Facing Yourself: The Ultimate Test
Tom Muzila • Shotokan Karate of America (SKA)
Facing yourself: the ultimate test
Tom Muzila trained under Tsutomu Ohshima in Shotokan Karate of America (SKA), where he held the rank of yodan, 4th dan, at the time he was profiled. In the early 1980s, Jim Nail wrote about him for Black Belt magazine. This page summarizes that profile. The experiences and words are Muzila's, as reported by Nail; the summary is ours.
A ledge on Mt. Whitney
The profile opens with a mountain story. On a warm, clear day in November, Muzila set out to break the speed record for climbing Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States outside Alaska, wearing only jogging shoes and a sweatsuit. With a couple of thousand feet left, the sun went down, the melting snow froze, and he had to turn back.
On the way down he reached a stretch of ledge, about 12 feet long, that had turned to solid ice. His only way across was to jump for a sharp rock sticking out of the ice some seven feet away. If he missed, or the rock broke, he'd fall. He jumped and made it. Looking back, he told Nail:
"That was a moment when I really had to face myself, let go of all my mental blocks and insecurities, even the fear of death, and just act."
Limits we set ourselves
Muzila's main point is that most limits are self-imposed. Facing real danger, he says, strips away the distractions and the petty thoughts. If he had started thinking "what if the rock breaks," he wouldn't have made it. In his words, people "set their own limits."
Past the number 1,000
Like many karate organizations, SKA used the number 1,000: in special training you'd do 1,000 repetitions of each basic technique. Muzila felt people were getting too attached to that number, so he picked 10,000, a figure that felt like "forever." When that started to feel finite too, he moved to 50,000, and then to regular practice carried on straight through for 24 hours.
The point of these practices, the article stresses, was concentration, not endurance. Muzila warns that combat isn't like marathon running. "In the martial arts there is no time," he says; it can all be over in a split second. So doing thousands of techniques in a dreamy trance would miss the point. Every repetition has to be real.
What exhaustion teaches
He describes something many people who've done long practices will recognize. At first you put everything into each technique and waste a lot of power. As you get more tired, you have to force yourself through each repetition, and your movement becomes more economical. Throughout, the real opponent is the inner voice that makes excuses and tries to convince you to quit long before you're actually beaten.
Two swords
The profile frames all this with an old samurai saying that Muzila quotes:
"A samurai wears two swords. One to cut the enemy and, more importantly, one to cut himself."
It's a good summary of what he was after. The hardest opponent, in a dojo or on a mountain ledge, is yourself.
A note for readers: Muzila's mountain climbing and 24-hour practices were extreme, and he did them after years of training. They're not a recommendation to try something similar without proper preparation and supervision.
Sources
- Jim Nail, profile of Tom Muzila, Black Belt magazine, August 1983 issue. Quotations are Muzila's words as reported in the article.
