{"id":182,"date":"2009-02-25T03:14:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-25T03:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=182"},"modified":"2009-02-25T03:14:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T03:14:00","slug":"the-danger-of-slippage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/25\/the-danger-of-slippage\/","title":{"rendered":"The Danger of Slippage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/2009\/02\/new-years-resolutions-2009-february.html\">a recent blog post<\/a> I mentioned that if you miss a day of a workout, it&#8217;s really easy to miss the next day.  I thought it was true when I wrote it, but a week or so later I started adding the days up and realized it was far more true than I anticipated.<\/p>\n<p>Aikido has classes Monday through Saturday, sometimes twice a day.  My last Aikido workout was Friday the 6th, and I elected not to go to the Saturday morning workout.  In my defense I haven&#8217;t gone to any of the Saturday morning workouts as I&#8217;m still a beginner, but after that decision not to attend Aikido, I found that I <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">couldn&#8217;t<\/span> attend Aikido on any of the following days because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Monday the 9th was my 4oth birthday party, one day early because of&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Tuesday the 10th was my standing commitment to my writer&#8217;s group (I am one of the two leaders while the primary facilitator is on maternity leave).<\/li>\n<li>Wednesday the 11th my wife and I took a trip to San Francisco for our yearly Valentine&#8217;s Day trip, dining at the Stinking Rose and dancing at Bondage-a-Go-Go.<\/li>\n<li>Thursday the 12th the trip continued, with a day at Muir Woods and dinner at Teatro Zinzani.<\/li>\n<li>Friday the 13th: no class for the Aikido Winter Camp, which I was not signed up for because I just joined the dojo.<\/li>\n<li>Saturday the 14th: no class for Aikido Winter Camp.<\/li>\n<li>Monday the 16th: no class for President&#8217;s Day.<\/li>\n<li>Tuesday the 17th: standing committment to writer&#8217;s group.<\/li>\n<li>Wednesday the 18th: out sick with a cold.<\/li>\n<li>Thursday the 19th: recovering from being sick.<\/li>\n<li>Friday the 20th: first day that I could have attended, but I forgot my uniform and ended taking the opportunity to surprise my wife with a romantic dinner before she left town.<\/li>\n<li>Saturday the 21st: prior committment to hang out with my wife on the last day before her 1-month business trip.<\/li>\n<li>Monday the 23rd: second day I could have attended, but my car ended up being in the shop for longer than I expected &#8230; *and* I forgot my uniform again.<\/li>\n<li>Tuesday the 24th: standing committment to writer&#8217;s group.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So after that one decision to skip class, there were <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">fourteen straight sessions<\/span> that I skipped because of lame excuses, valid excuses, or outright cancellations.   So I&#8217;m going to put this down as the Centaur&#8217;s Fourth Law: <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">If you choose to miss a commitment, you&#8217;re much less likely to catch the next one.<\/span>(1)<\/p>\n<p>To combat this, I&#8217;ve developed an attitude that works: put the workout or the exercise or the development activity on a regular schedule and treat it like a true commitment that can&#8217;t be missed.  That&#8217;s the only thing that worked for me for karate in Atlanta or for the writer&#8217;s group out here.  Treating a development activity as an unbreakable commitment sometimes can get you in trouble &#8211; I missed one of my wife&#8217;s art gallery openings for a karate class before I learned when it was safe for me to relax the rule, and I still regret that to this day &#8211; but for me, if I don&#8217;t, I&#8217;ll end up a victim of the Centaur&#8217;s Fourth Law.<\/p>\n<p>So now again: let&#8217;s renew the commitment and get back on the horse.  And as for Wednesday the 25th? Let&#8217;s just say my gym bag, with uniform in it, is placed so it blocks the front door.<\/p>\n<p>-the Centaur<br \/>(1) It&#8217;s the fourth law because I&#8217;m sure I can come up with at least three laws more important than that, like <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">You&#8217;re almost certainly wrong about something you&#8217;re almost certain you&#8217;re right about<\/span> or maybe <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">The more successful you are at staying &#8216;on message&#8217;, the more successful you&#8217;ll be at alienating your audience<\/span>.  But I don&#8217;t have a labeled list or anything at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent blog post I mentioned that if you miss a day of a workout, it&#8217;s really easy to miss the next day. I thought it was true when&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,5],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-taidoka","tag-we-call-it-living","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}