn’t that vision of the Acropolis that my father said would be at the end of the great marathon. It was condominium buildings all over the shore of Florida. And that wasn’t the sweetest mile I’d ever swam. I should say it wasn’t the fastest, but it was the sweetest. That’s it.
And I remember so well, it was so many years ago, I was only 28 years old and I remember so well, though, as I came in toward the shore, I thought to myself, Remember, you’re retiring now. And remember this passion, live with it. It’s not easy outside of sports. Sports is so black-and-white, and it’s very easy to have concrete goal, and to know just what you need to do, and to measure yourself at the end. But who’s going to tell us in the end, who’s a great person among us, and who’s making the most progress, and who’s causing change, and who’s a great father. Who’s going to tell us? Only you. You’re the judge.
And I thought to myself that day, as I came into the shore, “Remember this feeling of commitment. Remember the high of unwavering commitment. And this is what you want to live the rest of your life with.”
And so, Cuba, which had been the year before, and wound up 42 hours in a very very rough wild sea. There’s a 103 miles, all over the Earth you can find a 103 miles, always going to be a challenge, to understate it, to any swimmer, to swim that kind of distance. And I’m the only one so far who has swam that kind of distance. But 103 miles in those waters, in that territory, Cuba to Florida is a different 103 miles, it’s wilder: the sharks are larger, the jellyfish — the most dangerous in the world. The roiling eddies that are within the Gulf Stream, that’s a big sort of river that flows in through that area.
It’s a treacherous 103 miles. And no one’s ever done it. People have been trying since 1950. So, I got out there and had my chance and I had my 42 hours, and I didn’t make it. And then I did make the Bahamas swim. And we couldn’t get back into Cuba, we were not allowed with visas, et cetera. And so, I moved on to the rest of my life. And it’s not that I was suffering with the agony of regret over Cuba. But somewhere it was, it was somewhere looming in the back of my imagination.
So now, from 30 to 60, it’s not like I was lying around on the sofa eating chocolates all day. I did a few things. And I covered a number of Olympic Games as a sports journalist, wrote a few books, et cetera. But when I turned 60, and I don’t know, I can’t see out there, if any of you are around my age, or if you’re all younger, but 60 it’s a choking age. My mother had just died at 82. And I started thinking, “My God, I’m much closer to the end than to the beginning. I’m closer to the end than to the middle. Am I really going to only have 22 years left on this planet?”
And I started examining as we do at other ages but 60 is a big examination. And I started wondering, what have I done, who have I become, and have I really been living out that promise I made myself in that last mile from the Bahamas to Florida, have I been living with passion, and commitment and feeling alive and awake and alert every minute of every day? No, I haven’t been. And I thought, “I need to wake myself up, I want to feel that charge again!”
But I haven’t swum for 30 years. I hadn’t swum a stroke anywhere for 30 years. And I thought, Oh my God! I know what I’ll do. Oh my God, I never thought it, I never thought it possible, I never thought it would happen, it’s so extreme. Now I’m 60, can I? Can I go back and get these shoulders and shape again? Can I find the will, the heart to want to train all those hours? And put in all that time to try to do this, still, never-crossed-before challenge, Cuba to Florida? I started, I didn’t tell anybody, I was clandestine. My friends noticed that I was getting suntanned. They didn’t know where that was coming from, there were the little raccoon goggles eyes.
And I started getting ready. And I started researching. It used to be a jellyfish country, well now we know, with global warming, and with oil spills, and the change of the planet, now, the most poisonous jellyfish in the world, the Box jellyfish, that used to live only in the Southern oceans, Australia, New Zealand, they’ve now migrated because of global warming. And they’re all over, they’re in Israel, they’re in Thailand. But now, they are also in the Florida Straits. And the most deadly venom of any animal that lives in the ocean, more than the Moray eels, this thing is the size of a sugar cube, it’s tiny, its tentacles are like the width of your hair, so fine. But when that tentacle touches you and wraps around your neck and your arms, you go into anaphylactic shock. You have a fever immediately. It doesn’t just sting the skin, it takes you down. It debilitates you.
