Kayla Blood — that’s her real name — stands 5 feet, 4 inches tall. The truck she drives is 12 feet tall and 12 feet wide, with a jaw-dropping 1,500 horsepower supercharged engine.

Its tires, which weigh 640 pounds apiece, are taller than she is.

She can make the truck fly 50 or 60 feet through the air. With the help of a ramp, she can make it do a full back flip. She can make it stand straight up on its front two tires — this requires shifting back and forth between first gear and reverse — for up to 20 seconds at a time.

“They prefer us not to do it longer than 20 seconds because it messes up the truck and the oil pressure. When you’re on your nose for 20 seconds, it’s pretty insane inside the cab,” she says.

Kayla Blood, a six-year veteran of the Louisiana National Guard and former MMA fighter, drives the girl-power unicorn-inspired Sparkle Smash monster truck in the Monster Jam series.

Blood is a monster truck driver on the Monster Jam circuit. The tour comes to the Dome at America’s Center for shows at 5 p.m. Jan. 18 and 3 p.m. Jan. 19.

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The truck she drives is called Sparkle Smash. It is gradated in color from light pink in the front through two shades of lavender to a teal blue rear. The paint has sparkles and small stars in it. On the top is a unicorn’s horn that shoots confetti out of the tip.

“She’s a 6-ton unicorn. She’s sparkly, but she is full throttle,” Blood says.

The truck made its debut last May at the Monster Jam World Finals. Blood smashed it through a wall of cars and then did a few celebratory doughnuts in the dirt.

The truck is specifically designed to appeal to girls, and it’s working. Blood says that with Sparkle Smash she has met more girls coming to a monster truck event for the first time than at any other point in her 10 years in the sport.

The Sparkle Smash truck is the first time a Monster Jam truck was based on a toy, though other competing monster truck series have been doing that for years. Before it was unveiled last spring, Blood was behind the wheel of the Soldier Fortune truck — fitting, because she served for six years in the Louisiana National Guard.

Dressed in camouflage, which matched the truck’s paint scheme, she would do push-ups on top of the cab after a good run.

While she was in the guard, she became interested in combatives, a sport that serves as training for hand-to-hand combat. That led to an interest in mixed martial arts.

“I loved it. It taught me a lot. When you get into a cage, you don’t know if you’re going to get your butt whipped,” she says.

She won her only two fights before becoming pregnant, which is when she left both the sport and the military. Her son Austin is now 12, and “he’s bigger than me,” she says.

Blood was married to fellow driver Blake Granger, of the Maximum Destruction and El Toro Loco trucks. So Austin largely grew up at monster truck shows, and he still loves the sport. But he’s beginning to get a bit jaded, she says, and stadium shows now interest him more than arena shows.

Being 12, he is also not above telling her what, in his mind, she did wrong at any show.

Blood first began racing all-terrain vehicles in motocross events when she was around 20. She soon became so good at it that she was called to race in an intermission event at a monster truck show at the Superdome in New Orleans.

It was a thrill, she says, spending time with the drivers, and signing autographs and posing for pictures alongside them at a pre-show event.

“They called me about a week later, looking for the girl on the yellow LT-R450 Suzuki, asking if I wanted to drive monster trucks,” she says.

She began in the now-discontinued Triple Threat series, which featured drivers competing against each other in monster trucks, side-by-side off-road vehicles and ATVs. After six years, she was promoted to monster-truck competitions in stadiums.

“I feel like everything I’ve done in my life has molded me for Monster Jam,” she says.

The sport can be tough on the drivers. The trucks can leap as high as 35 feet in the air, and come down hard. At a competition two weeks ago, one of Blood’s tires was ripped entirely off the truck’s frame.

“That’s what Monster Jam is known for: carnage and crazy things and crashes,” she says.

Safety is the first priority, she says — not only for drivers but for crew and spectators, too. The drivers are strapped into a five-point harness, with a neck device and a helmet.

The harness is attached so tightly that she can barely breathe, she says. The drivers sit inside what is essentially a steel cage.

“That’s a challenge in itself, seeing through the steel cage,” she says.

Each truck is fitted with a remote ignition interrupter, meaning that the engine can be shut off whenever someone notices a potential danger, such as debris on the track.

While she loves driving monster trucks, at some point she would like to move into rally car racing. It fits her all-out style.

“I drive like NASCAR on the road. I have a Dodge Charger at home. I like speed, and I like racing,” she says.

The only woman to drive Grave Digger, a monster truck in Monster Jam, Krysten Anderson competes against her two brothers this year. She talks about what it’s like to have her brothers as her rivals and how the competition affects their relationship.

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