Marina Heck has seen that look before, the way eyebrows go up when someone learns she performs on gleaming vertical poles.
“It’s not what you think,” she said to a male customs officer at O’Hare International Airport after sharing that she was returning from the World Pole Sports Championships in London last weekend.
“Immediately, when you hear the word pole or pole dancing, you associate it with stripping. Now that it’s worldwide, it’s becoming more and more a legitimate sport,” she said.
How legit? Marina’s mom came along to London to cheer her on.
For the record, Marina is not and never was a stripper working the pole at a so-called gentlemen’s club, not that she judges these women and their choices in life.
She is a bubbly, 41-year-old married mother of two sons and a former kindergarten teacher.
Last month in New Orleans, Marina won the United States Pole Sports Federation national championship in the masters division of women over 40. That qualified her to represent the United States in London, where she competed against a dozen women from eight countries.
Her routine was four minutes long and set to an instrumental version of “Uptown Funk.” She wasn’t thrilled with her eighth place finish at world, but it became clear to her how elite the athletes are at this level. First place went to a 48-year-old woman from Germany.
“Most of them own studios, or they have coaches, or they have teams they work with. When I told them I go to a studio once a week and train in my basement by myself, they thought I was crazy,” Marina told me as we talked this week at her Waukesha home.
She showed me that basement. She installed two poles, one static and one that spins, on sheets of laminate flooring. She’s got an inversion table down there, a treadmill and stair climber, weights, pullup bar, a sauna.
“I videotape everything,” she said. “I record myself and play it back and see where my errors were and what I need to work on. I’m my own coach.”
For hours a day, she defies gravity, hanging and spinning on the poles to perfect moves with names like inside leg hang, side pole straddle base and rainbow marchenko split. In competition, pole athletes are judged on their technical skill, balance, creativity and other factors.
Injuries, broken bones and bruises are part of the package. “I have fallen on my head. You have to be very careful,” she said.
Athletic success for Marina goes back to age 3 when her mother signed her up for gymnastics to keep her from jumping on the furniture at home in Mequon. In high school at Homestead and later at Divine Savior Holy Angels, Marina competed in diving and received a full athletic scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She competed and won in both sports on the national level.
After Marina and her husband, Tom, had children — John, now 10, and Devin, 7 — she set sports aside for a while. Four years ago, it was a visit to a gay strip club with a male gay friend that first exposed her to pole sports.
“I saw guys on the poles, not stripping but doing tricks. I said I want to do that. That looks so cool,” she said.
And she did. Marina and a neighbor signed up for classes at Blush Pole Fitness & Dance in West Allis, which now proudly claims the 4-foot-11 dynamo as one of their biggest success stories.
“She is so strong, just a little, tiny ball of muscle, and she is very dedicated to achieving her goals,” Blush owner Maureen McKenzie Metzger said. “Athletes that compete in this level are Olympic caliber. Sometimes pole dance as a sport is treated as a joke. Watch Marina on a pole for three minutes and you would know a pole dancer is an athlete.”
Marina has won pole competitions at the regional and national level. Her husband is supportive, and her boys are fans. “They have my medals and trophies in their rooms,” she said.
And what’s in it for her?
“It’s self-fulfillment. It’s not ego. If anything, this brings me back down to earth and reminds me how grateful I am to be able to do this. I really enjoy it. I do it for me, and I’m really lucky to say that I represented the United States.”
Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@jrn.com
Editor’s note: An earlier posted version of this column said Heck lost her job as a teacher at a Catholic school after school officials discovered she performed pole sports. On Friday, Archdiocese of Milwaukee officials disputed Heck’s account, saying she was offered a different position at a middle school during a workforce reduction and that Heck declined the offer.