My approach is all backwards, but my standard M.O. is to party all ‘cross season and then suddenly dig my heels in and bring the whole overindulgence thing to a screeching halt.

I tend to be all-in or all-out.  It’s one or the other.  People say, “Just have one beer.” and I think to myself, “Who has just one beer?”  Unless the one beer is a 22oz bottle of Stone Imperial Russian Stout (at 10.8%) then I don’t want to talk about one beer.

I’m told I need to work on this.

In the meantime, I’ve turned the corner for the year.  On Monday I flipped the party switch to “off”.  I did the same thing last year and enjoyed the result.  A sober and clarifying holiday season.  A glut of energy heading into the new year.  Renewal.  All that new-agey mumbo-jumbo.

It’s been surprisingly easy so far.  The threat of team training camp in February in Arizona (more on that later) is definitely a motivator.  So far, there are no other women going which means I’ve got ten weeks to figure out how to keep up with the menfolk.

This is going to work, right?

Right.

For anyone out there bored enough to care how I’m going about this, here’s the breakdown.

• Roughly following Precision Nutrition eating guidelines (and using lots of their recipes)
• Alcohol-free until February with the exception of a 3 pre-selected days.
• Daily calorie tracking on The Daily Plate.  (Note: I have previously used both Sparkpeople and FitDay – The Daily Plate has improved tenfold over the past year and is definitely my favorite at this point.)

The goals have been committed to writing and the first milestone is training camp: February 2nd.  I’ll go back to Boot Camp from Dec 1-19 to kick start my discipline and resistance training and then I’ll do whatever my cycling workout schedule tells me to after that.

Fall is for getting drunk. Winter is for getting serious.

Or something like that.

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