Jorg's Brain Log

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!

Today I turn 33 years old. Where other people always use new years day to set new goals I’ve made it my habit to use my birthday to reflect on the past, current and future of my life.

Last year was an interesting year! On a personal level I learned a lot of new stuff about life and everything involved with it. I learned about trust, respect and honesty in good and bad ways. Not all were very positive experiences, but I can say that at least it made me a better person. Experience is key!

Now my 10+ year countdown timer has stopped and now that I’ve reached the big moment in my life, it is time to continue with some new stuff. I’ve set a total of 3 new countdown timers. Again all related to my age.

The first one reaches zero in 365 days, when I turn 34 and has a physical, mental and a task focus. I talk more about these goals in the next post.

The second reaches zero when I turn 35 years, 2 years, and has a professional and financial focus. And the third countdown reaches zero in 7 years when I turn 40 in 7 years and they consists of some major goals on where I want to stand in my life at that age and time.

Some people find it difficult to set long term goals, but it appears that those same people are also afraid to dream! I’m not saying that everything I set as a goal is succesful, but it is a way to get  focus in your life. And if I look back to when I was 21 and set some goals for my 33th birtday, it is nice to see that I’ve reached 80% of them. Now I only wish I set my goals somewhat higher…

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

Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! There is a lot going on at the moment. Some how my days are filled, but it feels good to be busy again like this. So, only 35 days left before I turn 33! That’s pretty exciting news, especially with all these developments in the last few weeks.

As I’m also sprinting for 4 weeks to certain goals, I probably need to adjust something. While I’m loosing weight pretty well, I’m afraid that if I keep doing the same thing as the last two weeks, I won’t make it. In the first week I’ve lost 4 kilo’s, but in the second week only 1. So I’m going to change one little aspect: I remove the late evening meal that I had on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I already removed it from the other days, where my diner consisted of eating the same as the family, but now I’m also removing that late snack on the really strict days.

Water drinking is really no problem anymore. I really can do without anything else from now on. I drank some soda on Sunday, which is my junk day, but I even switched back some glasses to water.

Sports is going really well! I’m starting to notice that the weight-loss is somehow affecting my performances in a positive way. Freediving is going great as you can read on Sharkbait. Fitness is also going good. I think I keep it as simple as I’m doing it right now: 3 times a week 1 exercise. Running also not a problem anymore now that I make 3 variations per week.

One thing to improve: I’ve got to keep a stricter writing schedule! It was pretty hard in the last week, with the launch of my company, still writing as much as I wanted to, but that is not an excuse. It only takes 2-3 hours per day to-do, so I’ve got to keep focused.

All in all, if I look at the small number of calories I’m taking, all the physical and mental activities that I’m doing, I’m pretty happy with how my energy level is keeping up with it. Go go go!