SN8 | Ep408 - Kaden Lebsack - American Ninja Warrior SN13 - Last Ninja Standing

Our special guest today is Kaden Lebsack "Last Ninja Standing" - American Ninja Warrior SN13 - WINNER! Kaden Lebsack (Super K WakeNinja) was born in Castle Rock, Colorado. Wakeboarding was his first passion starting at the age of 2. At the age of 10, he was the youngest member of the Mile High Wakeboarding Team. In the summer of 2016, is when Kaden discovered Ninja! Since then it's been nonstop training and competing. He has been across the US competing and is currently the back-to-back UNAA World Champ. Which stands for Ultimate Ninja Athlete AssociationAt the heart of “American Ninja Warrior” is the Great American Obstacle Course, and its obstacles, like those of American life, are meant to teach us lessons. Plan your route through the rope jungle carefully. Never be afraid of the mini-trampoline, because it will sense your fear and punish you for it. Momentum is crucial on the spin cycle. Hesitate and you’re done. Watch your forerunners carefully. One ninja’s mistake is another ninja’s education. American Ninjas are plumbers and dentists and stove cleaners and computer programmers and farmers who leap hay bale to hay bale, defying gravity and frightening the livestock. The show proudly boasts contestants from all fifty states. Ninjas are pro athletes and ex-Olympians and underdogs. Every season—we just wrapped the 13th season—follows the same arc. Each contestant must pass through the six obstacles of a city qualifier course—always culminating in a straight run up the infamous fourteen-foot Warped Wall to hit a buzzer on top—and then a Finals course in the same city, with four new obstacles beyond the Warped Wall, in order to qualify for Mount Midoriyama: a four-stage mega-course in Las Vegas that concludes with a seventy-five-foot vertical rope climb. The obstacles are a brutal parade of inanimate objects: Dancing Stones, Spinning Log, Floating Boards, Jumping Spider, Rumbling Dice, Monkey Peg, Cargo Crossing, Salmon Ladder, Double Salmon Ladder. On courses temporarily constructed, like pop-up playgrounds, in a series of curated urban locales—along the Venice beachfront, around Indianapolis’s Monument Circle—contestants support and propel their bodies in feats of unthinkable exertion. They swing on ropes, grip onto pegs suspended high above safety pools, brace their bodies between parallel walls, hold onto rolling logs, hold onto spinning wheels, run across tilting tables and wobbling perches. To make it onto the show, they have to submit audition tapes—The show also brings back popular contestants year after year, a kind of American Ninja aristocracy.The hosts of the show are Matt Iseman, a “bro host” comedian, and Akbar Gbaja-Biamila, a former N.F.L. defender and unrepentant pun addict. “American Ninja Warrior” is based on a Japanese obstacle-course show called “Sasuke,” named after the mythic ninja Sarutobi Sasuke. And yet I find that the moments when the show seems to illuminate something crucially American don’t live in its stories of by-your-own-bootstraps or anyone-can-do-it success but, rather, in the rupturing of these myths. The ninjas were competing not against the course and not even, ultimately, against one another. They were competing to make history.From an Article by Leslie Jamison - The New YorkerKaden Lebsack - ANW 13 Last Ninja Standing & Season 13 WINNER! He’s also the CEO of Bucket of ChalkOn IG: @kadenwakeBucket of Chalk on IG: @bucketofchalkhttps://www.bucketofchalk.com