We did the Swim Across the Sound this past Saturday, and it went really well.
We had kind of a different event this year. After years with the original Team RBG, none of my habitual teammates could make this one. I initially reached out to Race Director Liz Fry to just fold me into someone else’s team, but Liz didn’t want that. She wanted to keep Team RBG a going concern.
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| Team RBG before the Swim |
My Swim Across the Sound team fell apart a few weeks ago. It happens. Folks have lives and real-world concerns, and for better or worse, not everyone can make themselves available on the first Saturday in August every single year. After all the years I’ve been able to rely on this same small group of people, it’s somebody else’s turn to do their part now. I reached out to the race director for help fielding a team last week, but before I did that, I considered just swimming the damn thing solo. Not because I wanted to but to smooth out the logistics.
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| In the water for the Swim Across the Sound, 2022. |
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| Team RBG at last year's Swim. |
Friends,
As many of you know, I will be competing in the Swim Across the Sound to support St. Vincent's Hospital's Cancer Center again this year. 2025 marks a decade with the Swim for me. I first competed as part of "Team Y-Me?" way back in 2015. We've learned a lot and raised a lot of money in that time. This year can and should be our best year ever!
Action shot of me from the Swim in 2017.
Happy New Year! I hope this note finds you happy and healthy heading into 2025.
It feels like a lot happened this past year for Casa Cabeza, to the point that this is now my third attempt to put it all into some kind of context. I finally decided to publish a simple list of highlights.
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| Danno & Sally Cabeza |
These are presented in no particular order.
Friends,
Team RBG had a banner week this week, totalling over $8,000 in donations from our incredibly generous friends and families. I feel truly blessed and humbled by your outpouring of support this past week, and indeed, throughout this whole season. The Swim changes lives, especially mine. Watching my own friends and collegues come together to support my cause has been a life-changing, life-affirming event in an increasingly hostile and polarizing world.
Selfie from Tuesday's taper training session.
I reorganized my trophy case, going from two rows to three. In the process, I added a few things that had previously been either in our library or in our china cabinet, and I removed a few things that either weren't true trophies or that were redundant with other stuff that was already in there.
Here's where we landed. I tried to leave a little room at the top for future Swim Across the Sound trophies.
I'm now dying to explain this. If you're interested, the explanation is past the jump.
This post is part of the Twitter Threads project. I posted this last Sunday.
2000 yards #swimming this morning. Did some tempo work & felt good doing it.
— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) April 21, 2024
Life is good, friends.
If you've got a few moments, I'd like to talk to you about the Swim Across the Sound.
The Swim is an annual charity race sponsored by St. Vincent's Medical Center to benefit cancer patients in Southwest Connecticut. The Swim doesn't pay for cancer treatments. It pays for all of the things that insurance doesn't cover.
From the Twitter Threads Project:
4600 yards #swimming this morning with a lot of tempo work.
Now I’m tired.
Also: peep the door prize from last night’s drawing at the local brewery. This + 2 shirts + a tour + *4* growlers!
Friends, it feels like new social media sites are popping up faster than weeds in my wife's garden. What can you do? No one's quite sure which ones are gonna stick just yet, but we're all steady joining these things for better or worse. The hope, at least for me, is that each new site will offer a way to engage a new or different audience.
But every time we join one of these sites, we have to introduce ourselves all over again. That's a pain in the butt.
So. This is a little explainer: Who the Hell do I think I am?
Sometimes swimming is great, sometimes swimming is a grind, and sometimes it's both. Less than a month out from the 2022 Swim Across the Sound, and we've gotten into a space where it is very much both.
Let's start with the simple reality: I am swimming very well.
But I've also been swimming a lot, so this isn't exactly a surprise.
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| From the 2017 Swim Across the Sound. Support our team HERE! |
Well friends, we have reached the part of the training cycle in which I remember why I retired from competition. Which is to say that I woke up this morning tired and sore to the point that it took a real effort of will to get out of bed and go swim. Looking back on my competitive swimming career these days often feels like remembering that time I had a mental illness. I was mad about everything pretty much all the time, and I used those feelings to fuel my competitive fires. Today I’m in a much better headspace, and that’s great 99% of the time, but boy, it is sooooo much more difficult to find the right mindset when things get tough in training.
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| Click here to learn more about our Swim Across the Sound team. |
I bagged swimming outside this morning, & it looks like I might bag open water swimming on Sunday, too. It’s gorgeous in Coastal Connecticut this morning, but it’s also 58-degrees with the water at 62. That’s — just barely — doable in a sleeveless wetsuit, but it’s nobody’s idea of fun. I have a thick neoprene cap for mornings like this, and if the pool was closed like it was during the pandemic, I'd have no choice but to tough it out. However. We no longer live in that world, thank God, so I let myself off the hook. Plus, it's supposed to rain Sunday morning, so...
We're trying to be smarter with this, even though I'm not always great at that.
Yours truly during the 2019 Swim Across the Sound.
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| With my buddy Dave after a 3.25-mile open water swim last Saturday. |
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| An early Sound crossing to get to Long Island. |
