Swim Across America 2016

Last Saturday, August 6, under the early morning sky, I completed my 8th annual 5K swim for the Swim Across America event, which raises money to fight cancer. My sponsors, including colleagues, investors, family, and friends, once again helped to raise almost $5K (including pledged matching funds). Our team raised $25K, and the event itself raised over $360,000 overall. This is another triumph for everyone who participated. Not only did we have a great time swimming, but we also contributed significantly to the effort of finding a cure for cancer, an affliction which is still haunting many of our fellow humans. The silver lining is that thanks to those who support efforts like Swim Across America with their hard-earned dollars, progress toward this goal is being made every year. Many medical professionals whose research is supported by money raised from this event have provided detailed information on specific milestones they have reached. Hopefully we can eradicate the terrible suffering caused by this disease in the near future.

Weather forecasts earlier in the week predicted thunderstorms for Saturday, but the morning turned out to be partially sunny – perfect for swimming in the beautiful Long Island Sound. The thunderstorm arrived several hours later (must have been stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway). Not only that, but apparently the “calm before the storm” also provided us with relatively tranquil waters, which helped keep my sodium intake to a level recommended by the FDA (thanks to not swallowing a lot of sea water from the waves, like in previous years).

But the best part is that our CEO – my brother, Wayne – and another friend, Raymond, participated this year as volunteer kayakers. Using Wayne’s newly acquired, high tech, and state of the art inflatable kayak, they guided me through the entire journey, and helped make the swim much more enjoyable since (as I mentioned in my fund-raising email) I was confident they would be on the lookout for sharks, giant squids, pirates, and other sea monsters, which allowed me to concentrate on just swimming.

When I finally reached shore, I was astonished to find I had completed the 5K in record time (my own pathetic personal record), since I was able to swim the course without meandering, thereby confirming Euclid’s proposition of a straight line – it is indeed the shortest distance between two points. It took me about one hour and fifty minutes, which is 6.6 thousand seconds (for storage professionals who like to talk about latency, it is 6.6 million milliseconds, or if you are an SSD enthusiast, 6.6 billion microseconds). I wouldn’t have been able to make this time, bad as it is, without them showing me the way.

As a technologist, I couldn’t help but to relate this to our software development process. Having a clear vision of the concrete objective, and a well-thought out plan to guide the course of the operation is the key to reaching the goal in an optimal manner. No amount of brute force hard work can make up for time and effort wasted by aimless meandering. This is why we emphasize “Work Smart.” The results have spoken for themselves since our elite team of a few engineers created a technologically sophisticated, feature rich, function complete, detail perfect, and application versatile data migration product like DMS. And now we are setting the buoys for a new, exciting course to expand DMS to the next level.

But I digress.

This has been another fantastic year for Swim Cross America, and I am again looking forward to next year, when I not only would like to have a new record time, but also have a new record for the amount raised!