Diana Nyad: The Dara Torres of open water swimming.

That is not an exaggeration nor hyperbole. She has accomplished so much not just as a swimmer but as a sports personality as well. She has done an extensive amount of TV work for networks like CNBC, FOX Sports, ABC and NBC.

Diana Nyad is hoping to swim from the Florida coast to a Cuban beach in early-to-mid August. This swim is so long and so incomprehensibly dangerous that if accomplished it would summarily dethrone the English Channel making it no longer the "crème de la crème" of open water swims supplanting it with a new "Mount Everest" of the sport.

Here is a quick bio from Wikipedia:

Diana Nyad (born August 22, 1949 in New York City) is a former world record-holding American swimmer and public radio contributor.

Over two days in 1979, Nyad swam from Bimini to Florida, setting a distance record not broken until 1997 by Susie Maroney. She broke numerous world records, including the 45-year-old mark for circling Manhattan Island (7 hrs, 57 min) in 1975. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1986. Nyad was honored with her induction in the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2003.

She currently provides a weekly five-minute radio piece on sports for KCRW called The Score (heard during KCRW's broadcast of NPR's "All Things Considered"), as well as for the Marketplace radio program. She formerly hosted the public radio program "The Savvy Traveler."

Nyad graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Lake Forest College in 1973.

On July 10, 2010, at the age of 60, she began open water training for a 24-hour, 103-mile swim from Cuba to Florida, a task she had failed to finish thirty years previously. When asked her motivation, she replied, "Because I'd like to prove to the other 60-year-olds that it is never too late to start your dreams." She is schedule to make the actual swim in August of 2010.

Here is a link to her site which covers the details of her ambitious goal: [Link]