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.

It’s natural for a show like The Amazing Race to run high on emotions. The show involves people pushed to their physical and mental limits, continually immersing themselves in literal foreign cultures. The high variance that every leg provides can allow teams to feel the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat within an instant’s notice. It’s safe to say that Lucas Bocanegra and Brittany Austin were swimming in emotion throughout the race. The lifeguards entered the show with one of the only romantic relationships, and that passion burned as they went through roadside spats, rivalries, mat proposals, and ultimately a fatal passport loss, ending their race before the ninth leg even got started.

Lucas and Brittany started the race with nine years of a relationship under their belts. But they were realistic about how that would translate to the race, with Lucas tending to get pessimistic and frustrated while Brittany acted admittedly high maintenance. It took the first few days for them to get their sea legs, finishing in the middle of the pack. But that moderate success soon sank when they went to Morocco. At a physically exhausting Roadblock, Brittany temporarily gave custody of her Travelocity gnome to Jessica Graf and ran off without it. Though she was able to forgive the “gnome pas,” the seeds of mistrust had been planted. They continued to struggle when the teams traveled to France, and their frustrations with each other hit a gas station door-slamming boiling point as they attempted to navigate the confusing roads. Perhaps it was this feeling of emotional low that led to their back-to-back defeats in the season’s second Head-to-Head. Despite their difficulties, they were able to outscore Shawn Merion and Cedric Ceballos, and Brittany went from balling to bawling on the mat as she talked about their tough day.

It’s always darkest just before the dawn, though, and as dawn came upon the Les Baux province on the fifth leg, Lucas and Brittany were about to have their best day ever. Lucas’s building skills allowed him to construct a trebuchet that catapulted them into the lead for the first time in the race. They hung onto it, much like a bullfighter would hang onto his tempestuous arena partner, and finished the leg in first place. To add some icing on top of that sweet treat, Lucas pulled out his own ice: an engagement ring. Now tearful for a entirely different reason, Brittany accepted, and Team Ocean Rescue (or Beach Ocean/Ocean Spray, depending on who you’re talking to) were hopeful their change in relationship status signified a shift in racing patterns. As they headed to Prague, they found navigational difficulties to get the best of them again. But it was another team that proved to be more frustrating, as at the Roadblock, Jessica seemed to be withholding her answer from Brittany and Alex Rossi to get out first, despite having worked with them. It was a move that ended up turning the two couples against each other, culminating in a trip to the U-Turn board that allowed the lifeguards to have the last laugh. They got to channel this joyful energy into a Shola performance at the end of the leg, and Lucas’s ability to overcome his stage fright had him going from the Wench King to the Dance King. The two had won another leg and an additional honeymoon for their efforts, but they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The final five teams all made a transfer at the Dubai International Airport for their flight to Bahrain: their next destination. But one team wouldn’t end up making that flight; Lucas had misplaced his passport on the flight to Dubai, meaning they were not able to progress. And though he and Brittany tried their best to swim against this tidal wave of a situation by expediting a new passport at the American consulate, the current proved too strong. The elimination undertow had sucked them under the surface, leading Phil Keoghan to end their race in the inky black of night.

Now out of the race, Lucas and Brittany talk through their history with Jessica and Cody Nickson, as well as their reasoning behind U-Turning them; how they were able to deal with the highs and lows of the race; and what the origin of their “pineapple” safe word was.

I know things ended on a down note for you two, so let’s start with something positive. How’s the wedding planning been going? Brittany, are you still angling to ride horses in the water like you wanted to after the Zimbabwe legs?

Brittany Austin: (Laughs.) Listen, I can be good with riding a horse down the aisle as Well-Strung serenades us with African music in the background. I want it all. But it’s going to be a beach wedding for sure. Cancun, Mexico, the Riviera Maya with my closest and dearest.

Lucas Bocanegra: I think her Pinterest account has been blowing up with all of the wedding planning for the past nine weeks.

Lucas, are you going to build a palapa or some other structure to get married under, considering how good you are with construction?

Brittany: You just gave me a great idea, thank you very much! I’m totally going to add that. (Laughs.)

Lucas: Now I’m going to have to add one. If we had won a million dollars, I would have paid someone to do that for me.

(Laughs.) We should move to the way things had ended. I want to give you both major kudos for not only being able to handle losing your passports but being able also to get a temporary one so quickly and actually avoid getting eliminated at the airport. How were you able to grab onto that glimmer of positivity, knowing there’s a chance you may be able to catch up?

