Craig Dietz, the limbless American open water swimmer, arrived in South Africa on Wednesday and immediately made for Pietermaritzburg Seals Swimming Club to meet the media and to do some lengths in the pool ahead of the weekend’s aQuellé Midmar Mile.
In the photo: Craig Dietz practices for the aQuellé Midmar Mile in the Seals Swimming Club at the GC Jolliffe pool in Pietermaritzburg (Photo: Brad Morgan/Gameplan Media)
Talk to him for a while and his limitations seem to melt away. Some people, though, find it more difficult to approach him. That’s when Dietz turns to humour. “People don’t always know what to make of me on first impressions, so I’ve found the humour disarms them. No pun intended,” he smiles.
Nowadays Dietz is an open water swimmer and a motivational speaker, but he’s also a qualified attorney, having attended Duquesne University in the Steel City, his home town of Pittsburgh.
He might not have any limbs, but that is not something that Dietz regrets at all. “I wouldn’t be in Africa and people wouldn’t give a crap if I had arms and legs, so it has led me to have a lot of experiences that I wouldn’t have otherwise had. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.”
As it has been for every overseas swimmer that has swum the Midmar Mile, the event is going to be on a scale Dietz has never experienced before. He couldn’t have – it’s the world’s largest open water swimming event.
“I looked it up online,” he said. “It has a great history. This is the 40th anniversary, I understand. I think the biggest event I have competed in to date is a thousand, 1 500 people.”
Dietz credits his family for never letting any imitations get in his way. “Growing up, my parents and my siblings were very instrumental in pushing me to not allow my limitations to hold me back and to define me. That’s just carried through for my whole life,” he said.
“My catchphrase is to define your own potential as a person, to not allow your circumstances to define who you are.”
“There’s a saying that I use: I’ll try anything once. If I like it, I’ll try it twice.”
For more on Craig Dietz, click here
The aQuellé Midmar Mile takes place on 9 and 10 February at the Midmar Dam, just outside Howick in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. For more info, visit www.midmarmile.co.za
