The Amazing Race Winners Prepared To Compete By Going To Therapy Together
The following contains spoilers for the Season 37 finale of The Amazing Race.
One Amazing Race duo just earned some serious bragging rights — and a whole lotta cash!
The globetrotting reality series' 37th season came to an end Thursday, following its six finalists — Han and Holden, Jonathan and Ana, and Carson and Jack — to Miami, where teams participated in a rambunctious oceanside Scramble. The leg saw the duos participate in a lifeguard rescue, a sailing obstacle course and an extreme hydroflight, before sending them off to complete one of the series' wildest puzzles to date. But once it was time to race off to the finish line, no one could surpass the force that was Carson and Jack, and the gamers from Brooklyn were officially declared the winners of Season 37. (Read our full recap here.)
Below, TVLine spoke with Carson and Jack about their dominating performance, from conquering fears and staying positive, to preparing mentally and emotionally for the race of their lives.
TVLINE | First off, congratulations on winning the Race! How does it feel now that the secret is out?
CARSON MCCALLEY | It feels good! It feels all sorts of things. Obviously, we are so excited and happy. It's just cloud nine, but also there's a sadness that it's over. We've had such a great time watching it and re-living it. There's gratitude. The people in our lives who haven't known this about us for a year, finally they're catching up to a part of ourselves that we've known about for a year. There's just all sorts of emotions, but overwhelmingly, gratitude.
JACK DODGE | Yeah, it's been insane. I spent hours last night crying, mostly for good reasons, of just being overwhelmed by all the love that was in the room with us last night, and the releasing of a big secret that we've had. It's been the most insane and amazing 48 hours.
TVLINE | What was the time difference between your finish and Han and Holden's?
JACK | They edited it to be really close. I think we had at least an hour on them.
CARSON | Major props to Jack when he was doing that hoverboard thing. Everything else was so, so, so, so close. After that hoverboard, we felt like we took a huge lead. We saw how many attempts that took for everybody, like 21 attempts, 25 attempts. It was so hard to get that, I imagine. So after that, we knew we had a pretty strong lead, but we did see Han and Holden again at the boating, but it took us... I mean, we were hand-paddling. There was no wind. We were hand-paddling around a whole island. It took an hour-and-a-half maybe. So when we were coming back, we saw them heading out. So we knew we had at least [90 minutes], unless they somehow developed winds...
JACK | It didn't look like anyone really caught any beautiful gusts. So we were pretty comfortably ahead, but we were like, "Anything can change." And also, I think Han and Holden got doubly messed up by the car accident, so that probably also played a hand in that time gap.
TVLINE | All things considered, what was the hardest part of running this race?
JACK | Oh, that's a really good question. No one's asked us that today! I think the hardest part about the race is, honestly, soaking up every moment and being present in every moment, because the instinct is to just keep it moving, you know? On TV you see drone shots and you see these crazy places, but when you're in it, you're in game mode. Sometimes the hardest part was to be like, "Soooo, look!" [Makes a large gesture with his arm]. In a way there's this sadness that this is over, and I think that was part of it. Knowing that this was one of the most important times of our lives, something we'll remember forever, and yet you can't soak it up in the way that you want to. You want to remember every second of what's happening, and it's just not possible. That is something I need to come to terms with. To love it for what I remember it as. I don't know. That's a weird answer, but yeah.
TVLINE | How about specific Roadblocks and Detours. Which one was your absolute nightmare task?
CARSON | The good thing is that we're self-aware. We knew what we were good and bad at. I knew I'm the worst chef in America, so the pizza making...
JACK | Phil literally called it "the pizza nightmare for Carson and Jack!" Also, heights, I feel like, for you.
CARSON | Yeah, that actually was true. I was scared we were both gonna have to go up in the plane or there were a bunch of hot air balloons over the desert in Dubai that I thought we were both gonna have to go up in. I was pretty scared of that, but luckily I didn't get any of that.
JACK | I think my nightmare scenario would be a really physical challenge. Like if I had to do the wood carrying task without Carson. He really clocked in during that, I think. I somehow feel like for Roadblocks, I ended up doing most of the physically taxing tasks anyway. He has better strength. He's a better dancer. I did the dancing task, so we sort of actually lived some of our... not nightmares, but we all almost always picked the wrong Roadblock. That was a running joke like, "OK, should we go opposite today, because our instinct is never right."
