Forty-one-year-old Ryan Metivier is an Auburn chiropractor by day, aspiring reality TV show muscle-endurance obstacle course ninja by night.
This Sunday, Metivier and his Wolverine-inspired mutton chops are competing on season four of “Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Challenge” on CMT, Country Music Television.
On the show, eight new contestants face off each week, hoping to best each other and the show-ending “Skullbuster” obstacle course to win $10,000. It’s dusty, it’s hard, it’s no-holds-barred.
To not spoil the show, he can’t say how far he made it, only that he loved it.
“You can grab the guy, you can throw him down the hill — there’s a lot of stuff you’ve got to be ready for,” Metivier said Thursday.
His only tease: One challenge involved carrying sandbags through water and navigating under logs.
“The bags are getting soaked so this 60-pound sandbag turns into a 100-pound sandbag,” he said. “At the end of it, you’ve got to get out of the water, you’ve got to throw it over a wall of a certain height and you’ve got to run back, get another one. You do that three times and then you have to jump over the wall and ring the bell before the other guy. It’s pretty daunting. A good ‘ol time.”
Metivier, who grew up in Westbrook, said he’s been athletic his whole life, particularly into endurance races and marathons. He opened his practice, Auburn Chiropractic, in 2000, and he’s turned his Auburn backyard into something resembling the set of TV’s “American Ninja Warrior.”
“It’s got a 14-foot warped wall and it looks like a giant jungle gym all the way to my maple tree,” he said.
One of the regular challenges on the CMT show: carrying a 75-pound log over your shoulder while running a quarter of a mile. So, Metivier has those, too.
“I actually made my own logs and stained them and polly’d them and my buddies and I run down the streets — we probably look like idiots — we run down the street training for ‘Broken Skull’ with logs on our shoulders,” he said. “We get right into it.”
He applied for the show last summer, had an hourlong Skype interview with producers and was flown out to California in late September, still not sure if he’d made it onto the show.
“They’re really hush-hush about it,” Metivier said. “My last interview was in my hotel room at 11 o’clock at night and I was supposed to be on set the next morning (if he made the final cut). It was pretty crazy.”
Metivier is one of the oldest of the eight contestants on Sunday’s episode; most are in their 20s. Pulling up to the set, he said none of them had any idea what they could be doing. Any of the three challenges could have involved brute strength, speed, endurance or wrestling.
“That’s the great thing about it, you’ve got to have variety in your game,” he said. “You can’t just be somebody that is a really good obstacle course racer; you’ve got to get to the end in order to even do the obstacle course.”
Metivier said his Hugh Jackman-as-Wolverine look was inspired by his son who encouraged him to grow facial hair for the Boston Marathon the year after the tragic bombing. Lots of beards were grown in honor of “Boston Strong.”
“We were fooling around — my son’s a big superhero fan — (he said), ‘You should grow a Wolverine beard!'” Metivier said. “It kind of stuck. Any time I prepare for a competition, even if it’s a 5K race locally in Auburn, I kind of took it on as my little thing. My goal, honestly, when I apply to ‘American Ninja Warrior,’ I’m going to be the Wolverine Ninja. I’m hoping when people see me on ‘Broken Skull,’ it’ll be my MO.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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