76j: Candice Bergen / Frank Zappa

Diana Nyad

... Candice Bergen

[Host Candice Bergen stands before the well-trimmed Christmas tree at home base and addresses the camera.]

Candice Bergen: And now here's this week's film by Gary Weis. It's about Diana Nyad, the marathon swimmer who swam around Manhattan Island.

[The film begins with a young female college student addressing the camera. She is photographed in front of a swimming pool in a darkened gym.]

1st Student: Diana's been a big influence on me as far as my definitions of what a woman can be - and what a woman is. She's the first woman I've met in my life that sat down and said, "This is what I want - and I'm gonna get it - and it doesn't matter at all what anybody else in the world thinks."

[Elegant classical music begins and continues till the film ends. Slow motion footage of Diana Nyad swimming.]

Diana Nyad V/O: I have been swimming now for over fifteen years, over four hours a day, sometimes five, sometimes six.

[Nyad works out on a weight machine.]

Diana Nyad V/O: The average heartbeat is seventy-two to seventy-five beats a minute. The average trained athlete is from sixty to seventy.

[Pre-dawn. Nyad, in a heavy winter coat, runs across a crowded New York City street carrying a gym bag and a pair of racquets.]

Diana Nyad V/O: My heartbeat is forty-five in the morning at rest. Um, I can get it up to a hundred eighty when I'm working very hard but the point about being in shape is that it comes back down very quickly.

[Slow motion footage of Nyad's muscles flexing as she works out on the weight machine.]

Diana Nyad V/O: I, um, hold the world record for swimming from Capri to Naples in Italy and I'm the only person to have crossed Lake Ontario, which took eighteen hours, twenty minutes. I hold the record for swimming around Manhattan Island, in a little under eight hours.

[Slow motion footage of Nyad, wearing headband and wielding a racquet, as she plays a game of squash.]

Diana Nyad V/O: When I'm swimming during the - the toughest seasons of the year, I eat twelve thousand to twelve thousand five hundred calories a day which is at least ten times what the average person eats.

[More female students filmed in front of an Olympic swimming pool in a darkened gym -- presumably at Barnard College, an independent liberal arts college for women in New York City, affiliated with Columbia University.]

2nd Student: Diana Nyad is our coach on the Barnard College swim team. She really has been an inspiration for all of us.

3rd Student: Knowing Diana has made me see that I can do anything that I want to do. She demands perfection from you in - in everything but you don't mind giving it to her because you know that she demands it from herself.

[More footage of Nyad on the weight machine. More slow motion footage of Nyad swimming.]

Diana Nyad V/O: From a mile out, I can hear the clapping and the screaming. The people realize that I swam from a place that they couldn't even see on the clearest day. They know I may faint when I arrive. They share with me the most extreme moment of all. For, after the pain, the cold, the hours, the distance, after the fatigue and the loneliness -- after all this, comes my emergence. And my emergence is what it's all about.

[Nyad turns from the weight machine to smile into the camera, then turns back. Fade. Applause.]


Submitted Anonymously