Pack your bags, because The Amazing Race is back for its 30th season! Every week, Parade’s Mike Bloom will bring you interviews with the team most recently eliminated from the race.

A team’s journey on The Amazing Race can be similar to starting a fire. In the beginning, it takes a bit of kindling and effort to make for the right environment for success, much like the race has its initial growing pains of getting used to the globe-trotting and competitive aspects. Then a spark hits in just the right spot, igniting a flame. But just as quickly as a fire can start, it can go out, something twin firefighters Eric and Daniel Guiffreda know very well. After starting slow, they were able to build some momentum through the middle legs of the race, before a double leg in Zimbabwe spelled double trouble for them.

Though Eric and Daniel had been out of the country before when they were deployed in the military, their international travel as part of the race got off to a rocky start among the crags of Iceland. They ran the early half of the first leg in last place after getting lost, but were spared being the first ones out by the grace of The Ring Girls and Team Goat Yoga’s own navigational difficulties, as well as Team Slam Dunk’s penalty from the Roadblock. They hoped this would be their only flirtation with the bottom, but the bell rung once more in Belgium when they ended up as backward as the type they were attempting to set in the printmaking Detour. Said lack of aptitude with the printing caused them to swap Detours and put them in last place again. This time, they were saved by the first ever Amazing Race Head-to-Head, where Daniel got April’s goat and eliminated the fellow parents. This trajectory continued for the next couple of legs, with the brothers always quickly falling out of it due to navigation or car troubles. Finding a home in the back of the pack, they looked to their backpacks for a slice of home, adorned with pictures of their families. Perhaps this figment of what it’s worth lit that one little spark in them, or perhaps it was the luck in giving these hands-on men a Roadblock to build a trebuchet. But their performance catapulted them into the front for the first time in the race, finishing the leg in third place. That placement helped place them on the first flight with the next leg, and their Copernican knowledge, compounded with cooperation with collegiates Henry Zhang and Evan Lynyak, had them finish even better in second.

Their hot streak, though, seemed to ironically go cold as the teams touched down in the heat of Zimbabwe. They found themselves partnering up with Team Yale again when the first-ever Partner Swap put Evan with Daniel and Henry with Eric. The only team of siblings was about to see if blood was thicker than water, though it certainly wasn’t thicker than the mud that Henry and Eric got stuck in when they tried to navigate their jeep through a water crossing in the Detour. Luckily for them, Evan and Daniel were able to saddle up and gallop through the other side of the Detour, poaching any lead Jessica Graf and Kristi Leskinen had over them. They soon reunited to take on the actual city of Harare, and found themselves in a comfortable spot, especially so when they saw that Teams Big Brother and Yale had been U-Turned. They powered through navigating the labyrinthian Eastgate Mall but came face-to-face with their worst nightmare: a singing task. The brothers felt blue as they stumbled through their Shona in performing “Pasi Pano Pane Zviedzo,” and their lack of rhythm had them fall out of step from the rest of the group. In a rare event, both teams who were U-Turned survived, sending the brothers and their wordplay out of the game. Now out of the race, and with Daniel unable to speak with us, Eric talks with me about what got them into The Amazing Race, why they had such difficulties in the first few legs and the importance of family as a motivator.

The world wants to know: when will you and Daniel come out with your Shona-only album after your spectacular performance in Zimbabwe?

(Laughs.) Aw, man. Maybe during Halloween, because that’s the closest thing we can compare it to on the sound.

(Laughs.) Well, before you started the race, I know you both said you were most afraid of the dancing and singing tasks. When you were met with this task, did you think this would be the one to do you in?

We knew if something did, then it was a really good chance, from the beginning, that would be our Achilles heel. It was in the top two of what was going to take us down. We got over the direction thing; thank God we survived the fiasco with directions the first few legs. We knew it was up there.

I want to go back to all those months ago, even before you were in the race. Were you a fan of the show beforehand, and what made you want to apply?

I’ve been a fan for eight years now since my wife and I have been together. And she’s watched it from day one. Then once we got together, I started watching and became a huge fan. Then my wife told me for two years, “You and your brother should do it! Y’all could do it!” And I said, “No, no, they don’t pick people like us.” She kept on, so I finally said, “We’ll try it.” Then they called us fourteen months later.

So was your wife your coach? Once you got onto the race, did she give you any advice from the perspective of someone who has watched from the beginning?

We were both pretty familiar with how things went on there, and she knew things because she knew me. So, maybe a little bit on a few things, because she knew our tendencies in certain areas.

Outside of your military experience, had you done any international travel before going onto the race?

Just normal sorts of travel. I’ve been to Europe before with the military. We went to the Middle East and Europe as well on the way back as part of a church trip. But those were the main things.

You mentioned that you started off a bit rough because of your directional difficulties. As a fan of the show, would you say the navigation is the most significant discrepancy between the racer experience and the viewer experience?

You see a lot, but you don’t feel anything watching. We got up at 6:00 in the morning to go to the starting line, and I couldn’t fall asleep on the plane. So we’re pulling into Iceland around 6:30 the next morning. They didn’t have food on the plane, and I usually eat every three or four hours. Plus I hadn’t slept in over 24 hours. So that side of things kind of throws you off. And just being in a hurry, getting a feel for everything. Rushing is the number one thing that messed us up. If we did it ever again, that would be my biggest [thing to fix]. Take a step back, take a breath. Even make yourself sit still for two minutes and think about what we’re doing instead of just going into action.

