Mike Miles Muay Thai, Manchester
at the age of 58, few of us are lucky enough to find daily joy in something we fell in love with at the age of eight. Mike Miles is one of those people. The most decorated Muay Thai teacher in Canada and a four-time professional world champion, Miles is Calgary’s godfather of the sport: over the course of his 40-year teaching career, he has trained 40 world champions and, he figures, 99 per cent of the city’s Muay Thai trainers.
Remarkably, Arjan Miles (the earned honorific is Thai for “teacher”) has a pair of ill-fitting skates to thank for his contribution to the sport in Calgary. “We were really poor when I was a kid,” Miles says. “I was playing hockey, but my parents couldn’t afford proper equipment, so it was all hand-medowns and nothing fit well.” He recalls going out onto the ice one particularly frigid Alberta night in a pair of “crummy, too-tight skates” and freezing his feet so badly that he never wanted to play again. “In any case, I just wasn’t confident and I wasn’t very good at sports,” he adds. Weary, however, of getting picked on at school for his perceived shortcomings, Miles knew he “had to do something.”
At eight years old, he thus stumbled into karate, loved it, and then got into taekwondo. Miles helped pay for his training by getting a paper route and working alongside his mother cleaning offices. Little more than a decade later, he became one of the first westerners to be trained in Muay Thai in Thailand. He quickly achieved a position among the top-10 ranked competitors in the world. In addition to his Muay Thai skills, he also earned black belts in karate, taekwondo and kick-boxing.
In 1977, Miles opened his Calgary gym and has watched the sport grow in popularity, particularly over the past two decades as interest in MMA took off. “Most of those guys come from a Muay Thai background,” Miles says. “It makes for the best stand-up skills.” (Boxing and most martial arts fall under the umbrella of “stand-up fighting”; Muay Thai is characterized by the combined use of fists, elbows, knees and shins.)
Still, in Muay Thai, the cultivation of good fighting skills is, if not secondary, then equal to the cultivation of good character. “There’s a lot of interest in martial arts now, but lately I’ve noticed the character-building aspect has been pushed off to the side,” Miles says. “At my gym, character is very important. Raising good people, rather than bozos or bullies, is what I want to do.” At the heart of Muay Thai training, he says, is “building confidence, resilience, concentration and empathy. I want to teach people to contribute to society.”
With that in mind, Miles plans to celebrate his 50th anniversary as a martial artist and his 40th anniversary as an instructor by giving back “to the kids.” He’s currently working on getting a few of his illustrious alumni together for a fight-night fundraiser for a to-be-determined local charity that helps children turn their lives around. Stay tuned.