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.

Consistency is nearly impossible to come by in The Amazing Race. Every leg ends up shuffling the deck of the constantly-winnowing deck of cards, with teams facing new locations, new tasks, and new forms of transportation. Moreover, on paper, it would seem extra challenging to be consistent on a season filled with people known for their competitive spirit. Despite all that, Kristi Leskinen and Jen Hudak were looking to make history. After all, it was something they had done in their everyday lives, with Kristi, in particular, being a pioneer for women in the skiing field. The X Game champions were able to similarly excel on the race, becoming the first team to never finish below third place intact. But when it came down to the final jump, a high-stress leg put them at the low spot on the podium, taking the bronze medal ultimately.

Starting the race, Kristi and Jen a simple goal to visualize, be the fourth all-female team in Amazing Race US history to win. They took some huge steps towards that goal in the first leg, when their robust navigation and ability to drink the “Black Death” gave them life and a first-place finish. As the first couple of legs progressed, the other two female duos in the forms of The Ring Girls and Team Goat Yoga quickly fell out of it, making “Team Extreme’s” goal that much more extreme. Nevertheless, they persisted, dominating nearly every task in the next seven legs of the race. They had their moments of struggle like any other team, like communication difficulties with their taxi driver in Morocco putting them in last, losing out on second place during the fourth leg’s pétanque Head-to-Head, or leaving the Partner Swap pit stop in last after Kristi and Jessica Graf’s struggles in the Detour got their first place position poached. But every time they faced a difficulty, they applied the same behavior, just as they would when they hit a roadblock (not Roadblock) in real life: feel sad about your situation for a second, then work that much harder to improve it. As a result, they grabbed another first place finish in Prague and were able to avoid being U-Turned due to their navigation and friends Alex Rossi and Conor Daly looking out for them.

When it came down to four teams, though, Team Extreme faced many more trees in their slalom course to the end than they did before. Some issues talking with their sung tow driver led to the first major argument between the teammates over which Detour to take. They ended up trying both options, and their pachyderm-based precision got them one spot ahead of Henry Zhang and Evan Lyndek to avoid last place. Navigation and animals once again put them in the back of the pack when they flew into Hong Kong. First, their taxi driver dropped them off at the wrong location, forcing them to walk to the Victoria Peak photo kiosk. Then, they elected to tie off 50 crabs in a raging “monsoon,” and the difficulty of the task entirely rained on their parades. Though slightly disheartened, they did not give up and found their saving grace in the form of a stubborn briefcase. While Alex and Conor struggled to find the right combination to open it, they were able to decipher the signs and unlock a spot in the finals. Though they had suffered their roughest two legs, they were still confident in their overall strengths as they touched down in San Francisco. Indeed, it looked like things were starting to go right in their direction again, choosing wisely to seek out the code on the baseballs symbolizing Willie Mays’ home run record rather than running off like the other teams. That moment made a world of difference, as it got them into first position going into the final task. Jen was excited to take on an airplane puzzle that tested their memory of symbols from their time on the race. But their until-then smooth flight to the finish hit some unexpected turbulence when she struggled to get the correct combination. It came down to a tense three-way fight between her, Henry, and Jessica. In the end, it was Team Big Brother that blew the house down and finished first, with Team Yale only several minutes behind. After finally finishing, a tearful and frustrated Jen pushed her plane to a kind and forgiving Kristi, and they crossed the finish line defeated, but proud.

After the airing of the finale, Kristi and Jen talk with me about their feelings towards their final leg performance, how they were able to dominate for so much of the race, and what they learned about each other after spending years touring together before the race.

Jen, I know you said at the end of the finale that, once you had some time between you and the final results, you would look back on the race more fondly. Admittedly, seeing everything happen again may have drudged up those feelings once more, but how are you know that said time has passed?

