Jorg's Brain Log

We rented some bicycles today to get a better view of the island and Kos city itself. In the city itself it was pretty busy and we had a good lunch at a beach cafe. With the hot sun on our heads we went pretty slowly on the bikes. Just watching the sea and city was a lot of fun.

On the way back to the hotel we found Kos Divers, the diving shop I was planning to do some diving with. After asking the owner of the center about the diving conditions, he asked me what certification I had. After hearing I was an instructor he said it was better not to dive here. How honest! More about my freediving, or absence about it, on the shark-bait website.

After visiting another almost empty beach bar, it was time to get back to the hotel. Our hotel is halfway a big mountain, so when we wanted to rent the bikes, the owner of the shop which was located near the sea, came to pick us up by car. We weren’t that lucky for the way back, because we had to drop our bikes off at the hotel reception. So that meant we had to cycle our way up to the hill.

I just love a challenge, and gears on a bicycle! So with a pretty high RPM and a very light gear we pedaled our way back up the mountain. Helle had a little bit more trouble with all the gears on her bike, so when we arrived at the hotel she had enough. However I wasn’t satisfied yet and wanted to continue upwards. From the hotel up, the street gets much steeper, so another challenge. But after 10 minutes of biking upwards and blood in my throat it was time to do some downhill biking, which appears not to be so fun if you can’t rely on your brakes that much.

In the end I arrived safely in the hotel again and it took me around 10 minutes in the cold shower to cool down again. That was fun!

Today we traveled from Eindhoven to Kos (Greece). Of course by airplane. And while I traveled frequently from our own Eindhoven Airport, it’s been a while! Our plane was scheduled to depart at 15:40 and we had to check –in 2 hours before that. That’s 13:40! 2 hours of doing nothing…

This time I was already glad that we didn’t lose a day by traveling to Amsterdam Airport and going to all the long rows over there. This way we still had the morning for ourselves, to do some useful and productive stuff.

The good thing is that more and more airplanes allow to check-in online beforehand. And because we flew with Transavia I already checked in the day before and arranged 2 good seats way in front of the wings, so that you’ve got less noise from the engines which a roaring to the back. I also took in mind that  we were flying south east in the afternoon, which meant that the sun would be shining on the right side of the planes. So, I selected seats on the left side, so we could leave the sunscreen on the window open.

Of course my seat was next to the aisle, so I could make optimal use of the aisle itself as leg room. One learns a few tricks if you fly a lot. After selecting the seats I printed the check-in vouchers so that we could avoid the long check-in rows at the airport itself.

Now that we already checked in, we saved ourselves 30 minutes because you have to check in your main luggage 90 minutes before departure. So our deadline to arrive at the airport was 14:10 instead of 13:40. We ordered a taxi for 13:45 and we arrived at the airport at 14:00. We dropped our baggage and the baggage drop-point, which had no people waiting and walked away from the long line of people who were waiting to check-in at counter 8.

Because of all these new stupid flying rules that say that you can’t bring your own liquids any more on the plane, we decided to sit down and drink our cans of Soda. Otherwise you would have to throw them away. What a rules! Just a commercial rule that makes you buy drinks in the airport shop and in the plane.

Until now we managed to avoid any rows of people, but customs is unavoidable in Eindhoven. No VIP treatment here! As always I removed everything, including my belt, to make sure we weren’t delayed over there by some stupid body or baggage check, but this time my shoes were the problem. After removing my shoes and putting them under the x-ray, everything was okay.

It’s clear that Eindhoven airport is not prepared for busy season! What a mess behind customs! Completely filled with people and no place to sit. And that because of the 4 planes that were going to depart in the next 2 hours. Note to Eindhoven Airport travelers: Wait as long as possible before going through customs! There is nothing to do behind customs besides a café and a shop. Just wait in front of customs and you can still get some fresh air by walking outside and have a few more shops and café’s to choose from.

After a slow walk around we found a empty table in the corner of the café. We dropped down and we had to wait. Thank god the Tour de France  was on TV! Time Trial day, so I had something interesting to watch. After 45 minutes it was boarding time. Everybody ran to make a nice new row at the gate and I always wonder why! Do people really think the plane leaves without them, or that they won’t have a seat? As always we just stay put at our table. After 15 minutes the row was gone and some last people were walking towards the gate. That was the sign to go to the gate for ourselves as well. Again avoided a row of people!

As an extra bonus, we also avoided a row entering the plane itself. Because everybody was already seated in the plane, we just could walk into the plane, but our stuff in the overhead compartments and sit down. Too bad the only row left was a lot of airplanes: the sky was very busy and we had a 20 minute delay for departing!

