My journey to ninja...by Michelle Warnky Buurma

Hello!  My name is Michelle Warnky Buurma, and I am excited and so grateful that MLAB OHIO is about to have its 10th birthday as a Ninja, Parkour, OCR, and Fitness gym in Columbus, Ohio.  It’s extra special to be in Worthington, which is the city I grew up and went to school in.  I can hardly remember what life was like before the gym.  In this blog, I’m going to share about our journey here, as well as tips for training, talk with staff, interviews with members, and more!  Thanks for joining us.

I am a co-owner of MOVEMENT LAB OHIO (aka MLAB OHIO), along with Chris and Brian Wilczewski.  They are brothers from New Jersey, who started the first Movement Lab there.  That is the first gym I ever visited and the first indoor Ninja gym in the country!  Chris also created the National Ninja League while we were building to open MLAB OHIO. It has grown tremendously and is now called the World Ninja League.   

One of the most popular questions I get asked is how did I get into ninja?  Generally the follow-up question is how did MOVEMENT LAB OHIO get started.  To start off this blog, I will share the answers to the first question, then answer the second in a follow-up post!

My name is Michelle Buurma now, but my maiden name was Warnky. I combine those names in ninja and motivational speaking, since many still know me by Warnky.  I have always been active and competitive.  My family says that I always worked hard to keep up with my brother.  I loved playing outside for hours in our neighborhood growing up.  We played football, baseball, as well as hotbox, and home run derby with tennis balls! My family ended up getting a basketball sport court in our backyard where my brother and dad destroyed me daily! My dad created different tournaments like knock-out and 21, and at the end of the summer, those that held records got Frosties from Wendy's :)  My brother always held the title of the most games won, because he played me all the time!

I always loved climbing, and I think around 2nd grade, my mom saw a newspaper article about a new climbing gym opening up called VERTICAL ADVENTURES! She and I went to try it out, and I was instantly hooked!  We had been doing a monthly family activity of bowling, and we quickly shifted it to indoor Rock Climbing.  I fell in love with it.  I competed at a few Vertical Adventures competitions around 5th or 6th grade (there weren't teams or regular competitions like there are now). I also traveled to Cincinnati once to compete at ROCK QUEST .  Once 7th grade hit, I started doing cross country and track at Worthingway Middle School, then at Thomas Worthington for high school. Then I only had time to climb during the summers.  It always took a few weeks out of the summer to get my calluses and upper body strength back to climbing level, but I was always so excited to get back to it.

I ended up going to college at University of the Cumberlands and ran cross country and track there, but every summer I'd come back and get some climbing in.  After college I served overseas as an English teacher with a Christian organization in Kazakhstan for 5 school years.  When I first heard about Kazakhstan on a discovery call with the sending organization, I went to look at a map and was shocked to find that it is the 9th largest country in the world!  It is located south of Russia and west of China. The movie Borat introduced many Americans to Kazakhstan, even though it wasn’t realistic and was actually filmed in Romania.  In Kazakhstan we walked all the time.  I lived in an apartment on the 6th floor and we always took the stairs.  It was about a half mile walk (or more) to the bus stop, another mile to the office where my Russian language classes were, a half mile to the school where we taught, another half mile or so to the bus stop at night, then another half mile walk or more to the apartment.  The 6 flights of stairs at the end of the day were rough sometimes! :)  While there, I kept up my running with a group of friends called "Physculturnicas" who loved to be active outside.  We ran a marathon together, went climbing and camping outdoors a few times, and did other active things.  I also helped lead and play baseball or football (in the snow) every Saturday with a group of students/former students and some fellow teachers.  I also got out of my comfort zone and tried belly dancing my second year there with a friend!  I really enjoy dancing, but only at home, or in a comfortable setting which is usually in a crowd or when no guys are around.  Thankfully it was an all women’s class! The instructor was so impressively good that I was so focused on trying to recreate the movements, and I didn't get too embarrassed most of the time!  During my time in Kazakhstan, I had lost most of my upper body strength due to not using it much, but I was still way more muscular than almost any other female there. People would comment on my arm muscles at times, and I actually got some compliments on them.  Growing up I had more often heard comments like- ‘you must use steroids if you’re that strong or muscular’, which made me not really want to get too strong. I enjoyed lifting as well, but never wanted to lift too hard to get too muscular. I realized in college that I never really felt attractive or feminine from all those comments and being muscular, but in Kazakhstan I finally started to appreciate the muscles I had.  I was thankful for the way they protected me (story for another time), allowed me to do what I loved, and I could still dress up and be a lady.  

After 5 years in Kazakhstan, I very distinctly felt God telling me to come back to the States.  When I first came back, there were many adjustment challenges like finding my new place in life, finding friends to spend time with, figuring out what I should do with my life, etc.  I considered everything.  I love massages, so I considered learning to be a masseuse.  I considered nursing, firefighting, and so much more.  I eventually called around about jobs and started out as a personal trainer at Urban Active, now L.A. Fitness.  I also got a job working as a server at Texas Roadhouse-yes their rolls are delicious!  As is all of their food!  But those two jobs were pretty much opposites-as a trainer I started around 5 or 5:30am, and worked till around 11am or noon.  Then I'd go home, prep workouts for the next day's clients, then head into work at Texas Roadhouse around 3:30/4pm and work till late.  I was running regularly and I started climbing again.  I started bringing some of my fellow servers from Roadhouse to Vertical Adventures to climb, and was getting a lot stronger.  But I was also burning the candle at both ends.  I started getting sick a lot more since I wasn't getting enough sleep, and needed to start crashing hard and taking a nap in the middle of the day.

