One local high schooler will make an appearance on television, jumping and swinging her way through jaw-dropping obstacles. Grace Walk, a rising junior at Woodson High School and a Fairfax resident, appears Monday night on American Ninja Warrior.
The episode, “Western Regional Qualifying 2,” airs at 9 p.m. on NBC.
The show challenges athletes to “conquer the world’s most challenging obstacle courses,” with obstacles like a “supersized three lane racecourse called the Tripleheader.” The winner of the show takes home a $250,000 prize.
Ninja Training
Walk’s journey to appear on the show has been years in the making. She began with the ninja sport when she was just 9 years old. “I saw the show, I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” she says.
She joined a local ninja gym and started competing a few months later. Walk trains at Vertex Labs Academy in Lorton.
She started out in the sport by learning all the basics of how to take on the obstacles with the help of the gym trainers, she says. And when she got more serious about competitions, she started adding home training with strength exercises, too.
“The fun thing about ninja is it’s so different every single time, and it’s a young sport, too, so it’s constantly changing” as players improve and course designers come up with new challenges, she says. “Because it’s newer, it’s smaller, and so the community just feels closer together.”
To balance training with her busy life as a high school student, Walk says she runs every morning before school and does exercises like pull-ups, then goes to ninja practice after school.
“I think it’s very impressive to see any child do crazy things — and I think if you’ve seen the show, they do some crazy things,” Walk’s mother, Ruth, says of watching her daughter train. “You have to kind of trust them to know their bodies and know what they’re capable of.”
And the coaches are an important element of training, too. “The coaches are all really, really wonderful. They love to see, especially the young kids, grow in their confidence, grow in their strength, grow in their body knowledge,” Ruth says. “I know that coaches get a lot of reward out of the sport, and I think it’s the same for parents, too.”
Her First Appearance
At age 11, Walk made her first on-screen ninja appearance on American Ninja Warriors Junior. “It was obviously one of the most exciting things that I had done up to that point, like everything about the experience was so new to me,” she says. It was her first time running a course above water, which she says was “a dream come true.”
“I mean, it’s like total bucket list,” Ruth says. “When she applied for juniors, she asked if she could apply, and I was kind of like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ — you know, you never think it’s actually going to happen, right? … It’s a bit mind blowing.”
Taking Skills to the Screen
After a few more years of training and local competitions, Walk applied to appear on the adult show as soon as she was old enough. She got the call that she was accepted to go on the show in August, and she and her family flew to Las Vegas in September to film.
The show is filmed at night, and she says she woke up that morning filled with anxiety. But once she got on set, she says, “my adrenaline took over and I was able to focus a bit more and … just see the course in front of me and like go through in my head, like, ‘OK here’s what I have to do for each obstacle.’”
Walk’s parents were on set with her in Las Vegas to cheer her on, with her coach on the sidelines and her grandparents and siblings watching live from home.
“Grace is very brave, and it takes a lot of courage to do it,” Ruth says. “We’re very proud of her, and happy that she got the opportunity to do the thing that you see on TV and you dream about.”
And in the end, “I felt very happy with how my run went,” Walk says. “I don’t think I was disappointed with my experience, and I think it probably, if anything, made me even more excited to hopefully get to compete again, because it was just really fun.”
Feature image by Scott Everett White/courtesy NBC
