It was August 10, 2011. Diana Nyad was dozens of miles into her dream to complete a 103-mile swim from Cuba to Key West. Because of the currents in the Florida Straits, Nyad would have to last 60 hours-if everything went perfectly.  For two years, this dream of swimming from  Cuba to Florida had been part of her every waking hour. She was about to turn 60. "I wanted to be filled with commitment to the best of myself so that 1 wasn't looking back later saying, 'What have I done with my life?''' says Nyad.  Those extreme physical struggles are not new to her. In 1974, 25-year-old Nyad became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario against the current. A year later, Nyad's 28-mile swim around the island of Manhattan made the front page of the New York Times.  "Physically, I'm stronger. I weigh a lot more," Nyad said after a training swim in Key West in June. "There are also mental advantages to being older," says Steven Munatones, an expert in swimming.  Feeling a sharp pain in her right shoulder, she changed the angle of stroke  , telling herself to go gently until her hand caught the water. In the 17thhour, she swam over to the boat, and the crew located a pain reliever. Nyad took it. She lay on her back, rolled onto her belly and continued swimming, and then she'd turn on her back again, gasping, unable to fill her lungs. "I'm trying to make it. I'm barely going forward. I feel so sick. This has been my dream forever, but I can hardly make it another hour," Nyad told David Marchant, the boat's navigator  . Between the 23rd and 27th hours, Nyad had gone just five miles. "OK, Diana, I'm going to touch you, and it's going to be over," Stoll said. Nyad agreed. And with that, 29 hours and 43 minutes after she'd leaped into the water, the swim came to an end.  "She just wouldn't quit. It was more amazing to see her not make it the way she fought than if everything had gone exactly right and she'd made it the whole way," says Mark Sollinger, who piloted Nyad's lead boat.  At a press .conference in Key West after being pulled onto the support boat, Nyad choked back tears and said, "Sometimes the will is so strong. But I was shaking and freezing, and I thought, 'There's no mind over matter anymore.' I think I'm going to have to go to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida."  But when Nyad returned home to Los Angeles, the pain began to fade. "Something says to me the goal is still there," says Nyad. We can learn from the passage that Nyad   _  .
refused any help as she struggled in the water to make it has given up the dream of swimming across the Florida Straits appeared on the front page of the New York Times at the age of25 began the swim from Cuba to Florida when she was about 60 years old