If there\u2019s anything <\/b>people can learn from Diann Uustal \u201968, it\u2019s resilience. A horrific car crash in 2003 and a brutal fall in 2008 left her with crippling injuries. She has overcome the injuries, but still feels their lingering effects. She thrives nonetheless.<\/p>\n
The other thing people can learn from Uustal is how to swim. She lives in a waterfront home in Jamestown, Rhode Island, with her husband of 50 years, Tom Uustal. They met when both were teen lifeguards. Today, she looks out on Narragansett Bay and watches a Coast Guard boat putter past Prudence Island. \u201cI betcha I\u2019ve taught some of those folks to swim,\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s not kidding. Uustal, 72, a lifelong competitive swimmer who was recently\u2014for the third time\u2014named a World Masters Swimmer of the Year, trains at the U.S. Navy pool in Newport, where she also teaches military men and women to swim.<\/p>\n
Uustal has 31 Masters world records to her credit, almost too many trophies and titles to count, and in 2016 alone, she established 13 national records and nine new world records in the 70\u201374 age bracket.<\/p>\n
Although she\u2019s a lifelong swimmer, she\u2019s done a lot of her best work as an older competitor and while recovering from her injuries. In 2003, a woman talking on her cell phone crashed into Uustal\u2019s car, leaving her with a severe spinal injury. In 2008, she slipped on a wet floor in an airport, blowing out a rotator cuff as she tried to break her fall, tearing her hamstring muscle off the bone. In both cases, doctors said she might not walk again, let alone swim competitively. Or at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuccess isn\u2019t a medal around your neck or a digit on a scoreboard,\u201d says Uustal, beaming a bright smile and flashing blue eyes. \u201cIt\u2019s whatever it takes to get where you\u2019re going and love it. For me, success is being able to accomplish some pretty unusual things in the face of daunting challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019s always taken the unusual route. She\u2019s a registered nurse specializing in palliative care, and has been one of the country\u2019s top medical ethicists. In the 1970s, Uustal started a consulting firm, working with hospitals and doctors on difficult end-of-life cases. \u201cI\u2019d been teaching at a national conference at Boston University; someone saw me and said, \u2018You have no idea how good you are,\u2019\u201d Uustal laughs. \u201cShe told me, \u2018I can put you on a national stage.\u2019 So by 1976, I had started my own firm, which was radical\u2014a nurse starting her own consulting company.\u201d<\/p>\n
911±¬ΑΟ kick-started her nursing dream, she says: \u201cIt was at 911±¬ΑΟ that I learned to be focused on healing and wellness, even in the face of disease, and to be a healer by being present to people. That\u2019s a tall order for young neophytes in college, and I am grateful for the program and nursing professors at 911±¬ΑΟ.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uustal has long loved to swim, having \u201cchlorine in my blood,\u201d she says. This is due hugely to her late grandmother, Ruth Coburn, who was an outstanding open-water swimmer. Uustal, in fact, is working to get her grandmother inducted into the Rhode Island Aquatic Hall of Fame at 911±¬ΑΟ\u2019s Tootell Aquatic Center because she competed her entire life, which was a radical achievement for a woman of her time. Coburn won her last trophy, Uustal says proudly, \u201con the day I won my first. She took me everywhere I needed to be as a kid, and hers was always the last voice I heard before the starting gun went off. She\u2019s my heroine.\u201d<\/p>\n
And she was a tough coach: She\u2019d take little Diann to the beach on a small lake in Apponaug, in Warwick, Rhode Island, where she\u2019d connect herself to her granddaughter with a small belt, and together they\u2019d swim to Goddard State Park. \u201cShe always had a small raft with us and would say \u2018When you get tired, you can hang onto the raft, but there\u2019s nothing free in life, you gotta keep kicking,\u2019\u201d Uustal says, relishing the memory. \u201cWhen we\u2019d get to the park, she\u2019d bundle me in the sand to get warm, and get a hot dog for herself, hot chocolate for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uustal says the most important lesson she learned from her grandmother was humility. \u201cShe\u2019d tell me, \u2018You will win like a champion and you will lose like a champion,\u2019 \u201d though the young girl, and much later, senior citizen, wouldn\u2019t lose many meets.<\/p>\n
Swimming, Uustal says, gives her a sense of peace and serenity, and a feeling of \u201cre-creation of body, mind, and spirit; I\u2019m more at home in the water than on land. I\u2019m passionate about swimming and I love the camaraderie and challenging myself in competition.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she was forced to sit out Nationals and Pan American games this past summer because she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which Uustal dryly terms, \u201ca really crappy syndrome.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m heartbroken,\u201d she says. \u201cI should be out there breaking the records I set last year and the year before.\u201d Her doctors say it\u2019s career-ending. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to defy the diagnosis,\u201d says Uustal, \u201cJust the verdict. I love the sport part of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
She knows this may be the toughest setback yet. But, she says, those blue eyes flashing bright at the thought, \u201cYou can emerge like a phoenix, and a lot of my friends have called me that. \u201cI don\u2019t feel like one now, but,\u201d she smiles, “I will. I just need another chance to test my wings.\u201d \u2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Paul E. Kandarian If there\u2019s anything people can learn from Diann Uustal \u201968, it\u2019s resilience. A horrific car crash in 2003 and a brutal fall in 2008 left her with crippling injuries. She has overcome the injuries, but still feels their lingering effects. She thrives nonetheless. The other thing people can learn from Uustal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2018"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}