Jorg’s Brain Log

Wow, time flies when you’re having fun! Or should I say, when you’re busy… Last week was such a busy week at work, that I barely had time to do something else then work. This weekend our cat got a big problem with his bladder so he had to be taken to the vet immediatly and I only just picked the poor basterd up from his cage. Anyway, we’re glad he’s home again.

Workplace here is still okay! Woohaa! No more headaches since 1,5 week! Incredibly. Really enjoying going to work again. Productivity is high and mood is good.

Yesterday I put on my inlineskates I bought like 8 years ago and used them only once. My son on the bicycle and me behind him, for over an hour! When we came back I didn’t feel my feet anymore, but I told myself it was a good thing… so it doesn’t matter. Oh and I didn’t fall once! Just like the old days, only difference is now that I’m almost 40 kg more heavier. But still no problems with jumps, spins and grinds… and that for the first time! It’s fun to do, and also a good workout, so when the sun shines I’m going for some rounds again.

My own business is looking good. After some long months of preparation, brainstorming, discussion, etc, I’ve now finished the whole idea behind it and what we’re going to focus on. Basically you can divide Shark.nu in two; the sport side and the IT side. We’re working heavily on the Shark-IT website which will show a whole new concept of IT management. I’m pretty proud of the idea and so are some other companies who already bought some licenses for the ‘new plan’. More on this later, for now it’s still top secret. hehe.

The sport side of Shark.nu is also looking good. I’m especially proud about the performances of my Team Sharkbait members. Seems that the hard winter training really worked out okay so we have started Phase 2 of the plan. This plan ends end of the summer… I probably tell something more about the plan in the future, but for now we keep the results and news of this new training style to ourselves.

Time to go. The sun is shining so the weather is good. These days give me so much energy, it’s just amazing!

Weather is getting better, finally! Last friday, at work, excellent weather, really a summer feeling. It reminds me how much I like the sun on my head. So definitly I’m not at the good place where we currently live, maybe a 1000 km down to the south will do the job…

The weatherstation promised good weather for saturday, but unfortunatly we didn’t see a single ray of sunlight. So I did some good working on the new shop system we will be using for our future Shark.nu shop.

We planned to go to a parrot park in the neighbourhood on Sunday, so hopefully weather would be good, and it was! So an excellent day strolling through the park watching the many colourfull parrots. Well, not all parrots are that colourfull… because the park is really a shelter for parrots. They’ve got a fact board hanging at the entry of the park to make everybody aware of some facts about parrots:

• Did you know that there are more parrots living in captivity than there are free?
• Did you know that as an average most parrots have had more than five owners in the course of their lives?
• Did you know that parrots can easily outlive their owners?
• Did you know that parrots know feelings of hate, love, jealousy , etc and apply as well?
• Did you know that parrots in fact need a natural partner?
• Did you know that people can become spontaneously allergic to parrots?
• Did you know that it is highly likely that for your parrot two more died as a result of for instance bad international transport?
• Did you know that parrots need at least eight hours of attention?

You can see the rest of the list here, and the complete website here. These guys are doing some very good work!

So what’s going to happen this week? A few goals… Finish the new shop system, have some good physical workouts, fix that damn headache at work, prepare my new nutritionplan, and some more stuff…

One of my favorite sportive superhero’s is Lance Armstrong. After the last tour de france he stopped with competitive cycling, but I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t take up any other sportive challenges. And it seems that I (we) are right.

On November 5th Lance is going to run the New York City marathon! As a former triathlete (before his proffesional cycling) he has some experience in running, but it will be good to see what he can do. He’s saying that he’s just doing it for fun, but I can’t imagine that a guy like Lance will try to get the best time possible and train like hell. You either have it or you don’t, and he has the will to go! So what could his time be? He probably wants to go below 2:30, but some others are claing that because of is high max VO2 of 83 millimeters per kilogram he is a possible sub 2:10 runner. Well, that’s left to be seen, but it will certainly be interesting to watch Lance run.

If you want to see him run, watch this video and see him win the national championship of 1989 in triathlon.

The neverending story about my workplace continues; Last week, during my sick week, they placed two airco’s at my office room. So yesterday I went there again for the first time and decided to move my stuff back and try it out. Temperature was of course much much better, but still the air was not okay. For social sakes I stayed at this place for the rest of the day. Today I’m back at the office with my head completly filled. The airco’s gave me a cold you won’t believe! So it was I noisy night for my family, with me snoring all over the place. Time to move again to a better workspot! I think I put my chair outside and take my laptop with me… Temperature is good!

As an extra note, Sanne worked his ass off to publish the new Team Sharkbait website of which I’m the head coach and manager. Take a look at www.shark-bait.com

In one weekend I made up for all the lost time of last week when I was sick. Very good and productive weekend, not only business wise, but also personal and family wise. Saterday I was still a little bit in recovery mode, but still managed to spend a lot of time with my son bicycling for almost 3 hours, the evening was nice with a ‘funny’ horror movie called hostel. Denise didn’t think it was a funny movie, hehe…

Sunday, easter day, in the morning with the whole family to the swimming pool, the afternoon eating with family-in-law, and the evening a very productive evening working on a new shop website for Shark.nu. I finally managed to focus again, and stayed up working untill 3:30 am. Productive night.

