Now that the opening round at American Ninja Warrior has been aired I’m finally free to disclose how I did here on my blog. It’s been a hard few months keeping my mouth shut! Unfortunately they didn’t show my run on the show, so a number of friends and family who dedicated 3 hours last Wednesday night watching American Ninja Warrior are now more than curious to know and see how I did (they said they loved watching the show though, even if I wasn’t featured, and I think ANW has a gaggle of new fans). I won’t overanalyze how I did here before you watch the video itself, maybe I’ll save the obstacle-by-obstacle analysis for a subsequent post if people are interested, but I will preface it with a few background characteristics.

First, the opening round covered two days…both Saturday and Sunday over that great weekend at Venice Beach. My run slot was around noon on Sunday, so I had the advantage of watching other competitors do their runs on Saturday and build my tactical plan. That was great. What was not so great was the second dynamic at play, since I had all day on Saturday and a ton of adrenaline to process, I did something very stupid. I went to the “fan mini-course” that had small replicas of several obstacles just to goof around with some of my friends. Long story short…I long-jumped over a pit and the pad was misaligned on the far landing platform, and I rolled my ankle over giving myself one of the worst ankle sprains of my life. I spent the rest of the day cursing my stupidity. I went to bed that night and woke up the following morning believing that I would probably pull out since I could barely walk. I was beating myself up pretty badly for what I had done, and the likelihood that I had just ruined a dream of competing in Ninja Warrior.

The third and final dynamic…adrenaline and ibuprofen! I took a fistful of the latter, and about an hour before I was about to run I started to get bucketfuls of the former. The two combined to numb out my ankle and while I was waiting in the holding pen behind the starting platform I finally believed that I was going to be able to run after all. I’ll admit, I was more than a little nervous for the first obstacle the Quadruple Step that had actually felled quite a number of pretty strong competitors. The steps on the platform were all angled at about 45 degrees and pretty far apart, and I had witnessed more than one competitor jack up their ankles on it. I was afraid my ankle would buckle the first big landing on it on one of those angled steps, and I’d scream like a stuck pig and flail into the water. But I decided I had to attack the obstacle at full bore, not even thinking about my ankle, and just see how it turned out. In the end I feel very fortunate that I was able to get on the course and compete at all given my ankle situation, so while I was disappointed not to achieve my goal of advancing to the semifinals I felt some degree of satisfaction derived from just getting out on that course and letting it rip the best I could. In the end the adrenaline and ibuprofen did their trick, and I didn’t feel my ankle at all during the run, although it was pretty cranky afterwards!

I hope you enjoy the video, stitched together from two videos captured from slightly different angles, and let me know what you think! I’m hoping people start using the fancy new Comments system I just integrated on my blog 😉