Just Short

I am pretty darn proud of myself in overcoming my petty, little problem.

You see, my wife and I travel quite a bit, and I have had a few injuries, and that all plays havoc with the mandatory minimum attendance requirements. There is also a number of months a student has to remain in rank as well.

For me, the time was going to be up 3 days from today, on October 26^th. With nearly perfect attendance, the minimum of 100 appropriate classes can also be attained, and boom, new rank is qualified for.

My total, however, was not looking good.

I didn't notice how very bad it was until a few months ago, and I started taking steps to tighten things up. If I hadn't done so, I wouldn't be ready for promotion until February 1^st; over three months late.

I moved some travel dates around to be less disruptive, attended a Vancouver training seminar, and did a number of private lessons. This changed the very ugly February 1^st date up clear to December 5^th. I reclaimed almost two months.

There wasn't really anything else practical that I could have done.

I could have cancelled some travel plans altogether, or added travel to someplace that has more training that would have counted, such as the main LA school, or even to Vancouver.

To save the last month that I am short by doing something like that didn't make sense.

Take the nearby Vancouver school, for example. To attend, I would have had to miss sessions here at home. Perhaps I could have collected more that would have counted on my card, but would have had to give up equally valuable training here.

You see, I train far more than the 100 class requirement suggests. If everything counted, I would complete the total attendance requirement in no time, as I am on the mat, on average, for 9 sessions a week. Of these, only 3 “count.”

For example, the easiest out-of-town class to get to is on Saturday morning in North Vancouver. I would have to get up by 5am to catch the early ferry, hang around at some coffee shop until the class, attend for an hour, race for the ferry back, and get home around suppertime, all at a cost of well over $100. A hidden cost would be that I would miss about 2 hours of training at my home school. All this just to get to an hour of training that comes with a little check-mark on a card, instead of two hours of training that does not.

So I've done what I can so far. It also looks like soon, a few more private lessons might be possible. It looks like my current December 5^th date might sneak up a little more to around November 28^th; yet another week shaved off.

I do what I can, and won't let this happen again.