After a short but good sleep it was work time in and out of the house! Clean up the garage, clean up the garden, etc. It’s always nice to clean up and see the results afterwards, less stuff is less things to clean up in the future! My parents are very good at this kind of work, so with the help of them today we managed to do a lot! And they only planned to come buy to fix my son’s playhouse… This evening is again work time for the new Sharkbait website and the new shop… maybe something to show to everybody tomorrow…

As one of my main interests and that of my company Shark.nu is freediving we’ve made a special website for all freediving related stuff that Shark.nu organises, thinks of, hears about, etc. At the moment the website only has a weblog that will contains all the latest news and info that we think is relevant or interesting. In the future you can also find all kind of other stuff including our own info about freediving training with us. So me and my staff will be writing stuff over there, go and have a look! From now on you won’t find much freediving news on my own blog, but if something interesting will comes up on Shark Freediving, for sure I’ll post a note about it over here.

Finally feeling better. I was sick for a week and now finally I’m on the better hand. My stomach was turned around several times in the last week to get the sickness out. It’s unbelievable how non-productive you can be when you’re feeling miserable. Even thinking and some braincracking doesn’t work! So what have I done in the last week:

1. Sleeping, a lot!
2. Watching TV series and movies (I still have a collection of around 600 gigabytes to watch)
3. Sitting on the toilet, again a lot!
4. When I didn’t have a headache a little bit of reading in very light material, think comic books. It’s fun to read comics, I forgot a little about it. I still have a large collection of donald ducks but also the complete collection of Don Lawrence, the maker of storm and more.

And that’s about it… So I’m glad to of yesterday I’m feeling somewhat better so at least I could go outside again and DO SOMETHING. I still find it amazing that some people are throwing away their lives by going to work everyday, coming home to eat, watch a lot of sitcoms, and go to bed… Everybody their own choice, but not mine! Back to work!

It’s funny to see that when searching for software it always seems that what is written about it is always so much different then when you start actually using it. At first I started my weblog with the help of the famous Blogger, but as I worked with it I found out quickly enough that I missed a lot of things, the most important one having the ability to make categories. So what was first my second place winner in the list of best blogging software is now the one that I’m using. Wordpress seems very good for the needs I have. So we will see. It even managed to import directly my old blogger posts! I installed the software locally on one of the servers of our Shark IT department, so that I’m sure it will always be available.

When I was 18 years old, just before starting with serious weightlifting, my weight was 80 kilos. When I turned 19 it had gone up to 90 kilos. The year after that I added another 10 kilos and reached the 100 kilos. At my 21st birthday I touched the scale at 110 kilos. And again the year after that at 22 I reached 120 kilos. Somewhere halfway at 23 I reached my heaviest weight ever with 128 kilos. Normally you would think that would be one big pile of fat carrying with me all the time. But this weight was all the result of a very strict diet and powerlifting/bodybuilding scheme. Unfortunatly I was not below the magic 10% fat line but I was at an healty 15% so that meant that of the 128 kilos I ‘only’ carried around 19 kilos of fat, which gave me a fat free bodymass of 109 kilos which is a lot. But hey! I come from a big family. And before someone comments on this: No I was not using some kind of m&m’s or other strange pills! Just hard work, dedication, a lot of sweat, pain and puke!

So, here I am, 6 years later. Things have changed. Sportive time was more invested in organisational things and coaching then using it for myself. Research, writing, testing, producing costs a lot of energy. It has been interesting, but it’s time to use it on myself again. So what are the numbers? At the moment I weigh 125 kilos. Well great, you would say. Not so, because things have changed dramatically. It’s not the kilos that count it’s the fat free mass that counts. Fat percentage is around 25%, way too much for a guy like me. Max number for this should be at 15%. So what should be done?

First of all, at the moment I’m carrying around a big pile of fat with a weight of 31 kilos! Imaging that! 31 kilos! Not so difficult to motivate myself to get rid of a lot of those kilos! That means that my current fat free mass (FFM) is 94 kilo. Which is still great but I’ve lost 15 kilos of muscle mass! Which is quite a lot if you consider. Fortunate for me, that’s not a big deal, I’m not a bodybuilder. So if I want to go back to 15% I have to reduce the 31 kilos to 18 kilos. Which means that I will go to a more healthy and easy (94+18=) 112 kilos. Well that sounds pretty good. While dieting I will sure lose some more muscle mass, so I will put it to a round number: 110 kilos as a first goal. That sounds about right.

So how will I reach this? I will get in detail later but to be very short: cardiovasculair work, weightworkouts, stretching, diet (not in the normal sense of its word; athlete diet!)

It’s good to set goals!

Part of my 1200 day program to the ultimate goal is finding out what exactly is important for me. As I’ve done a lot of self exploration in the last year some things are pretty clear to me.
I know for a fact that:
- I love sports! Practicing that is, not watching! Think weights, water, freediving, cardio, athletics, cycling, running, etc, etc
- I love technology! This is very broad, but think of internet, software, gadgets, computer hardware, electronis in general.
- I’m very interested in humans in general, social stuff, physical stuff, everything that has to do with that.
- Family is the most important thing in the world! Especially my wife and two kids. I plan to have at least 1,5-2 hours each day during dinner time with them and one day in the weekend.
- Traveling is very important to me! I want to see the world, not only the land, but especially underwater!

So how can I combine all these things? Currently I’m earning my money as an IT specialist (microsoft, networking, solutions). I work 4 days a week for a good company to pay the bills, the rest of the days I work freelance (manage, design) for my own company. So one part of my company is looking into one of my interests: IT. The other part of my company is into sports; coaching people that is! So that is humans and sports together. Hmmm seems that I’m doing a pretty good job already ;-) The problem is that 80% of time I’m doing IT and only 20% of the time the other stuff. So I want this to change… And at the end of my 1200 day program I will be my own boss. But I think you already guessed that after reading my other post. So how am I going to do this? I got some pretty good ideas, I’ll write them down later.