Racers underestimated tough TV competition
The dream of winning The Amazing Race Canada went down the drain for Shahla Kara and Nabeela Barday on Tuesday night’s second season première. The Herald’s Ruth Myles caught up with the Toronto-based pair to talk about what went wrong in the flood training simulator.
Question: Who and where did you watch the première episode?
Nabeela Barday: We watched it with friends and family. Right now we are practising the month of Ramadan, which is 30 days of fasting, so our first meal of the day happened to be right around 9 o’clock Eastern Time, so we got to have our meal and watch the show all together.
Q: How hard was it not telling people how you did?
NB: It’s been tremendously difficult! The first challenge was not to let people know that we were even participating in this. I took a leave of absence from work and I was very hush, hush about what I was doing. For friends who asked, I just said, ‘Oh Shahla and I are travelling.’ But unfortunately, we didn’t align our stories very well. She said we were going to South Asia, and I said we’re going to South America. If anyone had really thought about it, they would have put two and two together.
Q: How was your experience on the show different than what you thought it would be?
NB: I think I had underestimated how difficult it would be to be on a reality TV show. By that, I mean a camera monitoring your movements, a microphone recording everything you are saying. ... You are thrown all these curveballs from all sides from what your competitors are able to do to how you react to TV to the challenges where you don’t know what to expect.
Q: How did you prepare to be on the show?
Shahla Kara: A little bit of working out, here and there. I think a lot of this Race is mental. You have to prepare yourself and you have to prepare to win and to do challenges that you never expected. ... We looked at past seasons of The Amazing Race, but as you know, nothing is ever the same with the Race. They are always making it challenging and unique every season, so there’s only so much you can do. But Nabeela and I talked about things so we would be on the same page, like what we would take penalties for.
Q: Which brings us to that flood training simulator. Walk us through your experience with that.
SK: Yeah, it was lovely! No, it was challenging. We had a firefighter challenge previous to that (which the audience didn’t see) and it took us quite a while to do that. By the time we got to that tank, I was dehydrated. After that piece fell in the water, I had to go under to get it. I think because my head went underwater, my body started shutting down because I didn’t have anything left. But we tried our best. After the first time, we tried, but after that piece went down again, it was almost game over at that point because Nabeela is scared of confined spaces and I was not up for going under the water again.