A bro-down is brewing right here around the Monterey Bay. It’s Ninjas vs. Spartans in a rope-burning, finger-clutching, muscle-searing, mud-soaked battle to the finish.
Seriously, though.
Santa Cruz native Kevin Bull of American Ninja Warrior fame and Pacific Grove native Ian Deyerle, a Spartan racer who last year led his team to the inaugural Spartan: Ultimate Team Challenge title, are developing quite the rivalry between the two adventure-sport reality-show camps. In the process, they’re turning the Monterey Bay area into a hotbed of obstacle course racing.
Bull’s coterie of Ninjas placed second to Deyerle’s Comeback Kids in the first season of NBC’s Spartan: Ultimate Team Challenge last summer. The second season of the reality competition began airing last week, and both Bull and Deyerle are back for more.
“I would be lying to say the Ninja team didn’t make me nervous because of what they accomplished last year,” Deyerle said. “This year, they were back and probably more motivated than I was because they lost to us.”
Deyerle, a 2001 Pacific Grove High graduate who lives in Monterey, said he never thought twice about returning for the second season. After all, he had a crown to defend.
During Season 1, Deyerle, who is currently ranked No. 27 in the Spartan World Elite Series, was selected to captain one of the four-person teams. His was a squad of athletes who had all overcome something, such as an eating disorder or drug addiction. Deyerle, a recovering alcoholic, fit right in.
“There was an immediate level of trust between Ian and his team, and that showed,” said Anthony Storm, an executive producer of both the Spartan team challenge and American Ninja Warrior. “They were incredibly efficient, and it takes communication to be efficient. You can’t just step in and do that.”
His past, his fitness and his knowledge of Spartan obstacles helped Deyerle lead his team to the $250,000 winners’ prize.
Still, because Deyerle’s group entered as one of the most physically intimidating of the bunch last season, some implied he may have just had the best athletes.
“They were a really good group of athletes, which was a big focus point they hit when we were doing our interviews,” Deyerle said. “Did he just get lucky?”
In Season 2, he’s out to prove he didn’t. This season, Deyerle captains team Strike a Pose (a name he said the network executives picked), which is laden with, in his terms, “flirty” Floridian friends Sarah Harrison, Amanda Tchir, Jonathan Ruiz and Mack Roesch. He said he was introduced to them just three weeks before they convened in Atlanta earlier this year to film the competition over the course of several days. Even in that short amount of time, though, he said his status as the defending champ paid dividends.
“Last year, the guys were kind of hard to deal with. It was where they thought they kind of knew everything,” he said. “They were closed-minded. If they had their mind made up and if we needed to do an obstacle, we had to do it that way, period.
“This year, my team is so happy they got me because I won last year that they listened.”
While Deyerle will be working with an entirely new cast of characters, Bull’s team remains nearly intact. The Harbor High alum, who recently moved from Scotts Valley to Thousand Oaks, is one of three returners from last year’s runner-up Ninja squad, alongside Lance Pekus and Maggi Thorne. This time around they will be joined by Meagan Martin and captain Michelle Warnky as they try to snag the crown that barely slipped their grasp.
“It’s difficult to take second, especially when you get that close to it,” Bull said. “But I think we were all surprised at how well we did.”
Most of the American Ninja Warrior stars have either made that series their profession or they work in gyms where they train themselves and others for the rigors of that parkour-style of course. Yet Bull said his team was surprised at its success because the motions and muscles needed to excel as a Ninja are not the same needed to conquer a Spartan race. He said Ninja courses typically emphasize climbing, hanging and bounding, while Spartan courses focus on pushing, lifting and, in the case of the current show, teamwork.
“There’s a little more pushing things around, which is different, and a little bit of water, which is different,” Bull said, “because just as soon as we hit the water, we’re out.”
Another little twist is that this year the Ninja season runs concurrently with the Spartan team challenge. That means the Ninjas can’t add extra muscle mass to, say, their quads for more power in the Spartan race without also having to haul that weight around the Ninja course on which they originally made their name.
And don’t think the outcome is scripted just because this is a reality TV show. Both Bull and Deyerle have done more tire flips and fingertip pushups than they’d prefer to put themselves in the best position to win. After all, territorial bragging rights are on the line.
“When you’re out here on the course, you do a lot of things like false starts and fake warmups so the cameras can record you,” Deyerle said. “But once the gun goes off, it’s for real. I don’t remember seeing any cameras or drones out there, because all you’re focused on is winning.”
Contact Julie Jag at 831-706-3257.