ø9o‘øø/µ./
I mentioned before the sharks, and they haven’t changed for millions of years in that area. They’re still underneath, and they’re large predators. On my last try this summer, we have a very soft-spoken Aussie guy, Luke Tipple, he’s the greatest shark expert in the world today. And he’s out there swimming with me with his other divers. They’re looking for signs of sharks. They go down and prod them, we never kill any shark on our swims, never a fatal weapon with us. But they bump them away, get them interested in something other than me, they are under there. And Luke, he never yells, at one time, I am in the middle of third night of this 51 hours of swimming this summer in trying this. And he grabs my shoulder, nobody touches me, he says in his Australian accent, “Diana, get over to the boat right now!” And I went over and started swimming over here. But I knew what that meant, and it turns out, later they told me, there were a number of large sharks lurking underneath.
The mental alone, you can picture the physical, okay? This swim is probably going take 60 to 70 hours. So this past summer I spent 51. What does it take to be powerfully — you’re not just out there, by the way, just kind of breast-stroking along. You’re digging in. You’re trying to get there, not in a sprint, but you’re going in a powerful way. Well, the body alone to train for it, it’s a rigorous, punishing routine of swimming 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, and 20-hour swims. Swims every day that are more than most swimmers train for a lifetime to do. Every day, to get ready for this thing.
And the mental. What do you do when you’re out cycling or climbing or running? You can see nature. You can chat with a friend. You’ve got some sensory input. But when you’re in the water, you’re turning your head 60 times a minute. You’ve got fogged-over goggles. You’ve got tight bathing caps to try to keep the body warmth in. And you’re in a total state of sensory deprivation: you don’t hear, you don’t see, you are really with your own thoughts.
So, for a while I count, I count in different languages. And for a while I sing. And I know the exact rhythm, I pick songs that have a 4-4 time, so that they’ll go along with my stroke. And I will sing them exactly the way I can hear the singer. For instance, I’ll sing Janis Joplin’s version of ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’ Two thousand times. And that will take me 8 hours and 45 minutes. Exactly.
So I start in with,
♪ Busted flat in Baton Rouge,
Waiting for a train ♪
♪ Feeling about as faded as my jeans.
Whoo, whoo. ♪
And I’ll hear Janis Joplin’s voice, hear it exactly the way it is in the records on the CDs, if you’re lucky to hear it live, I’ll sing right to the end of the song: ♪ Ba la la la la, ba la la la la, Hey, Bobby McGee, yeah! ♪ One! ♪ Busted flat in Baton Rouge… ♪
And if that becomes not entertaining anymore, you start tripping out. You know, it’s been wonderful for me to hear the TEDxBerlin challenge and philosophy this time, Crossing Borders. Because I never thought of it that way. And Anwar said something this morning, the inner borders. So, obviously, what I’m doing, it’s much like Mikael, there’s a physical concrete border, there’s Cuba, and there’s Florida. And there’s that space that I want to get across. And, by the way, I will never ever quit until I get across. And I will probably be 82, and coming here to speak to you and still trying.
But anyway, it’s been important for me to hear this, crossing borders, because since I turned 60, and I am now 63, I’ve been thinking, this isn’t just a sport. This isn’t just about getting there, getting some name in a record book. Honestly, I don’t care anything about that anymore. What it’s been, it’s been the wake-up call I wanted. It’s been the crossing of the borders of the mind and the will that I wanted. I’ve been awake and alert, and alive, like these last three years, like I wasn’t from 30 to 60.
And so, when I get done this time, I’m going to make the promise to myself when I see those condominiums on that Florida shore. This time, and I go off to live rest of my life outside of sport, now I’m going to remember, every day, to feel that commitment, to put it toward something, to live alive and alert.
And I want to leave you with, I don’t know if you know the American poet, Mary Oliver. I don’t know if you know her. But she has a phrase, and it made me think again of Anwar this morning, looking out like this, “Are you crossing borders? How about you?” he said. “How about you? How about you?”
Well, Mary’s phrase goes like this, “So, what are you doing with this one wild and precious life of yours?” So it’s not to judge but now that Stephan’s put out the phrase, I’ve decided, that’s what I’m doing with my life. I’m crossing borders. Vielen Dank!
Thank you. Thank you…
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