Avoidable Rows:

• No Traffic Jam because of traveling from Eindhoven Airport instead of Schiphol Amsterdam
• No Check-in line because of internet check-in from home
• No Gate row because of going last
• No row while entering the plane because of going last

Unavoidable Rows:

• Customs at Eindhoven

With all this new goal setting going on, everybody expects me to work my butt off for training and reaching my new goals. Well, resting is a much part of the progress of improving as hard work is.

Without rest your mind can’t come to rest and take on a new daunting task. Without rest your muscle fibers can’t heal from all the physical work they had to endure. Without rest.. well you get the picture!

Where I normally always say that 1 week of rest is enough to recuperate, fate has things turned around a little bit. My girlfriend gave me a great birthday gift by taking my on vacation to the island of Kos in Greece. So the last week of the month, starting on Thursday, I will indulge myself with an all-inclusive formula full with food, drinks, sun, reading and diving!

Which means that my rest period is a little bit langer then planned, but nothing better then to take an uphill run in the morning looking at the sun coming up from the sea!

So at the moment I’m in a little bit of warming up schedule before I start my real schedule on august 1st. I’m now doing some light running, dry and wet freediving exercises and some swimming. No weights at the moment, got a pretty intense 5 week schedule lined out when I come back, followed by an interesting body-weight only schedule.

Probably my next post will come from Greece with some nice photos to make you jealous.

Freediving… the art of breath hold diving! A great alternative way to visit an alien environment without any external support.

I’ve been freediving since 1997 when I first started with my scubadiving lessons, but missed the sportive element in it. For 7 years straight I trained and hold my breath on every occasion, until the big burnout came. Too much training, too much pushing for new personal bests. In the end I just hated training and only just wanted to enjoy myself in the deep water.

In 2008 I decided to take a year of and see if I wanted to come back into the water, and I’m glad that I took a break from it! Because now I’m in love again with the training and being underwater. So much so that I’ve taken my old goal of reaching 50 meters of depth again.

Serious training going on again. A lot of exploring and trying out. So much so that if I would write everything down here about this part alone, my blog would be too much about freediving alone. That’s why my good friend Sanne and I setup Sharkbait, so we could share our freediving experience with the rest through that website.

So if you want to know what’s going on with Jorg and his freediving, take a look here for all Jorg his posts, or go here for the full website where you can read Sanne his stories as well.

Only 363 days to go before my next birthday. So why am I already looking forward to this new countdown when my last one just finished? Because in the coming year I’m going to set some new standards for myself and I’ve set out a pretty exciting plan and some interesting goals to reach.

First I thought about keeping the list for myself, but it is much more fun to publicly list some of my goals for the coming year and look back at my next birthday on what I’ve achieved.

My list of goals is setup in some different categories like sports, health, mental, work, creativity, etc. I’ve taken the goals that are my top goals and most clear to measure. A goal like ‘eat the paleo way’ is a clear goal for me, but not really measurable. The goals below are really measurable. Either I’ve done it or reached it, or not.

• Run a marathon
• Swim 10 kilometers
• Do a triathlon
• Swim 100 meters underwater on one breath
• Dive to 50 meters depth on one breath

• Drop under 12% bodyfat

• Finish my book

Lets see how far I can go in one year and enjoy the journey towards reaching those goals as much as reaching those goals alone!

Only one week to go! 7 days and nights and then the magic number of 33 will pop-up. It’s been 2 weeks since my last personal blog and that is pretty strange, because I kept writing like crazy (around 1000 words per day), but that’s for the book I’m working on and not for public viewing yet.

So what’s going on at the moment? Well a lot, and that’s one of the reasons it has been so quiet here. But rest assured, I’m back at my blogging cycle as it was. Decisions have been made, thoughts have been thought about and I’m ready for the next big step!

Things I’m working on at the moment:

• Dyrion and the next step (which will be pretty excited and announced this week)
• Shark Sport company (Sharkbait and Shark freediving are part of this)
• Writing (I’ve made this a regular part of my lifestyle)
• Sports (to ventilate my testoterone)
• Kids and family (the most important thing in my life)
• Myself (the other most important thing in my life)

I plan to publish a post about my life and the number 7 on my birthday next week, July 13th. It wil be a pretty honest and open letter to myself, which can be read  by everyone (privacy is dead anyway). It has something to do with goals and commitments in life and as it is very personal it will be of interest to people with the same life questions and it will probably be of no interest for some other people as well.

Work hard!

Only 3 weeks to go before I turn 33 and there is still so much thinking, doing and improving going on. I’m definitely improving big time in many aspects in my life. I’m especially very happy about the result of the discipline test I’ve put myself into. From now on I feel that I can be my own leader. I don’t need anybody around me to give an order, before I start to improve, explore or learn. That’s a pretty big one.

