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The Guardian
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A new start after 60: I did my first pull-up at 63 – then fought to be a ninja warrior
Ginny MacColl was 63 when she accepted her daughter's challenge to complete a pull-up. It took nine months to nail it. Now, a decade on, MacColl can pump out 17 of them in a row. It's hard to argue with her when she says: 'You can get stronger with age.' MacColl has since competed three times in the reality TV show American Ninja Warrior. She's the oldest person to complete an obstacle, and the oldest female ninja athlete, according to Guinness World Records. It was watching her daughter, Jessie Graff, a stuntwoman, compete on the show that made her want to grow stronger herself. 'What do I do?' she asked Graff, who told her: 'Pull-ups.' As a former professional dancer, MacColl, now 73, had always been fit. But she had been diagnosed with osteopenia, a precursor to osteoporosis, and had never been in a gym before. Graff's challenge called for a different kind of strength – and a mental shift. 'When I grew up, women weren't encouraged to lift weights,' MacColl says. 'It was: 'You don't want to get bulky. It's not feminine …'' Seeing Graff in action, cheering her on, MacColl saw 'such strength and grace – and she had muscles! I realised that the things people had always said about muscles were so wrong. It was a disservice to women.' A shy child, MacColl was enrolled in dance lessons by her parents, initially to draw her out of her shell. 'Movement is a way of talking. It is an expression of what's inside you,' she says. In fact, she fell so completely in love with dance that, aged 20, she left Tennessee for New York. 'The goal was just to dance all day. Everybody said: 'You're not going to make it.'' But in 1974, she landed a part in Pippin, a Broadway show with Bob Fosse. 'I felt on top of the world,' she says. She branched out into TV commercials during the 70s and 80s, acting as 'a housewife and mum, smiling with my product beside me … Folgers coffee, Jordache jeans, Charmin … ' Her off-screen life mirrored those ads. She got married and had two children, even shooting one commercial three days after giving birth. 'A golden time,' she says. But 'all good things come to an end', and MacColl got divorced after 13 years of marriage, moving with her two children into the family's lake house in the Poconos, surrounded by 160 hectares (400 acres) of forest. There she needed a different kind of strength. 'It was a magical but very hard place,' she says. 'We had blizzards, bats in the house, bears outside. It took a sense of determination: 'I will make this work.'' Teaching dance alone didn't pay enough, and nobody wanted to hire her. Eventually, she got a sales job at the local radio station. She kept fit, swam in the lake with her kids and devised improvised obstacle courses in the woods with sticks and string. She told herself that if she ever returned to acting, she would 'come back as a granny'. At 62, she retired from her 20-year career in radio sales, having remarried and seen her children through college. Then she got an agent, auditioned for roles and began to swim competitively. She'd seen her parents grow sedentary in their retirement, and wanted something different for herself. To complete that first pull-up, she broke it down into sections, working on each element in turn. But when she debuted on American Ninja Warrior, she fell at the first obstacle. 'I was devastated. I felt I'd let down all the seniors in the world.' The biggest obstacle she has overcome in life, MacColl says, is failure itself. She felt like a failure at school, when she and her classmates were lined up in order of their IQ scores, and also when her first marriage ended. Now here it was again. 'It took me a while to get over that,' she says. 'There's a saying I like to tell myself: 'Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.' So I try to look at failure as a motivator. I will get this. Social media was my way of getting out of the doldrums. I started posting some of the things I could do.' She has more than 130,000 followers on Instagram, and over the past six years has landed parts in films including Poms (with Diane Keaton) and You're Cordially Invited (with Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon). She has just filmed her next appearance on American Ninja Warrior. In the process of all this, she has reversed her osteopenia. MacColl believes she can continue to get stronger into her 80s and 90s. 'Muscle is the organ of longevity,' she says. Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60? Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Daily Mail
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I never stepped foot in a gym until age 62... but now people are stunned by my physique
A woman who had never stepped foot in a gym has revealed how she got in shape at age 62... and went on to become the oldest American Ninja Warrior competitor in history. While actor and former dancer Ginny MacColl, now 73, from Southport, North Carolina, has 'always' been active, for the first 62 years of her life, she had no interest in weight training or working out. But all of that changed in 2015, when she decided she wanted to get stronger after becoming inspired by her daughter, Jessie Graff, who had participated on the popular sports competition show America Ninja Warrior. At first, Ginny, who had 'no upper body strength,' said her goal was to do five pull-ups. She worked tirelessly with a personal trainer and it took a full year for her to achieve her first pull-up. But now, a decade on, not only can Ginny do numerous pull-ups, but she also works out six days a week and became the oldest competitor in American Ninja Warrior history in 2022. While chatting with Ginny explained, 'I've always done some sort of exercise. 'Mostly dance from age eight to adult when I moved to NYC to become a professional dancer. But all of that changed in 2015, when she decided she wanted to get stronger after becoming inspired by her daughter, Jessie Graff, who had participated on the show America Ninja Warrior 'In New York, I danced on scholarship and with a modern dance company and then onto Broadway with the hit show, Pippin, in 1974.' She continued to dance professionally until she got married and welcomed two kids, when she decided to turn her focus to acting and modeling. She starred in 'over 100 national TV commercials,' but being a busy working mom with two young children meant she had little time to focus on staying active. 'My exercising was limited to what I did with the kids,' she explained. After undergoing a divorce, she started teaching dance and worked in radio. She eventually remarried and moved to North Carolina to 'rekindle her acting career,' but at age 62, she discovered a new passion thanks to her daughter: weight lifting. 'My daughter competed on ANW and she was showing young girls how cool it was to be strong,' recalled Ginny. 'I thought she was strong, healthy, confident and graceful and I wanted to get strong too. 'I didn't have the upper body strength and eventually went to a personal trainer with a goal of five pull-ups.' Ginny admitted that weight training was extremely 'hard' and so 'different from anything she'd ever done before.' She knew that starting out at that age meant she would have to take it 'slow' and focus on her entire 'body' as to not injure herself. And while there were times she felt 'discouraged,' she never gave up. 'I'd never been in a gym, never been in sports. So I essentially started from scratch,' she continued. 'It took nine months to see definition and toning. It took a year to get one pull-up. '[There was] plenty of discouragement because I saw how so many women accomplished a pull-up and why couldn't I? 'But it made me more determined. If they could do it then I could too.' In 2016, she decided to participate in ANW with her daughter during a mother-daughter segment. 'It's never too late and you're never too old,' she told 'Let's get rid of old stereotypes, like: you can't get stronger as you age, or: it's all downhill after 50' Now, she has been on ANW three times, and in 2022, at age 71, she broke the record as the oldest female competitor on the show. She has documented much of her fitness journey online, and has seen a resurgence in her acting career in recent years. She worked as a stunt actor in Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell's movie You're Cordially Invited, and had a small role as a tennis player in the Sex and the City prequel show And Just Like That. 'It's never too late and you're never too old,' she concluded. 'That's why I post my progress on Instagram, so I can show people that you can do a lot more than you think you can. 'Let's get rid of old stereotypes, like: you can't get stronger as you age, or: you'll get too bulky and you won't look feminine, or: it's all downhill after 50.
