Many of you might have watched the exciting conclusion to the latest season of "The Amazing Race." It came down to all three remaining teams -- TK and Rachel, Ron and Christina and Don and Nicholas -- all having a shot at the top prize. Rachel, Chris and Nick were trying to figure out a complicated Roadblock where they had to figure out which precise objects to put on a stage to represent all the legs of the Race.

Even though Chris had a headstart and got all but one right on her first try, Rachel managed to get everything correct to give herself and TK a lead they would never relinquish. On Monday, I spoke with all the finalists, and here's the highlights of TK and Rachel. I'll try to get the best of the other two in a post tomorrow.

MSN: Guys, congratulations on winning the Amazing Race.

TK: Thank you very much.

MSN: Obviously you must have been psyched for some time, because the Race itself was finished in, what, August or something?

TK: Yeah, the end of July.

MSN: It must have been really tough to not say to everybody, "We're millionaires. We did this whole adventure and finished first."

Rachel: It's not so much not being able to tell people that we won the money. It was much more not being able to share what we had learned and share our experiences.

MSN: What was the highlight for you guys, other than obviously finishing first?

TK: I think the highlight was making the train after our Speed Bump in Taipei. We were in a situation where we knew there was a 7:35 train and we knew there was an 8 o'clock train, and we knew Nick and Don and Nate and Jen were going to be close as to whether they made the 7:30 train. And then we were going to be close as to whether we made the 8 o'clock train. The fact that we made that train and they were still there, we were so fired up. It was so unbelievable.

MSN: What's your take on that, Rachel? What would you say is the highlight, other than winning the grand prize?

Rachel: Definitely what TK said too, but my personal high was finishing that Roadblock and knowing my competitors were so fierce and that I had found what was maybe the last, final piece of the puzzle to make us win.

MSN: Tell me more about how you guys first met.

Rachel: Well our moms had been friends basically from before we were born. They had the same jobs. And TK and I just grew up a lot differently. We were really busy in high school. We had different paths, different crowds. He went away to college and when he came back, I was going to go to the movies with my mom and he decided to tag along with his mom and we just really hit it off and kept trying to come up with excuses to keep the night going. After that, we`kept making plans and and started hanging out every day.

MSN: So you guys have been together how long roughly?

TK: About a year and a half now.

MSN: And what made you decide to go on the Race?

Rachel: I watched the show, and one day I dropped my parents off and I was there with TK. A commercial came on and they were holding open calls, and it was just a couple hours away. ... It just felt right that I saw this commercial. As much as I knew about TK at that point and how our relationship was going, I knew that we had a good formula going that would work well for the Race. It was just an adventure, something new. And that's where I was trying to go with my life. So we just went down and stood in line and went from there.

MSN: So how did you guys steer clear of the drama that hits so many couples that go on the Race?

TK: We don't really have much drama in our everyday life. I think we may have come off to some of the other Racers as lackadaisical or not really rushing, but it's a little interesting, because from our point of view we were so competitive and wanted to win so much that we weren't willing to waste any time arguing amongst each other and that wouldn't have made any sense in our attempts to win the Race, you know?

MSN: What kind of strategy did you pursue while you were running the Race?

TK: We really wanted people to underestimate us. Rachel is fairly petite, and we both look a little different. I think a lot of people underestimated us going into it. And then we just wanted to take everything one step at a time, be as positive as we could. The fact that we were able to enjoy so much of it put us ahead of any team that wasn't able to do that.

MSN: Rachel, do you have any additional thoughts on that point?

Rachel: Yeah. We had watched a bunch of the seasons before we had actually gone on the Race and saw that teams were normally successful when they stayed together and stayed calm. We're human beings so obviously we have that fluctuation of stress. It's a stressful situation but we just chose to take that nervous energy and used it to calm ourselves down so we could use our brains to the fullest capacity.

MSN: What if anything might you change if you had it to do all over again?

TK: It'd be a little silly for us to want to change anything at this point, but I don't know. It's really a situation where each thing that happened affects what is coming next. It may have been that some of our mistakes put us in a position to get ahead later on in the Race. I think we ran a good Race and got lucky at the right times.

MSN: What do you think was your biggest piece of luck?

TK: I suppose our biggest piece of luck was that the only leg we came in last was a non-elimination leg. If that leg hadn't been non-elimination, we would have been eliminated. So I suppose the fact that we got last on a non-elimination leg was a great deal of luck.

MSN: What would you say was the most memorable task other than the final Roadblock, of course.

Rachel: Most memorable, even if I didn't have the best time, was most of the challenges in Burkina Faso, especially when I had to take the bike into the market. I'll definitely never forget that because it's like nothing I've ever seen before. It's hard to describe. Even seeing it on TV didn't do it justice. It's definitely the strangest place I felt I was, the most unordinary Where-am-I, I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this situation.

