Jorg's Brain Log

For the whole day I’ve been thinking about what to write for on my blog today. I promised myself to write a post today, so I have to do it. It’s hard to write something when creativity is low, and normally this would mean I would skip the day.

The whole thing about waiting for creativity is that it doesn’t come with regular waves. Sometimes it takes days before it happened by itself and I feel creative again.

But the same thing as with any other wave is that it doesn’t take a lot to create a big wave. A small wrinkle in the water is sometimes enough to start a big wave. Just like this post; After one sentence I didn’t have to think anymore about what to write. It just came by itself.

This applies to a lot of stuff. Just take a small step, just get in the car, just do 5 minutes of work, etc, etc. It’s that first step that counts. The moment you start something you’re more likely to finish it. Starting something is the most difficult part of it.

I’m glad I started writing the first sentence of this post today. Finishing was easy!

Interesting new year already! After so many years I’m still learning new stuff about myself. Just the way it should be.

Last year I did a lot of experiments with nutrition to see where my slow metabolism came from. And in the coming 4 weeks I’m going to prove to myself that it’s all in the grains, or in my case, the bread I eat.

During the Paleo Diet of last year it became already clear that it’s not about the calories, but what kind of food I eat. As soon as I cut back on the grains, the kilo’s literally flew off. But problem was that I didn’t only take it with one variable, I changed my whole way of eating.

So this time the only variable I will change is that I won’t eat bread anymore (which I normally took at breakfast, lunch and sometimes a late evening snack).

Curious where this will take me! For the rest I will stick to the same 4 eating moments per day, concentrating on getting some extra proteins by eating enough eggs, fish and chicken, but keeping  it the same and real as normally. Oh yeah, the soda light is standard nowadays. I can’t remember the last time I drank normal soda, so that’s a good thing now that I’m accustomed to it.

Good-bye mr. Bread!

On January 4th I started with some new sport goals and after a month of sports I can see I’m pretty happy how it went for the first four weeks. Learned a lot about working with schedules, sudden changes, children, people in general and how to overcome dissapointments when you can’t do what you’ve planned.

Below my complete list of what sport activities I’ve done in January (without the details);

It may seem a lot but when I break it down to the list below, you’ll see it’s pretty doable (for me that is)

• 11x sport moments
• 4x fitness (45 min x 4 = 3 hours)
• 3x running (40 min average x 3 = 2 hours)
• 2x snowboarding (60 min x 2 = 2 hours)
• 1x swimming (60 min = 1 hour)
• 1x freediving (60 min = 1 hour)
• Total: 9 hours per week
• Getting my bag, travel, etc): 6 hours
• Total time including preparation: 15 hours.

So on average it’s about 1 hour 20 minutes per day of sport and including changing into sport clothes, getting sport bag, travelling to swimmingpool, skicentre, etc it become around 2 hours per day. Pretty doable for a healthy, fun and andrenaline filled life.

What do you think about it? To much? Or can you imagine I even want to sport more?

I already announced it a few weeks ago, Project 99! The new year has come and it’s time to start again. The holiday’s are over and it’s time to focus. It’s time to start with Project 99.

Why another project? Well, everything is a project these days. If it has and end-goal, it’s a project. And what’s better then to give a good name to it to get inspired when you think about it.

The number 99 stands for 99 kilo’s. One of my first focus points during this project is health, and with health you also think about a healthy body. In 2009 I did a lot of food and sports experiments to figure out the last pieces of the puzzle and I think I’m now ready for it. I guess I was 19 years old when I still weighted in the double digit range, and it’s time to get back there.

So the goal of P99 is the weigh less then 100 kilo’s, which is a big task for me. And it wouldn’t be a real Jorg project if it didn’t have some interesting sub-goals in it.

The different focus points of the project can be found in:

1. Cardiovascular training (running, swimming, cycling)
2. Weight lifting
3. Nutrition
4. Specific sports (snowboarding, freediving)

I’ve set some interesting goals for the coming months. So I’ll write them down below.

The project starts on Monday January 4th and will end after 24 weeks. That’s is June 20th, the time I want to run a marathon. It’s all divided like this:

• Total time 24 weeks
• 2 cycles of 12 weeks
• Each 12 week cycle consists of 3 x 4 weeks schedules
• And each 4 week schedule is divided in weeks
• which are then divided in days.

So in total I work with day, week, 4week, cycle plans. And every next step can change due to the fact where I am the day before. This way I don’t set a fixed schedule that isn’t flexible to changing circumstances.

