The Amazing Race "Married Dentists" team of Misti Raman and Jim Raman finished the CBS reality competition's 25th season in second place, losing the $1 million to Amy DeJong and Maya Warren, during the finale episode.
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"Married Surfers" Bethany Hamilton and Adam Dirks claimed third place, and "Dating Pro Wrestlers" Brooke Adams and Robbie E. Strauss were eliminated halfway through the final leg and therefore landed in fourth place.
In an exclusive interview with Reality TV World, Misti and Jim talked about their The Amazing Race experience. Below is the concluding portion. Click here to read the first half.
Reality TV World: How much brain vs. brawn would you say is necessary to succeed on the Race?
Jim Raman: Oh I definitely think you need a good mix, you know, not just brains and brawn but also communication, team work -- there's a lot of different variables. But the reason I felt that Misti and I were such a strong team was because we are well-rounded, because we're not the most athletic people but we're athletic enough, and we're not the most intelligent people but we're intelligent enough.
We just kind of have a broad range of skill sets, so I felt like being well-rounded was what was going to separate us from the other teams. Additionally, we've been together for 16 years, so the communication is there and we can finish each other's sentences. We think alike.
But yeah, I definitely think -- obviously if you look back historically, it's not the jocks that always win or the most athletic people. You just need that balance and also the ability to stay calm under pressure, which is an area that me and Misti didn't always do well in.
Reality TV World: I was just going to ask if the pressure got to Misti during that final memory task with the containers. Did you get flustered? And what was that experience like for you Jim, just waiting on the sidelines with the other teams?
Jim Raman: For me, being the type of person that I am, when the game is on the line, I want the ball. So it was hard for me to sit by and watch and not have any control. I like to be the one in control.
But I also knew that, you know, Misti is super intelligent and she's got a great memory, she's got endless drive, she'll never quit, I knew she'd give 100% until the end. So, while it didn't feel good to [not] be in control, it felt great to have a partner like her who was.
Misti Raman: And, you know, I don't think that I was necessarily overly stressed. It was certainly a stressful situation given that the knowledge it's the last leg and it's THE last challenge is going to determine our placement. That in and of itself was stressful. We're very hot, I mean, we're getting sunburned out there, we've been out there for hours.
And all of that, yeah, makes it a stressful situation. The memorization component of it -- although very, very difficult -- was not the issue that I had. I found all of the containers early and that didn't take me long to find them. There was one container though that I could not find, and that was London.
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What made me want to bang my head against the wall is that London was a very obvious container. It was on one of the main stretches in the maze and it was written very largely. The other containers, some of them were written much smaller, they were harder to see because they were in narrower places. They were just harder to find.
London was one that was very obvious. I can assure you the other teams did not have trouble finding London, so that's what was completely frustrating for me. But I found everything very quickly. It was very difficult though because you had to find all the cities obviously we traveled to, and you had to find the corresponding color -- that was yours, assigned to you -- and the numbers that went with each city.
So it wasn't even that there were nine cities with 1-9 numbers. Singapore and Copenhagen may have had No. 3. So you had to keep numbers in order that didn't necessarily correspond with when you visited them and some of the cities having the same numbers was very difficult. So it was a very difficult, very difficult challenge.
And the fact we couldn't take notes, we couldn't jot anything down -- we could do nothing but store everything, you know, in your brain and hope you could get that back on paper whenever you finally got to the end. It made it very difficult, but you know, it was the fact of not being able to find one very, very obvious container that was most frustrating for me.
But it is what it is. It played out like it did and Amy did not struggle with finding all the containers. She was able to see them, and it wasn't a pace-set challenge by way of having to run.
And so, her knee hurting her was not really an issue for her. You just needed to find it, see it, and store it, and repeat it. And she just did that most efficiently, so deserved -- they deserved -- to take first place because they did it the quickest. It is what it is.
It was very frustrating, but to say that we were overly stressed, we were far more stressed during the leg in Copenhagen whenever we took last place. And it was just the domino effect of making one mistake after the other that put us into last place. That was more stressful than that last challenge.
Reality TV World: Would you ever be interested in competing in an all-stars edition? And if so, based on your experience this season, would you do anything differently to better your game or chance of winning?
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We just need to really slow down and stay calm and make an extra effort to do that. Because I feel like when we made errors, that's when we made them -- when we let the pressure get to us. And we'd pack a little lighter. We needed to drop a bunch of gear after the fifth leg in Morocco. We'd definitely pack lighter and carry less stuff with us.
Click here to read the first half of Misti and Jim's exclusive interview with Reality TV World.
About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski