Okay, let’s break it down by the numbers:

• Starting weight: 225 pounds
• Current weight: 225 pounds
• Number of brunches consumed yesterday: two
• Time spent looking at fecking hipster in introductory video for nike+, reading FAQs and reviews: 45 minutes
• Workouts last week: Four (including inaugural “why bother?” session on treadmill: “Fitness test, level five, twenty minutes: ‘Can you handle a short stroll to the cafeteria and back?‘”)

Yesterday was Kate’s birthday (hurrah!), so a night spent at the Hotel DuPont, plus a noble Kate-and-John Extended Date tradition of having one early brunch and one late brunch (I mean, really breakfast and lunch, but on Sundays it’s all one long Vale of Brunch from six AM to two PM), plus a birthday dinner where I cooked for the family means that I ended yesterday happy, contented, and stuffed like Templeton the rat, offsetting any ass-narrowing progress I may have made last week with all the yuppie lunches sourced from Ashby’s.

Not that I’m complaining. I managed two early-morning workouts last week. Well, let’s say I managed two early-morning trips to the gym last week; calling what I was doing “working out” is a little enthusiastic. I made up for it with two thirty-minute runs on the weekend with the maharani in her jog stroller (“run faster, daddy! Faster!” — I am not kidding.)

So being a card-carrying member of The Order of Men Who Expect to Lose Seven Pounds a Week if the Just Reduce the Amount of Gravy on Their Chicken-Fried Steak By Half, it’s a little discouraging to not at least see one pound drop. But that’s silly, of course, and I’m telling you about it so I can stick to my guns this week and post some improvement. I’ve got work to do if I’m gonna hit 185 by April, which leaves me six months for actual, by-god marathon training at that point!

PS. to Will Ronco: Thanks very much for the advice that if I ran from home, instead of the gym, I could run for a whole hour. I appreciate the advice, Will, but it occurs to me that you may have forgotten what it was like to be a Human Man, back before you had to make sure to change directions halfway through your workout so you do not alter the rotation of the earth. I’ll get there 🙂