About Me
Hi there, happy to welcome you here! My name is Jaap and I am a triathlete.
My triathlon journey started in 2018, with no background in endurance sports. In July of that year I raced an olympic distance triathlon and in October I ran my first marathon. Marathon training commenced at the beginning of that same year, never having done any serious running training. It was only in May that I thought it would be a good idea to register for an olympic distance triathlon. I didn’t even have a road bike, didn’t really know how to swim properly. Had about six weeks to prepare. “How hard can it be?”. I threw myself head-first into triathlon, fell in love with it and that’s how the story began. For a more thorough story about my triathlon journey so far, see My Triathlon Journey so Far.
The Ability to Inspire
When I started out racing triathlons, I did it solely to challenge myself. See how far I can go. Olympic distance done. Cool. Let’s try a full distance triathlon (“Ironman”). That’s fun! Let’s see how fast I can get and try to qualify for the World Championships in Kona. Next – and current – challenge: see how I fare against the best in the world. How well can I perform on a World Championship stage? Can I beat the best?
But that’s not the whole story anymore. When you climb the ranks and you get faster, and people around you see how dedicated you are, something happens: You get the power to inspire, and that really is wonderful. At first, it’s your direct friends and family who get affected. In many cases, honestly, after they’ve first been telling me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. I can’t blame them; I wasn’t living too healthily and turned around fairly sudden. But people start to notice your dedication, buy into your journey and get inspired. Slowly, this circle of influence expands. As the results improve over time, so does your circle of influence and the number of people you can inspire. After direct friends and family come friends further away, old study mates, colleagues, members of your triathlon club and these days I even get messages from complete strangers with messages of support or questions about my journey so far. I’m not inspiring thousands of people every day, but I love it every single time I feel like I can make a small positive impact on someone’s life, someone’s journey, someone’s story. To be able to do so through triathlon, the sport I’ve come to love so much, is wonderful.
Future journey
It should be no surprise that my future goals are twofold. I want to continue to inspire more people, by continuing to challenge my own limits and sharing my experiences. How far can I go? How fast can I get? This year (September 2023) I’ll be competing in the Ironman World Championships in Nice. Next year, I hope to qualify for the World Championships in Kona (October 2024) and challenge myself against the best in the world on the big island of Hawaii. I feel like there’s still so much room for improvement as an athlete; I love the journey of seeing how fast I can get, of whether I’ll be able to compete with the best in the world.
Project 8:15
To provide a handle to track my progress to myself and the outside world, I launched Project 8:15. To compete with the best age-group triathletes out there, I need to be on their level. I’m not there yet, but there’s a dot on the horizon. If I can go sub 8 hours and 15 minutes on a fast (but fair) course, I know I’m amongst them. So my dot on the horizon is just that; how can I go sub 8 hours and 15 minutes on a full distance? See my Project 8:15 page for more info.