TK: For me, the most memorable I guess, all of it was great. But being in India, I guess, just the leg in India was an eye-opener, being able to see such a drastically different culture close up. It was a privilege.

MSN: What sort of stuff didn't make it to air that you wish did make it to air?

Rachel: For me, it was a downtime. It plays a big part of it. ... Like when TK, Nate, Jen and I went swimming in Croatia, the night in Burkina Faso where we slept outside and had dance entertainment and things like that that don't get shown. And I think they don't quite portray the time a lot of the challenges take or the distance we're driving. It wasn't really shown to its full extent.

TK: A lot of the downtime. We took a ferry from Croatia to Italy. The ferry didn't leave till the evening, so we had the entire day to swim around the Adriatic and jump off rocks. It was just an unbelievably memorable great day in Croatia.

MSN: What surprised you most about being on the Race?

TK: How physically demanding it was was probably the most surprising to me. Not so much running from place to place and things like that, but lack of food and lack of sleep. That's probably the hardest part of the Race, hands down. In Italy, I went 36 hours without sleeping or eating. By the end of that, you're just feeling a little bit crazy. Everything everyone says you take out of context, and everything is much more intense when you're tired and hungry.

MSN: Rachel, talk about the final Roadblock. How did you manage to get all the pieces in place before everybody else?

Rachel: I still can't believe I was able to do it before everybody else. What I did, I had a journal all along the whole Race. Every time I would take down information that was given to us, directions, what have you, I would jot it down. Whenever I would have time, I would kind of recap what we had done in previous days. Having watched previous seasons, I knew there was a good chance that the last challenge would have something to do with memory of the Race or something like that. So we really took time on the flight to Alaska looking the notebook over, making sure we memorized the order of all the countries we had been in and the key points of each place and just really talked about it and refreshed our memories. So that probably helped me. And because I was able to stay calm, my mind was a little more clear than maybe the other two competitors were and that could have helped me too. I like puzzles. I like doing things like that, so it worked well with my mind.

MSN: Now Ron and Chris said they had sort of a 40-minute taxi ride out of the way on that last leg. Did you guys have any sort of taxi problems?

TK: Yeah, on the last leg, from the Roadblock where Rachel finished in first to the finish line, we got lost big time in Alaska to the point where when we were approaching the finish line, we had no idea if we were in first or third or what was going on. We had gotten so turned around we knew that if one of the other teams had finished the Roadblock and gone straight to the finish line, they would have beaten us. We're very fortunate that Ron and Chris's driver got lost as well.

Rachel: The guy we had was a total local. He knew all about it. The clues on the last leg, everything was supposed to be a mind puzzle. We went on a scavenger hunt. It was not direct whatsoever. So the answer to where we were supposed to be taken had a couple different possibilities, and our taxi guy, he just had a gut feeling. He said he was certain. He took us there. We just really had to trust him. Unfortunately, Ron and Chris's taxi driver tried one of the other options first that took them out of the way.

MSN: What advice would you give to people who want to compete in the Race?

TK: I would say it's the adventure of a lifetime. If you're the type of person who can go a day or two without eating or sleeping and without freaking out, then you're made for the Race. It's probably not worth ruining the relationship over.

MSN: How has being on the Race affected your relationship?

Rachel: I think overall it's brought us closer because we hadn't been together that long. And to be able to deal with all the traveling and not be apart more than 20 feet for the whole month definitely was a good test. We already had really strong feelings for each other. We had a great connection and then to be able to work so well together and accomplish a goal.

MSN: What are you guys going to do with your prize?

TK: Well, we both have a couple of bills lingering over our heads it'd be nice to pay off. We've got to live modest lifestyles. Neither one of us is expending a whole lo of money on anything. I'm mostly excited because Rachel's a bit of a workaholic and it's going to afford us the opportunity for her to take some time off of work and hopefully get some good traveling done in 2008.

MSN: Where would you guys like to go that you haven't already been?

Rachel: One of our traveling priorities is we have family we haven't seen because of financial reasons or we can't get off work. It's definitely shown us that traveling is a lot easier than it seemed beforehand and we know it's attainable. So we now know it's important to do that traveling. So we're going to visit our family first and then we're going to be able to take the trips we won along the Race, so we're going to do that. And find some more adventures too.

MSN: Alright, guys, do you want to add anything else?

TK: I'm not morally opposed to the U-Turn. It came across that way, but it wasn't the truth.

Rachel: We really did get to know the other teams very well, and for us, that was a big part of the experience, the friendships we made.

- posted by Raoul