Season “Investing time in myself” · Episode 5
Health buys time
Think · 1 November 2026
10 to 15 hours of sport a week. That's around 500 hours a year. When I tell people, I almost always hear the same sentence: "That's so much time."
I do the math the other way round. What do those 500 hours buy me? Ten years, according to the big studies: a Harvard analysis of more than 100,000 people found that five simple habits (not smoking, a normal weight, daily exercise, little alcohol, a good diet) add about 12 years of life expectancy at 50 for men and 14 for women (Li et al., Circulation 2018). Twenty is my bet. That's no guarantee at all. As a margin it's still pretty good: 500 hours a year against ten or twenty years.
In the first season, "250K a year is enough", I buy hours with money. Here I buy them with training. And it's not the years themselves I care about. More time means more decisions: more fun, more experiences, more of my own say.
If you don't plan your life for 70 years but for 90 or 100, what counts most is how many of them are active years, years where you can really do things. I don't have to do everything at 70. But I don't want to have to train for a year just to ride a bike again. I want to keep the option.
I have one condition: sport has to give me something now and later. If it's fun and buys time at the same time, that's the perfect world for me.
Nobody teaches you that. By teach I mean: program it into a kid's head so that it sticks. Sport isn't only competition. What you often hear as a kid is the opposite: it's about winning. Hardly anyone tells you that sport gives you something right away and buys you years at the same time.
That's why I invest so much in health. 500 hours a year is a lot. Ten years is more.