American Ninja Warrior Kansas City Finals
NBC — Monday, July 20 at 7 p.m.
Brains, meet brawn. Last semester, University of Iowa Nonfiction M.F.A. candidate Spenser Mestel skipped the customary post-workshop bar crawl for the gym, for an immersion journalism project that would make the New Journalists proud.
Mestel (who, by way of a disclosure, is both my former classmate and next-door neighbor) tried out in April for the seventh season of one of the most popular sports entertainment game shows on network television. A spin-off of the Japanese television series Sasuke, competitors on American Ninja Warrior race to complete a series of challenging (and zany) obstacle courses.
When the Kansas City Qualifiers aired on June 1, friends and neighbors gathered at George’s Buffet to watch. Unfortunately, the network didn’t air his “run” — the mad-dash effort to jump, climb, crawl, hang, run and swing to the finish — but when the names and complete times of successful contestants flashed on screen, the Market Street watering hole erupted into cheers. Spenser completed the course with a time of 2:09:46, qualifying him for the Kansas City Finals, airing tonight on NBC.
So you were on American Ninja Warrior! How the heck did that happen?
My brother and parents are big fans of the show, so it had been on my radar. I remember seeing a video on Facebook and thinking what everybody thinks when they see the show: I can do that. I’d been working out pretty intensely, so the only problem was that you have to submit a video application. I had broken my neck doing parkour in Egypt a couple years back, so I thought I had a pretty compelling story, but I knew I’d still have to ham it up a bit. It was definitely as corny and embarrassing as I thought it would be, but it worked. I submitted at the end of December but had to wait three months before I found out. I remember walking down the street in March and talking to my dad on the phone. I got a call from an unknown LA number, freaked out, and told my dad I’d call him back. For the first three minutes, I thought it was a prank that my friends were playing. The woman assured me it wasn’t (over and over) and gave me the preliminary details. I hung up and called my mom, dad, brother, aunt and uncle, even my thesis advisor from college.
What made you want to compete?
I was pretty scarred from my parkour accident in Egypt. I had been at a playground outside the city. I saw my friend front-flip off a ledge about ten feet up — not a difficult move by any means — and I copied it. Instead of piking (keeping my legs straight), I bent them, which makes the flip harder to control. Front flips are also tough because they’re blind landings, meaning you only see the ground at the very end once you’ve completed the rotation. I never saw the ground, though. I had over-rotated so far that I hit my forehead on the ground. My whole body tingled for a quarter second, and I sat up. It felt like a piano was sitting on my head, but I could still move my fingers and toes, so I figured it wasn’t too bad. The only good decision I made that day was to stop training and go home. It took about five doctors to correctly diagnose me, but once I got to the top of the Egyptian health care system, the care was amazing, much better, in fact, than when I came back to the states. Anyway, I spent 75 days in a neck brace and never really got over the fear and embarrassment from the accident. I thought that competing on ANW would be the best way to get over it.
You’re a grad student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. How did you balance training and school?
Since it was such a short span of time, and since it might be my only chance to ever run the course, I gave myself permission to train as much as possible. I can’t say I was at my most productive during the four weeks of training, but grad student life is actually perfect for an aspiring ninja. Since I was only in class for twelve or fifteen hours a week, I could go to the gym whenever I was free. I also cheated a little and used my grip-strengthener during workshop. The real problem was that I was obsessed with the course. I ended up writing about ANW mostly by default — it was the only thing I was thinking about. I went to Chicago two weekends in a row to workout at a ninja gym there, and I was spending two or three hours at the gym per day. By the end, I was totally burnt out. Just physically exhausted, aching, and sore, which I think means I did it exactly right.
American Ninja Warrior’s Kansas City Finals episode airs tonight on NBC at 7 p.m. CST. You can read Spenser’s account of the Kansas City regionals online at RollingStone.
