[hoopsguy]

Usually I do my monthly status post on the 1st of the month, but I'll be on the road and won't have the same scale so I'll just do it a day early.

164.5, which is down 3.3 pounds from last month. And off by 0.1 pounds from where I was on December 1st, so I more or less erased the sins of Christmas season.

Challenges this month - we host a holiday party on the first weekend after New Years. In addition to a lot of bad eating and drinking there, I always have leftover booze in the house. As a result, I had 33 beers this month - about double what I normally drink. But wine consumption was way down (9 glasses) to more or less even out alcohol intake compared to my historical patterns. More importantly over the last 10 days of the month I only had alcohol for "events" instead of mixing in 1-3 drinks multiple times per week. This is a goal for 2012, to substantially reduce my alcohol intake as part of an improved diet/fitness regimen and as a way of saving a few bucks as well.

January includes the aforementioned party, my wife's birthday, and my company holiday party. 3 events in a month is a fairly heavy rotation, and that doesn't even factor in stuff like weekend visits to the in-laws. I expect fewer in February which should help with having my meals a little more normalized and having a bit less variance in daily weigh-ins.

But my running was the biggest change this month. I ran 26 miles this month, almost exclusively inside. I'm planning to run a couple of 5K's this year and I'm running one/week while trying to reduce my time by 15 seconds each time out. I started at 9 minute mile pace at the start of the year and successfully did 8:15/mile pace yesterday. I'm not sure how many more times I'll be able to drop 15 seconds/mile before hitting a wall, but I would certainly like to get to 7 minutes/mile by April 1st. I'm also participating in a company Dodgeball team, which gives me one other outlet to break a sweat.

Caffeine - I've got 11 Cokes recorded for this month and expect a couple went unrecorded. I can and will do better on this in February.

One month left on what was my original diet plan. Down 23 pounds so far, and anything more at this point is gravy. But the main focus from here is building and sustaining good habits going forward. I think I've put together a pretty liveable diet in the past year and the exercise is progressing in the right direction. Hopefully I continue to have positive stuff to report here in the coming months.