Reddit reviews Bone Games: Extreme Sports, Shamanism, Zen, and the Search for Transcendence

1. I just answered that one below - but really, I do martial arts because I like to do martial arts. Sort of like sex - my motivation has changed over the years, but I've no intention of stopping. And don't particularly want to get into talking about motivations and why I do it.
   
2. IP (internal power) or IS (internal strength). Mobility, yes, because IS requires relaxation, moving with open joints, spiraling extension, etc. Fitness? No. I train otherwise to enhance fitness. I remember reading once that Cheng Man Ching, the famous taijiquan teacher, in his later years, decided to take up bowling, but quit because the ball was too heavy.
   
3. There is no book that I know of that attempts to address the character of these guys, in general - though people have written about one or another specifically. They are quite different guys - Sugino sensei was the only one I ever met. I found him to be a very nice man. He was a brilliant professional martial artist, but something was missing for me. I never felt scared - hard to explain, but imagine a loaded gun on a table. It won't go off by itself, but it has a potential of lethality. I never felt that with Sugino sensei. I never met Ueshiba - but he was different from the other people on your list and, I think, most other martial arts instructors. He set himself up as a guru - this was a deliberate act. Most people point out that his martial art practice, derived from Daito-ryu, was really not all that unique technically, and even the remarkable abilities (internal strength) were merely one variant that his contemporary/rivals such as Horikawa and Sagawa knew. However, one thing I believe may have been different is that Ueshiba may have also had the ability to tap into what I refer to in Hidden in Plain Sight, (HIPS) as 'berserker' strength, something we see in people in extreme life-threatening states (consider the book Bone Games). This is apart from 'internal strength,' rather, it is tapping into that primordial instinctive power that resides in us. I record an example of this in HIPS - one of my Araki-ryu students inadvertantly injected a full syringe of insulin directly into his circulatory system, and he described what happened within when he was instantly in insulin shock, potentially dying, and in total adrenaline dump, and what he did to survive. From what I read of Ueshiba, he had the ability to tap into that kind of power at will, something related to shamanistic practices, passed down within Shugendo. [NOTE, however, that one has to take this with a huge grain of salt. Ueshiba fictionalized his own abilities - dodging bullets, for example, and others did as well. And people unconsciously make myths - they can physically react based on their belief that they must react, for example, something I call 'aiki accomodation syndrome,' - or as a judoka would say, "putting kuzushi on yourself.']

On the other hand, Robert Schulteis writes in Bone Games that timing your runs with a stopwatch is like remembering lovers by carving notches on your bedpost.