Long Islander eliminated from 'American Ninja Warrior'

Shelter Island’s Luke Lowell-Liszanckie, who competed on the current 17th season of “American Ninja Warrior,” progressing to the finals despite being a first-time contender, has climbed his last Warped Wall and traversed his final Devil Steps. Monday night’s episode revealed that the 23-year-old contestant was eliminated.

“I just had this feeling” right before his final run through the show’s acrobatic obstacle course “that I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to do this again,” said Lowell-Liszanckie, the third of four children of David Liszanckie and Nell Lowell. “I kind of took it all in one last time at the starting mark, and then I just ran and gave it everything I had.” Already suspecting he would not continue on, “I didn’t focus on just speed but more so just kind of doing the obstacles in my fashion, at my pace — just trying to get 'em done.”

Ninja, a type of “obstacle sport,” originated as a Japanese TV competition in 1997. Men and women race through obstacles involving souped-up versions of jungle gyms, climbing walls and more. The authorized U.S. version, “American Ninja Warrior,” premiered in 2009 on the now-defunct cable network G4, and came to NBC with season 6, in 2014.

“I just wanted to finish the course, because I wasn't able to with the previous two” attempts, falling into the protective water trough beneath the obstacles, Lowell-Liszanckie said. “So the pressure really wasn't between me and who I was racing against, or even me trying to move on. It was: ‘OK, I just want to finish. I just want to get past the one obstacle that kept taking me out.’ ”

That would be the Floating Monkey Bars, in which a competitor holding two batons swings from one trapeze-like bar to another, inserting and removing batons as they go. “I managed to get past that, but I didn't finish the final obstacle,” the Piston Plunge. Here competitors leap in turn across five discs hanging from a strut. As the ninja grabs each one, his or her weight pulls that piston down and the others up. The ninja has to swing, gain momentum and leap to the next.

Lowell-Liszanckie’s big takeaway — aside from “learning to train for low-humidity environments,” as in Las Vegas, where the show is produced — is “how cool the experience was, and just how positive an environment it was,” he said. Making it as far as the finals in his rookie season “told me that even though something's new and I'm doing it for the first time and it's this huge monumental thing, it doesn't mean I can't take it as far as I did. And then the fact that I did, looking back on it, is pretty crazy.”

Now the Shelter Island High School graduate, who had attended SUNY Plattsburgh for a time until leaving to pursue a competitive ninja career, returns to his summer job as a dockhand at the Greenport Harbor restaurant Claudio’s.

“Some people recognize me and it's really cool, but I'm not used to all the attention, so I don't think I'm the best at handling it,” Lowell-Liszanckie said. “But I'm just very, very grateful and appreciative of everyone who comes up to me and has nice things to say.”

The series continues Monday at 8 p.m. on NBC/4, with Part 4 of the finals.