In 1975, two years after graduating from Lake Forest College in Illinois, she made headlines by swimming the 28 miles around the island of Manhattan in a little less than 8 hours. Nyad completed the 110-mile swim from Havana to Key West, through the jellyfish-and shark-infested waters of the Straits of Florida, in approximately 53 hours.īorn on August 22, 1949, in New York City, and raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Nyad was a champion swimmer in high school. On September 2, 2013, 64-year-old Diana Nyad becomes the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the use of a shark cage for protection.