Bruce Lee’s limits
Stirling Silliphant (an American student of Lee’s) related an inspiring story that perfectly embodies Lee’s attitude toward progressive resistance in cardiocascular training, as well as his refusal to let a person -in this case, Silliphant- underestimated his own physical limitations.
“Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.”
So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” —and we’re still running – “if I run any more, I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles.
Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”
— From The Art of Expressing the Human Body By Bruce Lee, John Little
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The late Stirling Silliphant was one of the greatest screenwriters of his era. He wrote the landmark Oscar winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night. He also wrote Eastwoods The Enforcer, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and had a very bad day writing the godawful The Swarm. On TV, he wrote for the cult classics Route 66 (The pilot episode is one of the best one hour TV scripts ever) and Naked City among others. He also wrote the classic first Longstreet episode with Bruce Lee. He was also the writer who was working on the Silent Flute with Bruce.