During this period I tried out my first Obstacle Course Race (OCR) called the Warrior Dash.  I ran it with a climbing friend, and a friend from college joined us too.  While we were walking to registration I remember one of them mentioning a TV show called "American Ninja Warrior".  He asked if I had ever heard of it and said he thought I would love it!  My college friend agreed and she said someone from my college had also competed on the show.  It sounded cool, but I didn't think much of it.  We had a blast at the OCR race! I won my heat for the women easily, but then found out a female in another heat beat me by a few seconds for the overall top finish.  I already loved the race, but that lit a fire in me to start racing with other top females!  In time I started going out to other OCR races like the Savage Race, Tough Mudder (and the Toughest Mudder 24 hr race, but that's a story for another time!), Mud, Guts, and Glory, OCR World Championships, North American Championships, Spartan Races, and more!

I hadn't thought again about that show "Ninja Warrior" until a few days later after a shift at Texas Roadhouse.  I was sitting at a table talking with some of my co-workers and eating, then a friend came up bright eyed and banging her hands on the table.  "Michelle!  Have you seen the show American Ninja Warrior?!  You would love it, you need to do it!"  She started telling me all about it.  My curiosity was fully piqued, so I went to my parents' house and looked it up with them.  It was love at first sight! It just clicked.  I couldn’t wait to try out some obstacles!  But then I hit a roadblock.  I didn’t see any females on the show, only men.  My mom and I ended up freeze-framing a group picture of the Las Vegas finals competitors, and looked through the faces of 100 competitors.  We found 3 ladies out of 100 athletes competing, which was enough for me! I started telling people that I wanted to try Ninja Warrior.  Many hadn’t heard of it, and several who knew of the show said, “You’re strong, but you’re not THAT strong!”  I thought I was strong enough, but I wanted to go test myself and find out!

I searched on facebook and found that there had been a ninja event hosted in New Jersey about a month earlier.  I contacted the owner (Chris Wilczewski - now a business partner! ) and asked when their next ninja event was.  He said he would probably host another one next year, but that I was welcome to come out any weekend.  I took him up on that, and ended up driving 8 hours away with a friend to New Jersey for a 1 day training session!  We got in pretty late in the evening Friday night.  I knew I’d likely have to wait till the next day to try anything, but we started talking with Chris and some others for a while.  After talking for 5 to 10 minutes, I was itching to try something. I asked if I could just quickly try the one obstacle I most wanted to try- the salmon ladder.  It was staring at me from the back of the gym and calling my name!  Chris said sure, so I headed over and hopped up.  I quickly popped it up one rung, and then got one side up another rung, but it was crooked.  I heard Chris shouting advice.  I hopped it up again and straightened it out. Then I got it up another rung, but it was crooked again!  I kept hearing advice being shouted, so I got it level again, and made it to the top!  I hopped down, and was so excited! Chris looked shocked and said he had never seen a female get the salmon ladder before!  He said I definitely had to try their warped wall the next day, because a female had never gotten it.

I could barely sleep that night I was so excited! The next day I came back and tried out everything.  I got all of the upper body obstacles, and even learned how to do an 8 foot lache (swinging from one bar to another bar 8 feet away).   The warped wall hadn’t been available all day, even though I was dying to try it.  At the end of the training session, they did something they called a meathead challenge on the warped wall.  They started with a long run up, and slowly made the length of runup shorter and shorter.  We played ‘PIG’ so that if you missed the wall, you got a letter.  Once you missed 3 times, you spelled PIG and were out.  I was out first, as the only female, and the only one who had never tried the wall before.  After they finished the challenge, I worked on the wall for about 2 hours.  I was getting closer and closer, but wasn’t quite there.  All the guys were telling me to take 3 steps on the wall.  One time I unintentionally took 4 steps…and my fingers touched the top of the wall!  I got so excited and realized I needed to do it differently than the guys.  A few tries after that, I got the wall and exploded with excitement!  All of the guys started asking me if I was going to do the show.  I had no idea how to apply, but told them I wanted to!

I came back to Columbus, Ohio fired up.  I showed videos of the obstacles to Alexis, the owner of Vertical Adventures.  He said that if I could find people to help me build obstacles, he would let me use their tools, help with materials, and let me put up obstacles in the gym after hours.  I started building quad steps and quickly had a friend join me to build them.  Chris Wilczewski had added me to a Ninja Warrior facebook group, and I posted a picture of our newly built quad steps there! Within a day or two, I found a voicemail on my phone.  I listened to it, and to my surprise, it was a producer from American Ninja Warrior!  He had seen that I was building obstacles and asked if I was going to apply for the show! I was shocked and over the moon.  I called him back and told him I would absolutely love to do the show.  He talked to me about how to apply and make a submission video. He said he’d be looking out for my video.  I was hooked, and started working on my video right away.  Here is my video from 12 years ago.  Before long, I got my first acceptance call to be on the show!