Weight

In the first 12 week cycle I want to reach a weight of max 109,9 kilo’s. Monday morning I will weigh myself, so then I know I much I have to lose. This way I have another 12 weeks to do the really hard part of another 10 kilo’s that I have to loose.

Cardiovascular Training

I’ve set some separate goals for each different discipline below:

Running

At the end of the first cycle I want to do a half marathon and at the end of the second cycle a full marathon. In between I will do some additional competition runs to get used to it.

Swimming

I’ve also got the goal to do a 10k swim this year. But I first want to do the first month before I do something concrete with this. The first half year is already pretty exciting like it is.

Cycling

Somewhere I also want to pick up cycling, so that my goals of doing a triathlon can be accomplished. Furthermore, it would be great to do the Alpe d’Huez one day… so who knows.

Weight lifting

A month ago I started with weight lifting again. This is so much part of me as a person that I just can’t live without it. I just love to lift heavy weights and I will probably never stop doing so.

For the first 12 week cycle I will build up my strength again and the end goal for the second big cycle is to be pretty close to some old personal best again AND to train at the new Shark Sports facility.

Nutrition

After a lot of experiments in 2009 with nutrition and some other body hacks, I’m now ready to make some permanent changes to my eating habits. It’s time to switch to Paleo again and start out some veggie tests as well.

Specific Sports

The sports that I do that aren’t for a general purpose like losing weight, except only to have fun and enjoy it are snowboarding and freediving. Both sports give me so much pleasure. If the general goal is reached during this project the performances in both sports will for sure improve big time. So some specific goals would be fun as well. As I don’t compete in snowboarding I just keep this sport as a purely ‘have fun’ goal.

Freediving goals are more clear. 4 minute static in water, 100 meter dynamic with fins and a 75 meter dynamic without fins before the end of the project.

On Monday it starts and I will then publish the somewhat more concrete schedule for that day.

1. My time with my kids and all the vacations we had this year with them.
2. My girlfriend Helle moving in with me
3. Saying goodbye to the rat-race  and starting my own business again
4. I learned to love running!
5. Found my love for freediving again.
6. My first snow vacation that made me hooked to snowboarding
7. The year I became a professional writer
8. Found my roots
9. Turned knowledge into wisdom
10. Helped a lot of people

Lesson Learned in 2009:

Many people want to get to the top

It’s crowded at the top

BUT…

Everybody want to get to the top of the same mountain

So there is a lot of competition

There is a simple solution…

Find a new mountain!

Now that the year is almost over I’m also almost done with the last book of this year, which is a management book by Matthew Stewart. Great read by the way! Bought it yesterday and already I’m at page 200. I’ll try to finish it this week.

As I kept a reading list this year it is easy to look back what I’ve read this year. It’s probably the most I’ve ever read in a year! 121 books. That’s 10 books per months, or 2,5 book per week. Wow, I’m proud at myself.

The 5 books that made the most impression on me, or that I clearly remember from the whole bunch are:

1. Titan
2. Free
3. Blink
4. Inside Drucker’s brainn
5. The Big Switch

This is for sure one of the habits I’m most proud of, taken in account that I wasn’t a reader at all 10 years ago. Let’s try to read even more in 2010!

Imagine this; getting out of bed at 5:30 in the morning. Packing your snowboard stuff and getting in the car at 6. Driving 300 kilometers and arriving on location at Winterberg, Germany at 9 in the morning. Buy a 1-day ticket and snowboard for 6 hours straight with only a 15 minute wurst-break. Get back in the card at 3pm and drive back to home and arrive at 5:30 pm. Take a shower and get at the diner table at 6pm.

Sanne, Marieke and I just did that! And  I must say it felt like we had a long weekend-vacation with this trip. Amazing to go from the clear flatland of the Netherlands to the small mountains of Winterberg and have a whole day of snowboarding.

Okay, it was not Solden in Austria, but it still beat the hell out of the indoor terrains here in the Netherlands. Great stuff! And for sure something we have to more often.

My son turned 9 today. 9 already. Every year I say the same, about how fast everything goes. But damn, he’s already half way about becoming an adult!

As a gift from us to him he got a keyboard so that his creative and musical intelligences will be further developed . Without kidding it’s amazing to see what the boy can do within 10 minutes pushing buttons and playing around with that thing if you compare it with me after 1 hour of reading the manual.

Great to have the whole family and circle of friends together in our house. My son must really have had a good day I guess. Especially with all the new toys he now has. December is really about being spoiled here.

It isn’t over yet! Tomorrow it’s time for the children’s party where he and his friends will go to a big indoor playground where they can be themselves for several hours without me telling them to keep quiet.

Son, I love you and I wish you a lot more healthy and happy years to come!