By Ann Hedreen
When marathon swimmer Diana Nyad was 64 years old, she stood up and walked on her own two feet onto Smathers Beach in Key West, Florida, after swimming 110.86 miles from Cuba in 52 hours and 54 minutes. She had first attempted the crossing from Cuba to Florida 35 years earlier, three years after astonishing New Yorkers and the world by swimming around Manhattan. Nyad sped through the 28-mile New York swim in a mere seven hours and 57 minutes. The Cuba swim became the goal of a lifetime. It took her five tries—in 1978, 2010, 2011, 2012, and then triumphantly in 2013—to finally step out onto that Florida beach.
“The epic Cuba swim touched my soul,” wrote Nyad in her 2015 memoir, Find a Way. “There is no other ocean crossing that would move me to dream again, to train like that again. Now it’s my challenge to live that same fierce way out of the water.”
Continuing to live with the fierceness it took to swim from Cuba to Florida is no puny task. For most of us, this kind of equation works the other way around—we need a pep-talk and promises of treats to get us to step up and do the hard things in our lives. Sometimes we need to plead with ourselves just to get out of bed and seize the day. But all her life, Nyad has had the opposite problem. She is addicted to pushing herself, to setting the next challenge so that her steely will can get to work. I write this with admiration. Because what’s astounding about Nyad, who is now 75, is that her new goal has nothing to do with surpassing the records she’s already set in the water. It has to do with walking on dry land. And it’s not just about her. She wants to get all of us walking so that we can connect with this planet in a way even more primordial than swimming. Walking.
We humans “have been walkers extraordinaire until now,” says Nyad, in a recent lively Zoom interview. “Until the car came,” and changed everything, including our bodies in this country more than any other. “Let’s get back to what human beings are built for, which is walking.”
“We are all from one place,” adds Nyad’s longtime trainer and best friend, Bonnie Stoll. “The only thing that differentiated us was that we all walked out of Africa.”
Their new venture, called EverWalk, began to take shape “a couple of weeks after the 2013 swim,” Stoll recounts. “We were a group of 40 people and we all had such a sense of purpose. We all had the same goal—getting the swimmer across—and a couple weeks later Diana and I are sitting around and we said how can we get the world to feel some kind of purpose and be proud? Nobody really wants to go swimming daily. But walking is something everybody can do, unless you’re wheeling in a wheelchair.” And when we’re walking, “we are looking at nature for every second. And maybe we are talking to people we haven’t met before. And … walking is good for your heart, it’s good for your soul, it is the best thing you could possibly be doing to stay in tune with your body and your mind.”
“There are epiphanies that come when you’re walking,” says Nyad. “We handle our meetings for EverWalk while walking. People are much more free. They’re not looking at a screen and a wall. They’re looking out and up and imagining everything they can be and everything they can do. So, I think that EverWalk has really become what we felt in the ocean to some large degree.”
Now in its eighth year, EverWalk’s vision is to get the world walking, through offering online challenges and support and organizing and leading walks all over the U.S. “Our community is very strong,” says Nyad. “We chose the moniker EverWalk because that word ‘ever’ is in there. Everybody, every age, everywhere, forever, for the rest of your life.”
Though there are EverWalkers of all ages, the virtual challenges and the in-person walks are especially popular with people over 55, because just about everybody “can walk as they get older,” says Stoll, “but not everybody can play beach volleyball anymore.” Stoll, who was a nationally ranked racquetball player in the 1980s, and is a renowned fitness coach, sends training manuals and offers tips to walkers who sign up for EverWalk events and trips.
Nyad and Stoll are currently in the limelight because of the 2023 movie, Nyad, starring Annette Bening as Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster as Bonnie Stoll. If you haven’t seen it, put it on your Netflix list. Foster and Bening are riveting, real and unglamorous. Stoll felt like she was watching her actual self. As Nyad put it, “This movie honors an unapologetically fierce personality who will not give up on her big dream, and a friendship of 45 years, of two athletes going after this thing together.”
Nyad and Stoll both knew they were athletes from a very young age. Nyad grew up in Fort Lauderdale, with the Atlantic Ocean as her playground and the International Swimming Hall of Fame in the heart of town. From the age of 10, she was up at 4:30 in the morning and working out in the pool every day. Stoll grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, playing every sport she could get her hands on, especially if it involved a racket. Her mother liked to recall the moment she realized her daughter was an athlete—when she saw her playing football, the lone girl on the field, with all the neighborhood boys.
In their early days together, Nyad was Stoll’s fitness coach, teaching her how to bring more strength and stamina to her game. For the Cuba swims, the roles were reversed. “Bonnie had had nothing to do with swimming, but she was the best coach I ever had. Because she was that athlete and because she knew me,” says Nyad. “We need to research it, but we think we’re the only pair of athletes who, 35 years later, switched roles. Coach went to athlete and athlete went to coach.”
And now, both Stoll and Nyad are coaches. And they are ready to be your coach, if you’re ready to get off the couch and start walking.
Ann Hedreen is an author (Her Beautiful Brain), teacher of memoir writing, and filmmaker. Hedreen` and her husband, Rustin Thompson, own White Noise Productions and have made more than 150 short films and several feature documentaries together, including Quick Brown Fox: An Alzheimer’s Story. She is currently at work on a book of essays and is a regular contributor to 3rd Act Magazine, writing about topics including conscious aging, retirement, mindfulness, and health.
Read more about their Fall 2024 challenge at EverWalk.com . And watch for more news about upcoming in-person walks, including Martha’s Vineyard in Fall 2025.