Little Things Become Big Things - Quickly

Daughter is working hard to devise new ways to torture me maximize my fitness potential.  Every month, she provides me with a new set of workouts for the month.  She's helping me build my strength, my balance and my short and long twitch muscles.  This month, the upper body workouts have really been great- tough but doable.  The lower body?  Well, one set of exercises requires me to step up on a bench and lift the other leg. As I have mentioned before, I have pathetic balance.  In order to follow the exercise exactly, I was unable to have any weights in my hands (the better to balance myself on the wall when I was up there on the bench on one foot).  It made the lower body workout as a whole not as tough as it could have been.  I didn't say anything to daughter because it really didn't seem like that big a deal and I didn't want to be a pest.  Besides, it was only a month of workouts.  How much effect could it have? This weekend, I noticed my running stamina and strength was not as good as it had been. My per-minute mile time was a bit slower.  I mentioned it to Daughter, along with my perceived deficits with the lower body workout.  Daughter was not pleased.  First, she wanted to know why I waited so long to tell her, because second, there was an easy fix, involving letting my other foot touch the bench until I gained my balance.  She wanted to know if I was just going to not say anything and hoped it passed (busted!).  This morning, I took her advice, fixed the workout, and sweated my lower body off.  I bet my running time recovers as well - eventually.

As I sat there drenched in sweat, I thought about (you guessed it), the Trenches.  I can't tell you how many times I find out about "little things" that have gone on between my client and their spouse/other parent.  Usually, I find out after the "little things" have become big things.  Of course, when I have to help the client deal with the now "big" thing, they tell me about the little thing that started the ball rolling in the first place.  They tell me how they didn't want to bother me with such a little thing.  They say it didn't seem like anything much at the beginning.  They figured it would pass, it would go away. Then, when the little thing became a bigger thing, they were embarrassed to call and tell me that they hadn't told me about the little thing.  Well, now it's a really big thing.  They can't avoid telling me.  Now, not only must I fix the little thing that started everything, I have to repair the damage that resulted from ignoring it.  So much more work.  So much more money spent.  All because the client didn't want to bother me about the "little thing" that would have taken less than five minutes to fix at the beginning.  Here in the Trenches.