Tim Garrean in later years.

When I first studied the internal arts of Chinese gongfu in Omaha in the late 1980s and early '90s, there was a fellow student named Tim Garrean. He was around my age and lived in Council Bluffs. He wore a headband when he worked out. We were both training under Sifu Phillip Starr.

Tim and I began learning Iron Palm around the same time. He studied Iron Palm a lot more seriously than I did. I was more interested in the arts of Xingyi, Taiji, Bagua and Qigong that we were learning.

In Iron Palm training, you do repeated strikes on bags filled with hard beans or corn or buckshot (shotgun ammunition made of iron pellets). You strike with the palms, the sides of your hands, and the backs of your hands.You also do other training such as fingertip push-ups, and you work on driving your fingertips into buckets of hard corn, gravel, or pebbles. The idea was to develop strength in your fingers and palms and toughen up your fingers, hands and knuckles so your strikes would have more power. You would have an "iron palm."

There was an industrial-sized bucket of corn in the basement of the school -- hard kernels of corn filled the bucket. Our goal was to do spearhand strikes downward into the corn to see how far we could go.

I never got very deep. I could stand over the bucket and drive a spearhand into the corn, and at first I would bury only half my fingers into the corn - maybe up to the knuckle in the middle of the fingers. I was surprised at how difficult it was, but I wasn't alone. Not many students could do any better.

If you have ever tried to drive a spearhand into a big bucket of corn, you know how hard it is. 

After a few months of not-very-diligent Iron Palm training, I could maybe bury my spearhand up to the palm -- maybe halfway into the palm. It seemed as if touching the bottom of the bucket was just an impossible dream.

One day, I went to the basement of the school, where various training devices were located, including the buckets and the iron palm striking bags full of beans and buckshot. Tim was there.

"Hey, Tim," I said. "You've been training Iron Palm for about a year. How deep can you go into the corn?"

He walked over to the big bucket of corn, formed his hand into a spearhand, leaned over the bucket and WHOOMP!!

Tim Garrean drove his hand to the bottom of the bucket! I could bury my hand halfway up the palm, but he buried his arm almost up to the elbow.

"Holy crap!" I shouted.

He pulled his arm out and dusted it off. I was gobsmacked. In fact, it was a little scary.

"Oh, my God! What could that spearhand do to someone's body?" I asked. Tim just shrugged and smiled.

I lost track of Tim after I left the school and began studying Chen style Taiji. Last night, I was remembering this incident, and I thought I should track Tim down and talk with him about it. Then I learned he has been gone for 11 years. 

He passed away in 2013, leaving behind family and friends who described his sense of humor and kindness. I remember him for a different reason -- as the man who performed the most amazing thing I have seen in martial arts.

A lot of amazing martial feats are a bit suspicious, especially feats involving Qi, but there's no way to fake driving your spearhand to the bottom of a freaking industrial-sized bucket of corn. Just imagining what that kind of power could do in a moment of self-defense is not something I even want to think about for very long. But it shows what happens when you work hard at a skill. And I guess that's why it's called kung-fu, which is "a skill achieved through hard work and practice."

It isn't magic. It isn't mystical. But if you work hard, you can do some amazing things, like Tim Garrean did.

--by Ken Gullette