By Margie M. Palmer
North Park woman has life-changing experience on ‘American Tarzan’ reality-TV show
There was a time when humans were truly wild.
Survival meant silently stalking your prey, climbing high in trees to escape predators, and utilizing every resource within reach to stay alive. That era may be gone but there are still men and women who blaze though the forest, swim the raging rapids, and spend their days in the treetops.
One such woman is North Park resident Maria Herrera.
Herrera is among seven people selected to compete in “American Tarzan,” a new reality TV series that’s set to premiere on the Discovery Channel at 10 p.m. Wednesday, July 6.
Challengers were flown to a remote Caribbean island to take on Mother Nature’s most brutal obstacle course. Their goal was to not only survive the wild, but to master it.
Herrera is the first to admit she’s not one to back down from a challenge. The 34-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico native said she has always been fearless.
In high school, she was the only woman to join the men’s wrestling team. When she moved to Las Vegas, she took up street luging, a dangerous, adrenaline-charged sport.
“I had a friend out there who was a fabricator and he taught me how to weld. One day we decided we’d make street luges so we watched some YouTube videos to learn how to do that,” she said. “When I moved to San Diego, I met some other people who [were into the sport] and we got better and faster and I started to get ready to compete.”
On one of her training days, she took a corner way too quickly. She knew she wasn’t going to make it.
“Instead of being thrown off my sled onto the street, I was thrown off a cliff. It was pretty gnarly and I wound up with a dislocated arm, a compound fracture of my left radius and I fractured one of my vertebra.”
When she got to the hospital, doctors put her through a battery of tests and told her she might not walk again.
“I didn’t believe it. I was really stubborn,” she said. “I told them I can’t have surgery because I had a race in two weeks. I guess it never really hit me because I was so stubborn. Not walking again was not really an option for me.”
Her recovery was long and arduous, yet despite a few mental and emotional setbacks, Herrera forged through.
“The mental thing was crippling and I started feeling sorry that I couldn’t run, jump or lift. I was taking painkillers and drinking a lot until one day I looked in the mirror and thought to myself, ‘You should be paralyzed. You’re wasting this. You got a second chance,’”
She started off slowly by doing pushups, sit-ups and squats. That advanced to her signing up at a local CrossFit box.
Competition was next on her list.
“I did one Tough Mudder but that was kind of easy for me so I started doing Spartan races. Little by little, I started to challenge myself more and more. I wanted to see how many more miles I could run or how much more weight I could lift,” she said, adding that when her friend sent a her a link to sign up to be considered for “American Tarzan” she jumped on it.
In addition to being “totally into obstacle courses,” Herrera also has a stark attraction to survival sports. She recently put her survival skills to the test when she spent a week alone in the Peruvian rainforest with a pot, fire-starter, machete, mosquito net and fishhook.
“I knew the competition was the kind of thing I would pay to do anyway,” she said.
The show’s producers agreed. She got a call within 10 minutes of putting in her application.
Although she can’t tell us too much about what happened during her time on “American Tarzan,” she does feel it was a life-changing experience — and she’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“I’ve always been pretty athletic. As a kid, when I was 4 years old, my mom caught me 20 feet up in a tree. My motto is: ‘Making people nervous since 1982,’” she said. “If there is one thing I’d like to tell people it’s that, no matter if you are injured, overweight or whatever your circumstances may be, if you want something, go for it. The power of the mind is really strong. Work hard, be diligent and you can have anything you want.”
—Margie M. Palmer is a San Diego-based freelance writer who has been racking up bylines in a myriad of news publications for the past 10 years. You can reach her at [email protected].