Only around 2% of the people can do this and it’s an art not to be taken lightly. If you can bring yourself to discipline to act and do then you’re a very brave and enlightened person.

Self discipline

This self-discipline has really come to affect in 2 parts of my life in the last weeks and months; personal fitness and writing! With only 3 weeks to go I’m a little heavier than last week with 113,2 kilos. Considering all the eating and drinking I’ve done in the last week, I’m very happy about that. It means that my metabolism is on fire and that I’m burning calories every minute.

My goal is to weigh 109,9 kilo’s on my 33rd birthday. So I have to drop 3,3 kilo’s in 3 weeks. It will be very hard, because I already lost 16 kilo’s and things are now much harder to lose, but I really really want to get to this point. I think I will post an extra post about how to reach my end goal tomorrow or so.

The writing part I’m also very happy with! I’m writing between 1000 and 2000 words everyday and that’s a big deal to me. It isn’t that I wanted to be a writer or that I saw any future in it for myself. But the fact is that I always wanted to create something new, and I think that with this writing I really found something for myself that I just love to do and goes naturally.

Looking forward to finish the last 3 weeks before I reach another milestone in my life.

In college I had a total of 7 years of French classes. After those 7 years I was a mediocre French student, but I could have a small conversation in French and in general I could follow movies, discussions and books in French. Unfortunately, I didn’t go to France as much after those 7 years, so the language skills I’ve developed over that time were mostly lost.

On my Dutch blog about Life Skills, I wrote an article about how to reactivate your lost language skills. And to put power to the article, I decided to reactivate my own French language skills. End of august of this year we have planned a nice 1,5 week family vacation to France, and the goals is to get my skills back so that I can do at least the basic conversations and understand what they are saying.

I’m planning to do this in the following way:

• I’m going to watch a lot of French video’s and movies, with English or Dutch subtitles in the beginning.
• Next I’m going to read some French comic books. The storyline of a comic book is always easy to follow due to the graphic, therefore you get a little help of understanding the text balloons.
• Also I’m going to reactivate my vocabulary by reading a French-dutch dictionary. Just seeing a lot of French words will reactivate a lot of the drill sessions I did all those years ago, learning the wordlists for next day exam.
• In the last month before the vacation I’m going to study a little about the language rules, to understand how to construct sentences in complete discussions.
• And last I’m going to find me some word cards; cards where only one French word is printed on together with the explanation and a sentence example.

Lets see how this will go! I’m pretty curious and excited to see how much I can bring back. I’ll update regularly about this endeavor.

As I’m noticing some energy changes in my daily behavior, I decided to give my metabolism a little swing again. For a few days I will be eating normal meals in the evening again, instead of the paleo food. Also I’m drinking some calorie free drinks, to keep me energized.

Hopefully this will spike my metabolism in such a way, that I can reach 109,9 before my 33 birthday. Still got 3,5 week to go, so hopefully I can achieve this goal.

Another energy drain that was going on, was the lack of a decent workplace. The last week my girlfriend Helle and I were pretty busy with my new office at home to finish it. I’m glad I’m now writing this from my new desk!

I already feel so much new energy when sitting here instead of in the livingroom. Really a place where I can start chaning the world.

Things are going pretty fast at the moment. The countdown to my 33rd birthday is going pretty fast! Only 28 days to go, that’s 4 weeks. I’m pretty happy to report that I’ve lost 16 kilo’s since I started a few months back with sport again, and that I’m now at 112,9 kilo’s. Well, it’s probably also thanks to the changed eating regime.

The fun things is, that it doesn’t cost any energy to make such changes. Where I would fail miserable in the past with trying to loose weight, now it has become so easy, it is amazing. It’s pretty interesting to analyze how that is possible, but in the end I think it’s just because I took it slowly but steady.

Instead of making a master-plan for the next 12 weeks, planning every meal and training, I now set out one global goal of getting back to 109,9. When I started my weight was at 128,9 kilo’s and if you think at that point about all the things you have to do of loosing 19 kilo’s, it’s such a big task.

So the first thing I would do is set myself a task to go back to 120 kilo’s, in 4 weeks time. Sub-goal number 1! And instead of changing everything at once, I first started with implementing some exercise in my schedule again. Every week that went by I added another exercise to the list, or another eating habit.

If you reach one sub-goal, plan the next one! And plan week by week, day by day. Most importantly, if you mess up one day, just keep going! Everything is NOT ruined because you did one thing wrong, just learn from it and don’t do it again.

I’ve set a goal to reach 109,9 kilo’s this weekend. That means I’ve got to loose 3 kilo’s in a week. To be honest, I’m not going to make it. And if I did it would be an unhealthy way of reaching this. So did my mission fail? No! I just keep going in the next week, until I finally reach that goal.

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Thomas Edison