The first time Diana Nyad tried to swim around Manhattan, in the fall of 1975, she was pulled out of the East River in the black of night after eight hours of non-stop swimming—“trembling uncontrollably, muttering an incoherent stream of monosyllables,” she wrote in her 1978 memoir, “Other Shores.” She had contracted a virus in the contaminated water, and it took her ten days to recover. Then she got back in the water and did it again. On her second try, she wrote, “the Hudson was rough, but the full force of the tide was with me and I almost frolicked in the waves.” Nyad made it around in seven hours and fifty-seven minutes, breaking the record by nearly an hour: “Manhattan Island was mine!”