Not many of Soledad O'Brien's PowHERful Summit speakers personified the word powerful quite like Jennifer Tavernier.
Wearing a sleeveless top, Instagram's @minneninja had the guns out last weekend at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, where O'Brien, CEO of Starfish Media Group, held a daylong event featuring speakers to advise young women interested in completing college. At one point Tavernier, a personal trainer at Conquer Ninja Warrior in Eden Prairie, got the young women out of their chairs for a little exercise.
Tavernier is a "Team Ninja Warrior" champion. "Team Ninja Warrior," which airs on the Esquire channel, is a spinoff of NBC's exhausting obstacle course competition "American Ninja Warrior." Tavernier didn't survive the "America Ninja Warrior" course, "but I made it to the fourth obstacle." Meaning: "I had a pretty good run on 'America Ninja Warrior.' "
Saturday the mother of two daughters, 6 and 8, will speak at Women RISE at Healthsource in Lakeville.
Q: How did you get from fitness person to "American Ninja Warrior"?
A: I saw a video of Kacy Catanzaro completing a finals course. She was the first woman to ever do that. The first woman to scale the warped wall and then she completed the whole thing. I had never seen the show before and I thought, "I would love, love to do that. That looks so exciting!" I started looking into it and found a gym here to start training. I train at ninja gyms. There are several that have opened in the last couple of years. They have all different kinds of obstacles because they are always changing the obstacles on the show.
Q: What is the secret to getting up that curved wall?
A: Not running crazy fast and being intense. You have to lean back a little bit and then have very powerful legs. If you run straight at the wall, you won't go up it. You have to lean back and let your steps carry you.