So we moved over to her blog to grieve with her, where her supporters Candace Lyle Hogan and Elaine Lafferty said, "This was always about the importance of reaching beyond your grasp. Of course, a shore-to-shore success would have been nice—it was what Diana wanted, passionately. There’s no sugar coating for that; her disappointment is real. But for her contemporaries whom she so specifically addressed, this was always about the attempt, about the courage to risk wanting anything passionately again—or maybe even for the first time.... "

And we agreed, sobbing over our keyboards (okay, that was just me). Then we stopped. Because, the glory of Nyad's efforts was about her passion and willingness to try, but, geez, it was also about what she accomplished. As one Twitter fan so insightfully pointed out, "[She] 'only' made it halfway to Cuba?"

Fifty-eight miles of open ocean isn't exactly nothing. Which serves as a little reminder: sometimes what we achieve is something other than what we dreamed, but that doesn't mean it's failure.