My name is Troy Gehrett.
I grew up in a small town in central Wisconsin called Marshfield. It was there that my love for the martial arts was born. My first experience with the martial arts was learning techniques from my older brother, Bryan, in the basement of my parents home when I was small. Bryan later became a student of a local Tae Kwon Do school that met at the town hall in the nearby village of Hewitt and at age eleven I followed in his footsteps. The name of the school was “Jo's Tae Kwon Do.” The principal instructor, Jo Bill, had on average 20 to 40 students. He was a short, stout man who loved his practice and it showed in his students enthusiasm. I trained with Mr. Bill for about four years and earned my black belt.
For reasons that were driven mainly by the impetuousness of youth, I decided to leave Jo's and return to training with my brother at age 14. He had left Jo's shortly before that to focus on studying Shotokan Karate. We trained outdoors and at the YMCA for a few years before I left Marshfield for college.
My academic studies eventually took me to Minneapolis, MN. When I first arrived I began looking for a place to train. I was initially interested in finding a good Shotokan school since it was most familiar to me. The most famous, and closest to campus, was run by a man named Robert Fusaro. Sensei Fusaro had been the headmaster of this school since the late '50s. He had received his training while stationed in Japan during the Korean war. I visited his school once and returned to participate in one of the advanced training classes. It was, as I understood at the time, classical Shotokan in every sense. I even had an opportunity to free spar with Sensei Fusaro's oldest son, who was the most senior student in the school. His school was impressive but sadly my college student pocket book wouldn't allow me to join.
My search for a school continued. I eventually stumbled across a flyer for a school advertising aikijujutsu, kenjutsu, and jojutsu. This was completely different from the training I had received up till then and peaked my interest. The school was operated by Shu Lee. Sensei Lee had trained in a martial arts system called Kaze Arashi Ryu. I visited the school in the summer of 1997 to observe a class and was instantly amazed. I felt that I had found something that was worth my effort to learn and as a result trained with his school for the next nine years. During that time I received the equivalent of a first or second degree black belt in the arts of Aikijujutsu, Atemi Jutsu, and Kenjutsu.
The time I spent training with Shu was, in many ways, life altering. In addition to learning martial arts I developed a strong interest in eastern spirituality and, most importantly, met my future wife. While under his wing I had the opportunity to learn from many of the most senior practitioners of the art as well as it's founder.
Having learned all I felt I was going to from Sensei Lee, I decided to move on to pursue new training opportunities. My first experience was learning from a former top student of the Kaze Arashi Ryu organization named Mark Raugas. Mark had decided to leave Kaze Arashi Ryu for various reasons but in his time with the group had become quite skilled in both the empty hand and weapons techniques. He offered to show me and David Dettloff, another former student of Sensei Lee, the remainder of the empty hand curriculum. It was about this time in my life that the Microdojo was born. Mark made good on his promise and continued training David and I until we'd seen the empty hand techniques in their entirety.
During our training with Mark, he introduced David and I to the Chinese internal martial art of Ba Gua, which he felt had improved his understanding of technique in general. This led naturally to interest in other Chinese internal arts such as Hsing Yi and Tai Chi. Mark located an instructor in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area who had trained with a famous Chinese internal martial arts practitioner named Su-Dong Chen. The instructor's name was Stuart Finkelson.
Stu has an impressive background in martial arts. He'd trained in many different forms of martial arts and had been a wrestler through his college years. When David and I met him he had been training with Master Su for about ten years. Master Su called his teachings collectively the “Essence of Evolution.” They are basically his interpretation of the classical Hsing Yi, Ba Gua, and Tai Chi he'd learned as a youth in Taiwan and emphasizes specific movement from those traditions.
I am currently working to further my understanding of the aikido/aikijujutsu I learned from Kaze Arashi Ryu as well as training in Essence of Evolution under Stu's guidance. My dearest friend and trusted training partner through my endeavors continues to be David Dettloff.