CARSON | But what's good about that again is we kept on having this mantra that was like "Obstacles and opportunities." There is something else that happens in your brain when you continuously run up against things that you don't think are gonna be your strengths and we continued to do well, right? So then it's like, "You know what? If I can do this, we can do anything!" If you had no physical things the entire race, and then the last leg had this hugely physical thing, the mental toll that could maybe take on you, being like, "Oh no!" In the final, you start to get crazy, but continuously proving to yourself that you have what it takes is good.
JACK | That is so true! In the last Roadblock, we thought it was going to be a heights challenge, the hoverboard thing. Carson has a way better hold on how his body moves because he's a trained dancer. So then when we realized like, "Oh no, this is not heights. It's a body movement thing," I was a little scared, but then I was like, "I did the dancing and I rocked it." We had these opportunities earlier in the race to be like, "Yeah, we can both do anything."
TVLINE | I spoke to Phil last week, and he said his favorite teams are the ones who really seem to be having fun, and he pointed to you guys as an example. So how did you remain so positive and stave off the stress of the race?
CARSON | We keep talking about how the No. 1 thing we think we did was [go] to therapy together before going on the race, which is not really something that friends do, but it was so helpful for us.
Obviously any close relationship is going to understand what you love about each other, right? But really focusing in on the things that make this friendship so powerful helped us maintain that good mental attitude.
JACK | And I think also learning to release the expectation from the other person. If I'm in a time of stress, your instinct might be, "Well, I need Carson to then hype me up." But actually, no, it's my responsibility to self-soothe because if we're both doing our best to make sure that we're OK individually, we're gonna be putting our best self [forward] for the other person. And so I think releasing the expectation of how the other person should act in any circumstance, good or bad, when you're killing it at a challenge or flopping, like we learned in therapy, we will do our best by being our own therapists throughout the race. It's not your responsibility to look after me, it's mine.
TVLINE | Piggybacking off of that, what did each of you individually learn about yourselves from your experience on the Race?
CARSON | Wow.
JACK | We talked about this in the race a lot, but we play these characters all the time in [Dungeons & Dragons], and in those games you're kind of inherently powerful, and I never thought that we would — oh my God, I'm getting emotional — that we would have that opportunity to prove it to ourselves in the same way that we get to do in these games, and really remember that we can be the heroes of our own lives and we can be whoever we want to be. We have every capability to be powerful. I think that's the biggest takeaway. We are the Frodo and Sam of our own lives and that was big for me.
CARSON | I have spent my life training as an actor. I was on Broadway. I was in a play. My entire life has been in that space and a bunch of that is about trying to control the way that you're perceived. Like, "I'm gonna be typing and if only I was a certain way, I would get something," or "I can use this opportunity to get to the next play," and things like that. There's an interesting thing about participating in games like this where it's like, "Oh, maybe this is me steering away from myself as an actor." But what's so amazing that I learned about myself is that really following whatever your instinct and your gut says about whatever you want to do in your life, it will always pay off, right? I've received nothing but so much love that I thought was going to be judgment from the Broadway or theater community for going on this. I've received so much support from them, and I was like, you know what? We can — back to you being like, "We're the heroes of our lives" — we can do whatever we want, whatever we feel like we're drawn to, and that's only gonna fold into our other passions. The things that make us so three-dimensional, right? I don't need to focus so much on being this two-dimensional person that is packageable for people. We can be so many things at once.
TVLINE | With the Race now done, do you have any interest in competing on other shows? If so, which ones would you want to try out?
JACK | I love Survivor. I applied to Survivor seven times. The Traitors! I mean, hit me up, girls! I'm unemployed.
CARSON | I would do Big Brother.
JACK | The Challenge!
CARSON | I mean, that's the thing about labeling yourself as a gamer, and not just like somebody who likes Monopoly. Meaning that you have a wide breadth of, "I love all types of games," you know what I'm saying? We are down and open to try any type of thing that can combine our competitive spirit with our silly spirit.
JACK | That's a great way to put it. Throw us into something and we will always take it very seriously and very silly. [Laughs]