Wisconsin’s Amazing Race Winners

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• Wisconsin’s ‘Sweet Scientists’ Talk About Their 'Amazing Race' Win

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  For those who love to travel, an around-the-world trip might sound like heaven, but probably not like Amy DeJong and Maya Warren did it.

  DeJong and Warren are graduate students in food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They recently won the 25th edition of “The Amazing Race,” a reality show on the CBS television network.

  The race takes teams of two around the world, performing tasks and challenges as they go. The winners of each leg receive a prize, and the team that comes in last each leg is usually eliminated.

  Warren and DeJong not only traveled to places they might never get the chance to, but also to take part in activities specific to the local culture. DeJong related the story of when she had to remove the hair from a goat hide in the tanneries of Morocco.

  “That’s nothing something people would ordinarily schedule as part of their vacation,” DeJong said.

  “I don’t think you can even schedule that as part of your vacation!” Warren added.

  “You’re totally immersed in the culture, and you can’t buy that. It’s literally a priceless thrill,” Warren said.

  To prepare for the competition, DeJong said that they worked out every day, focusing both on running and strength training.

  “We knew that as an all-female team, not having a really strong guy could potentially hurt us,” DeJong said. “We knew that we weren’t going to win the race based on our brute strength, but we didn’t want it to be a major weakness.”

  The advantage that they had over other teams was their scientific background and their analytical skills. That included watching many past seasons to try and figure out why all-female teams didn’t do as well.

  “We really wanted to approach it strategically and understand where are people’s downfalls, and we can win the race,” DeJong said.

  Warren added that they didn’t just watch the past episodes, they “really studied it. Like to talk about how (they) would approach a task that (they) saw on the show.”

  Warren said that they not only applied their analytical approach to the show, but to themselves. She said that they spent a lot of time trying to understand each other and themselves. While they had been lab mates, they had not spent a lot of time together socially, she said.

  “We had to learn each other in more stressful situations and in ways that would test our relationship as we were sort of building our relationship,” Warren explained.

  “The show is really about relationships,” Warren said.

  She noted that those relationships can be anything, from parent and child, to any combination of romantic partners, to friends like them. She thinks that their relationship worked well because it didn’t have the emotional baggage of a couple or close family members.

  “We could let things go a little easier, which helped us. If something happened, just brush it off and keep going,” Warren said.

  As a result, she said she thinks it’s better for friends to do the race together, “if they’re level-headed,” she added. Couples have won more than friends, though, she admitted.

  DeJong said that “trying not to be last was a decent strategy for us.” Warren said that ultimately, the goal is “not to be last, ever. You usually try to be first, at least more than once. But in our case, it worked out totally fine that we were first once!” That was, of course, in the final, deciding leg.

  Warren and DeJong are proud of how they ran the “Race,” not just because they stayed positive and didn’t attack other teams, but for the choices they made that allowed them to win.

  Explaining how their background as scientists and their habit of methodical thinking helped them, Warren said, “we over-thought the things that we should over-think, like how to approach the race and different tasks, instead of should you turn left or right when you’re driving,” she said.

  “We ran a much smarter race than any of the other teams, but you don’t see it as well because it’s harder to portray on camera. But if you look back on how we ran the race, we ran it using our minds more than anything else. And it’s a mental game at the end of the day,” Warren said.

  When asked if they would run “The Amazing Race” again, both Warren and DeJong said yes.

  “Absolutely, 100 percent would do the ‘Race’ again if given the opportunity to do so,” DeJong said.

  “Winners’ edition! Please, let’s do it!” Warren added.