In spite of these navigational difficulties, you received a few saving graces, most prominently the Head-to-Head. What do you think it was about the Head-to-Head tasks that benefitted you guys so well?

The tasks were good. The biggest stress is not knowing where you are [regarding placement]. So whenever we got to wherever we were going, all the stress went away. I thought, “Okay, now I can truly focus on one task here.” I didn’t feel the weight of it. The most stressful thing for me was getting where we needed to go. Once we got there, I got a lot calmer.

As a fan of the race, how did you feel about the Head-to-Head? Admittedly, it may be tough, since you were participants and benefitted from them.

Of course, like you said, it saved us. We liked it for that reason. But overall, I don’t like the placement of it. I felt it could be unfair to the teams that did everything right and got there first. But on the other hand, it’s a twist of the game. I would have liked them to be somewhere in the middle [of the leg], so someone had a chance to catch up at the next pass and it may affect the time you got to work on your Detour or your Roadblock. So I just really didn’t like the placement.

I also found it interesting that, in spite of the difficulties you guys experienced, you seemed always to be very positive and full of corny jokes. Is that just part of the way you were raised?

That’s just who we are. Going into it, I said, “Of course I want to win. But I want to have a good time, because more than likely, we’ll only be able to do this once in a lifetime. So let’s enjoy it and enjoy what we’re doing.” Our goal was always to win, but not to be so focused on every detail so that if something goes wrong, we won’t be devastated and crying. Because we won’t enjoy any of it. I was happy with my life going into it; I’m blessed with two wonderful daughters and a wife. None of that was going to change. I was happy going into the race, and I was going to be happy leaving, so I didn’t let any of that dictate every part of me.

Speaking towards that family element, we heard a lot about how you guys were anchored by family. Mainly, Daniel had his head in an intriguing place, considering he had a son only a couple of days before going on the race. Was it tough to put yourself in the race with family on the brain?

That’s one thing we just kind of compartmentalized. We mentioned it every once in a while. But for the most part, we tried not to think about it too much. We both had pictures tied to our packs. We looked at them, but we didn’t really bring it up because it’s different when you start thinking about them and talking about them. It makes you a little homesick, but [you] just kind of keep moving. If it weren’t for family, I would have definitely been gone. It wouldn’t have mattered to me. It’s just motivation because all the money would have meant for me would be creating more opportunities, freedom, and time to spend with them. That was one of our goals.

Let’s touch down in Zimbabwe. You end up by default with Team Yale, but you had been working together before, and you said if you had a choice, you would have picked them. Did you get along well with them in particular?

We were close the whole time. Everybody was pretty close. You travel the world, and 85% of the race you’re on the move in airplanes. So that is your family, so we talked a lot. We got along well with them, so it was just a natural fit. [Looking back], I would have possibly picked an all-male team, just because we thought it was going to be physical. They were definitely in our top two choices.

Well, you got that all-male experience with you and Henry, where you ran into some trouble with the mud. How long were you guys there fruitlessly working that winch to try to get your jeep out?

Maybe an hour or 45 minutes. They worked us to death on there. The whole point of the challenge was to get stuck because you were only allowed to go five or ten miles per hour, which wasn’t sufficient to get through a hole like that. People walked through the shallow part on the left side, and they kept saying, “We can’t go on the right, it’s a drop-off.” But we didn’t have a choice since someone was already stuck in the shallow side.

Did it help to have Henry in that situation? I can imagine how stressful it was, a different pair of people might have led to more combustion and arguing.

Henry is incredibly laid back. I would joke, “I think you can punch Henry in the face, and he’s kind of laugh and say, ‘It’s okay.'” He just doesn’t get angry; he’s very calm and collected. So he was the easiest partner in the world to work with. He pulls his weight; he got out there and was working just as hard as I was in every aspect. We supported each other and never fought, never had a boon of tension between us.

I want to speak to your overall race. You kept talking about how the firehouse and your family back home would react to some of the things you and Daniel were doing on the race. Now that everything has aired, what has the reception been like?

Overwhelming support. So much encouragement. It’s all been positive. Of course, some of my buddies and the guys at the firehouse love to pick on us. I knew we were done for when we had to get in fry costumes and when we couldn’t go in reverse in our car. Within 30 seconds, I had ten texts from the guys saying, “What is going on here?”

Hopefully they didn’t put you in charge of driving the fire engine anytime soon after that.

(Laughs.) They were like, “Man, what are we gonna do?!”

You and Daniel were the only team familially connected on this season, and you guys have known each other since birth. Did you learn anything new about him while being on the race?

We always joke and say we were “wombmates,” then we were roommates, then we were platoonmates since we went to boot camp together. The race is special, but it’s really not a comparison to three months of non-stop. We were in the same platoon in boot camp, and we were deployed together as Marines, so that’s a whole different kind of stress. We’ve really been through the most stress we can possibly be in together. And we were together when our family members died. So there really wasn’t anything new that we were going to learn.