Jen Hudak: I’m going to get emotional. (Laughs.) They didn’t show me cry that much in the race. We’re extremely proud of our performance on the race. I know we’re certainly not loved by everyone, no one can be. But I know that we’ve also inspired some people and shown some vulnerable people what it means to be a strong female in this world today. It’s a mission that was really important to Kristi and me, and we’re extremely proud of how we performed. Watching last night was very difficult, and certainly drudged up a lot of sadness and disappointment that we felt; it’s impossible not to have those feelings when you make it that far in a race like this. But at the same time, for us, the experience and what we’re going to carry forward with us for the rest of our lives is everything that happened in the twelve legs leading up to the final moments in that race. So we’re not allowing that [moment] to define that all for us.

I want to start before the race even started. You’ve both had storied careers up to this point; what led you to want to pursue a spot on The Amazing Race?

Kristi Leskinen: Oh, gosh. Jen actually got the phone call. She had made it pretty far in Survivor casting actually, and she gets a phone call asking, “Are you interested in doing The Amazing Race? Do you have any girl friends with a similar kind of resume as you? And I got the phone call. She says, “What are you doing next week?” I said, “Depends. What’s happening?” She said, “Do you want to go onto The Amazing Race?” I said, “My plans got changed. When do we need to be there?” (Laughs.)

Jen, you said before the race that Kristi served as a great inspiration in your field. What was the relationship between you two like?

Jen: We traveled all over the world for twelve years together, competing in freeskiing events. While we were competing against each other, we got along great, [as we did] with our entire community. But it wasn’t until after we retired that I think we connected on a deeper and more meaningful level and started being able to look at the bigger picture of our sport and what we had been involved in. Kristi was one of the early pioneers of free skiing and someone that I admired. She was this bold, beautiful, and fearless women doing this crazy sport, hanging with the guys, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wanted to be like that, and I’m glad Kristi came before me so I could follow in her footsteps and together, we were able to really pave the way for a lot of females to follow. Getting to watch the Olympics right now, and realizing the role we played, even though we never got to go ourselves, is a pretty special thing.

On that note, there are several points in the race where your gender was highlighted, especially when you ended up as the only all-female team left. Two prominent examples are the trebuchet building Roadblock and the electronics smashing Roadblock, where you end up competing against all men. Kristi, as someone who was used to that in their daily life, did that adequately prepare you for those types of situations?

Kristi: I just want to say that our sport was very challenging. It was difficult; we went through injuries and things like that. It caused us to realize what you can come back from. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and so we faced all the challenges of the race with [the attitude] of “we can get through this.”

To be a bit blunt, did you expect to be as dominant and consistent as you ended up being?

Jen: No. (Laughs.) I don’t think we did. Because we watched the race enough, we know it’s spiky and that at any moment, you can come up to a task that is outside of your wheelhouse. It can completely throw you off and set you back. So we didn’t go setting a goal for ourselves to never fall below third. But two legs into it, we were like, “Well, we haven’t finished below third yet. Maybe we could keep doing this!” So we didn’t go in with the expectation that we would perform that consistent, but we certainly went in with the expectation that we could go the whole way.

I would say, though, that you seemed to have your toughest moments in the third-to-last and second-to-last legs. What was going on in those instances, and do they connect at all with what happened in the end with the final task?

Kristi: [In] Thailand, we had a difficult sung tow. Ours didn’t speak any English and actually didn’t know any of the places that we needed to go to. That put us behind. There is some luck involved, and on the final night in Hong Kong, there were difficult challenges. We weren’t the best with tying the crabs; we had some cab issues. Clearly, the challenge with the bats was difficult. We were the only all-female team left, and that was one of brute strength.

