Polly Pearson is an adrenaline junkie, and she's not the only one who thinks so.
“My husband, he’s like, ‘Why do we always have to go on vacations that we have to train for?’ For our 25th wedding anniversary, we climbed Machu Picchu in Peru.”
The 59-year-old math teacher is no stranger to mountains: She’s conquered peaks in Switzerland, Tanzania and Bolivia. She’s now set her eyes on a completely new challenge: survival reality TV.
“I love competition reality TV shows,” Pearson said, “I watch them all the time.”
She’s tried to get on Survivor several times and never received a call back. So when she applied on a whim to appear on the second season of Fox's “Extracted,” premiering Monday, Jan. 26, she thought the result would be more of the same.
“You’ve got a snowball’s chance of getting on these shows. I sent an email and thought that would be the end of it," she said.
Turns out, to her surprise, she’d hear back about a month later: a telephone call out of the blue from one of the show’s assistants.
“I thought it was spam, or a joke,” she said, “It turns out they were interested.”
She would ultimately be selected out of about 40,000 people to be a contestant.
“Extracted” takes place in northern Canada, where contestants are airdropped into the wilderness. For about three weeks, 12 survivalists are pitted against the elements with little to no shelter, food or warmth. Harsh, but perfect for a thrillseeker like Pearson.
“My students call it ‘Hunger Games,'" she said, “And it’s pretty similar to that. You have to find your own food, figure out how to build your own shelter.”
She wasn’t entirely alone, though. Each survivalist has a team nearby in more hospitable conditions, competing for supplies. Pearson’s team was her niece Bailey and identical twin sister, Molly.
Pearson thinks the twin angle and her age might have been reasons the show was interested in her as a contestant, but she’s got deeper reasons for making her first reality TV appearance. In 2023, she was diagnosed with Stage 3 uterine cancer.
“It was a pretty rough journey,” Pearson said, “I went through chemo, lost all my hair, radiation, all of it. But I recovered.”
Pearson said she’s out in the wilderness to show that cancer is beatable, to give hope to those who are going through what she went through.
“I wanted to be a spokesperson for people who have gone down that road and suffer from that. I wanted to prove that I may have come through that thing with scars, but it didn’t have to define who I am. I’m still adventurous, I’m still tough. I’m not going to be a spectator in life.”