I'm not entirely convinced that everything folks think is low road is actually low road. And unless/untill we can plant sensors in various parts of our brains, we're not going to be able to know for sure.
I have a personal experience that sort of epitomizes low vs. high road.
My first martial arts instructor was a Japanese who studied under and knew many greats, including briefly with Gogen Yamaguchi. He was samurai class by birth, and his father apparently was a significant martial artist in his day. This man was 33 years old when I met and studied with him back in the very early 1970s. And he had a way of doing and teaching (at W&M) that folks really don't get away with much any more.
For the life of me, I can't tell you how much of what he did was brilliant, and how much of what I did in response to perhaps sadistic training was brilliant. Who knows? All I can say is that my severe and sometimes dangerous and volatile training days with him created permanent memories and lessons in my brain.
Hiroshi Hamada Sensei had a few interesting habits. One is that he liked to abuse his promising students. For whatever reason, I happened to be the target of some of that abuse over the years. If you wilted under the abuse, he eventually would ignore you - the kiss of death with him. If you survived it, you got more. But you did get better very quickly.
And then there were those camps. Those damn, insane camps. These were 3-day weekend affairs where you were put through hell in workout after workout in severe conditions.
On a typical camp workout, we would run out to the beach near Kitty Hawk, NC at midnight and do hundreds of blocks and punches around a bonfire. At first it was kind of cool. Then he'd start to get a little insane. He'd pull long, burning boards out of the fire, and start whacking down on the upper blocks of one of his ... er ... "favorite" students. In my first such camp, I happened to be one of those favorites.
At first I didn't worry so much about the flaming stick coming down on my head. No big deal, right? You're really not going to get burned much with the thing bouncing off your forearms. But then I detected him getting a bit ... sadistic with me. He was counting, and everyone was doing high blocks to his count. At first it's no big deal. But then ... that bastard started coming down with the flaming stick towards my head
in-between counts. It appeared he was trying to hit my head with it.
The wierdest thing happened. I was young and hadn't even taken physiology yet. All I know was that - no matter how much I tried to stay on timing - my arm would NOT let that burning stick hit my head. He was messing with my conscious mind and my sense of rhythm. And something inside said NO and a motion came up that sort of kind of looked like an upper block.
Much later on I realized he was triggering a flinch response in me. This was a low road response at its purest. I don't know if he knew what he was doing, or knew that he was opening my eyes to something. All I know was that the right thing happened - no matter how much I tried to stay on timing and possibly end up getting hit.
God bless that amygdala!
Yes, he yelled and yelled at me to keep timing. And my arm kept flying up in perfect timing to the stick rather than pefect timing to his count.
Sensei Hamada was known to beat the *^%$ out of you for not doing what he wanted you to do. He did not - that day.
Maybe he was insane and sadistic. Maybe he was brilliant. I'll never know...
But back to the subject at hand... What I did sort of kind of looked like an upper block (classic jodan uke). It was flinch and it was primal. But it was really close to looking like the pure motion we were doing in kata and in drills.
How about that!
You could say that my high road training worked. Or you could say I flinched, and my flinch was affected somewhat by my high road training. Or you could say that my high road training was a lot like my flinch, and so the differences mattered little. Everything converged beautifully.
I'm sort of a fan of the latter school of thought.
At the same camp, 24 hours later, we are at the top of a very steep dune doing maybe about a thousand punches. By then we are hoarse, and our biceps are sore from the constant twanging from punching air. You'd get tired. Your punches would slow a bit. And the next thing you knew... That bastard would sneak up behind you and push you so hard that you went flying down the steep dune - head first.
It was humiliating, and a lesson I guess. But then again... The arms would fly forward, and I would end up doing nearly a perfect forward fall - even with head coming downhill before butt. It wasn't a pure flinch, because a pure, naked flinch would mean my hands would go straight out and I'd hurt my wrist. It was sort of kind of a flinch, but it was refined in a way that I did nearly a perfect forward fall. Each of us would crawl back up to the top of the dune, and continue to punch again in earnest.
But I still remember those sneak attacks from behind, and how my body responded. We were tired and sore and disoriented and weak. But the amygdala somehow played a role, and I somehow ended up OK.
Did he know what he was doing, or did I survive in spite of his brutatlity? Who knows?? But I sure as hell learned something.
And then there were those 20-minute punching sessions while kneeling in the waves of 30-some-odd degree ocean. Don't get me started...
- Bill