Jen: And to be perfectly honest, Mike, Thailand was a little bit shaky, and Hong Kong was shaky. When Kristi and I were flying to San Francisco, we just took the time on the plane to reflect on everything, to review notes, to prepare ourselves, to calm ourselves down. If you watch the episode–I need to watch it again because watching it [at] viewing parties is always weird–we always were extremely conscious to slow ourselves down at every moment in the final leg. It was paying off, and we were running a virtually flawless leg until we got to the “memory” portion of that final challenge. Then it went all downhill. People can look at that and say that we cracked. We didn’t crack; we didn’t break. In fact, we got stronger going into that final leg of the race. But we misinterpreted something, apparently. (Laughs.) Our clue said to assemble an airplane properly. If you look closely, you can see that my final assembly of an airplane, as with everyone, had one wing facing one direction and one facing the other direction. It took me an extra hour to figure that out.

Kristi: Which is not a proper orientation of the wings.

Yeah, it’s not exactly the most realistic plane. But I suppose that’s the puzzle.

Jen: (Laughs.) It would not have been cleared for take-off if that was an actual plane! It wasn’t so much the images that were giving me a hard time; I thought that you had to have wings on certain sides. With wings on certain sides, you were never going to have the correct combination of images.

Kristi: We thought it was a two-part challenge. First: assemble the plane mechanically correct so that the wings would face forward. Then: solve the puzzle. So Jen got within one piece of having it [completely] correct on the first try, then took it all apart because she realized she’d have to put a wing on backward. She got hung up on some of the mechanical aspects of the plane, and it was really about the puzzle.

Jen: I mean, other teams had to deal with the same thing. I have no idea if it would have changed the outcome of the race at all, and that’s not what I’m trying to say. We’re proud of the race we ran and accepting of the final results. It was a difficult thing. You had to be so exact and precise for the entire eleven legs that came before, so it was a little weird to have something like that. I’ll play that over and over again in my head for a long time, trying to figure out what I was supposed to see what I didn’t see.

I want to talk briefly about your relationships with the other teams. It seemed like you were friendly with everyone, especially Teams Big Brother and Indy Car, to the point where, despite being arguably the biggest threat in the race, you never once faced the U-Turn. Was that a strategy of yours going in?

Kristi: No, there was no strategy in that at all. We traveled the world for several years, and we competed against other people. Having retired, we realized that the important thing is not which contest you won, but the relationships you build and the friends that will last a lifetime. We went into [the race] genuinely wanting to enjoy it, make friends, and have a good time. So our [thinking] from the beginning is that we don’t want to U-Turn anyone. We don’t want to alienate anyone; we want to be friends with everyone. There are some things that come down to luck, or maybe it’s just not your night on the final leg. [If] someone else is going to win, you want to be genuinely happy for them. I guess our alliance was formed just because those friendships were tighter and we would be happier for them if they won instead of others.

Kristi, I believe it was you who attributed the thoughts on your race to the phrase “The journey is the destination.” What will you remember most about your journey on the race with Jen?

Kristi: We got to go on this trip of a lifetime. To wake up in the morning, rip a clue, and have no idea where you’re spending the night and what you’ll be doing in the country the next day, it’s exciting. Jen and I competed in a very adrenaline-packed sport. When we retired, we missed that. The race brought that back into our lives in an enormous way. We loved it, and we made great friendships; those friendships will last forever. We’re going to two weddings and the Indy 500, so it was such a wonderful experience. We would do it again in a heartbeat.

You mentioned a few times how you had toured the world together before. Did you learn anything particularly new about your teammate in the context of The Amazing Race?

Jen: I learned a lot about Kristi. I always knew she was tough, but to actually up close and personal and watch the things that she had to endure and see her continue to push through was impressive and astounding. I’m certainly a good athlete, but Kristi shows me up in many regards. So it was fun to be alongside her and counterbalance each other and work together as a team.

Kristi: We were in an individual sport for several years, competing against each other. To work together and genuinely be cheering each other on was fantastic. Extreme sports athletes get a reputation for being a little thick at times, [but] Jen is brilliant. She’s extremely smart, and I leaned on her a lot. It was truly a special experience.