内容摘要：“The Indy 500 marks the unofficial kickoff of summer and the start of hot dog season,” said Kelsey Rice, brand communications director at Chicago-based Oscar Mayer. “It’s only fitting that we bring a race of epic proportions to the Speedway and celebrate a timeless tradition: delicious meats and a little friendly competition to kick off a summer of wieners.”

“The Indy 500 marks the unofficial kickoff of summer and the start of hot dog season,” said Kelsey Rice, brand communications director at Chicago-based Oscar Mayer. “It’s only fitting that we bring a race of epic proportions to the Speedway and celebrate a timeless tradition: delicious meats and a little friendly competition to kick off a summer of wieners.”

Pugh said this was among his most difficult endurance swims in an almost 40-year career, which says a lot for someone who has swum near glaciers and volcanoes, and among hippos, crocodiles and polar bears. Pugh was the first athlete to swim across the North Pole and complete a long-distance swim in every one of the world’s oceans.He said he expected the swim to be difficult because of the water temperature, the distance and the fact that it was happening during the start of shark migration season. But the weather proved the most challenging element of all.

“It’s been a long journey, it really has — 12 days, cold water, constant wind, waves, and then always thinking of what may be beneath me. It’s been a big swim. A very big swim,” he said. “When you swim for 12 days, you leave as one person and I think you come back as a different person with a new reflection on what you’ve been through.”Day after day, Pugh entered the island’s frigid waters wearing just trunks, a cap and goggles, enduring foul weather as a nor’easter dumped 7 inches (18 centimeters) of rain on parts of New England and flooded streets on Martha’s Vineyard.Some days, he was only able to make it a little over half a mile (1 kilometer) before wind and waves made it impossible to see beyond an arm’s length ahead. In some cases, he had to make up lost distance by swimming multiple legs in a day.

“I was just getting really cold and swallowing a lot of sea water, not making headway and then you’re constantly thinking, ‘Are we taking the right route here? Should we go further out to sea? Should we get closer in?’” he said. “And meanwhile you’re fighting currents.”But Pugh — who has been named a United Nations Patron of the Oceans and often swims to raise awareness for environmental causes — said no swim is without risk, and that drastic measures are needed to get his message across: About 274,000 sharks are killed globally each day, a rate of nearly 100 million every year, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

On Monday, Pugh called the decimation of sharks an “ecocide.”

“I think protecting sharks is the most important part of the jigsaw puzzle of protecting the oceans,” he said.needs to start at the local level — especially in communities of color that may lack trust in the medical field.

It’s already happening in Brownsville, where the hospital fully reopened in 2022;who lack permanent legal status after their work hours; and in California, where

, who often work on farms or at meatpacking plants.“We’ve learned that we have to go to people, we have to go to where they’re at, they’re not going to come to us,” said Mandip Kaur, the health director of the nonprofit Jakara Movement.