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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?