Brittany: Or maybe it’s a non-elim.

Lucas: Yeah, we were hoping it would maybe be a non-elimination. My heart sank when I watched the plane leave the gate with my passport in it, knowing it wouldn’t land until five hours later and the other teams were about to board the next plane in about 30 minutes. At that point, there’s nothing I can do. I wasn’t thinking about the race; I was actually thinking about getting a passport and getting back to the States. I didn’t think it was going to go that quickly. We had a lot of help regarding going to the consulate and getting our paperwork done. When we were finally able to get a temporary passport, it was one of those things where we thought, “What if?” We had a leg in Iceland that lasted ten hours; maybe this would be a non-elimination. We would just [need] to get through everything. Yeah, we would have to do a Speed Bump, but who cares? We can go right through it.

Brittany: You see it over and over. You put it out into the universe and hope that maybe, somehow, it comes true. (Laughs.) The only other option is to be devastated, and nobody wants to feel devastated for that long.

Speaking towards that devastation, it’s safe to say you were one of the more emotional teams out there. Brittany, you in particular wore your heart on your sleeve. Did that just come from the pressures of the race, or does that come from who you are?

Brittany: I’m a very emotional person in general. I’m very compassionate, and I feel everything around me. As you said, I wear my heart on my sleeve, and anything I think or feel I will either say or show on my face. The race definitely caught me off-guard in how much of a whirlwind it is. We didn’t know what to expect. I’m the kind of person where whether I’m happy, sad, angry, frustrated, or hangry, it all comes out through my tear ducts. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to be crying. It’s just the way I manifest.

Lucas: I’m one of the least emotional people, so Brittany is emotional for both of us.

Brittany: (Laughs.)

Lucas: We can sit down and watch a Disney movie, and she’ll be crying, and I get a kick out of it.

Brittany: He likes to film me and store [them] on his phone.

Lucas: So I can see how funny it is.

I’m the Brittany in my marriage, so I feel you there. Those Disney movies have a lot of tearjerking moments!

Lucas and Brittany: (Laugh.)

Let’s backtrack to even before the race started. What prompted you two to want to go onto the show? Brittany, you had just won a national rowing competition. Were you looking for another proverbial gold medal to put on the shelf?

Lucas: I wasn’t a huge fan of the show. I had watched some things here and there, [but] I didn’t know much about the show. Which goes to show how we did so poorly in some of the legs; we should have been a little more educated on the show. We were lucky enough that they reached out to our headquarters and our chief saying, “We’re looking for a couple of lifeguards who have done some badass things.” And we thought, “Hey what a great chance for us to travel the world…”

Brittany: And possibly win a million dollars.

Lucas: At that point, we were gung-ho to try to get on that show.

Brittany: The timing on it worked out. We hadn’t had kids yet like you said I just came off the high of winning nationals, which was a big plus for me. We have a job where we can–

Lucas: Take time. And they were very gracious to let us go on this trip and travel. We had a great experience doing it. We won two trips to places we only dreamed of going.

You just spoke about the highs, let’s talk about the lows. You definitely have your worst argument in Saint-Tropez, where we experience the most dramatic closing of automatic doors I had ever seen. What was going on that day that led things to boil over?

Lucas: At this point, we were doing the self-driving leg to Saint-Tropez. We had never been to Saint-Tropez. I had no idea where it was located.

Brittany: I knew where it was, come on.

Lucas: It was somewhere in France. We did have a map to get to the location. We were actually right behind Big Brother. Big Brother turned off, and we turned off, and we realized we were going the wrong way. At this point, we were severely lost. We kept watching teams go past us, but we weren’t able to do a U-turn to get back with them. We got to a gas station, and Brittany asked a really nice man on a scooter–

Brittany: He was lovely!

Lucas: –to tell us where we were. And the guy couldn’t tell us where we were, and at this point I got frustrated.

Brittany: I knew we had him, so I wanted to milk him for as much juice as I could get out of him. Lucas kind of snapped at him, and I’m very compassionate. So that’s what set me off. It really upset me that he was rude to somebody else. I’m used to going back and forth with him; I can take it.

Lucas: And then we realized the map we were showing this poor old man was actually the wrong map. It showed a map of Saint-Tropez and not the location we were. So the guy couldn’t tell us where we were on the map because that was the wrong map! We finally realized where we needed to be, and so we just went on our way and completed the rest of the leg.

Brittany: It’s a race, you get frustrated, you go back and forth. But you always understand the other person’s mindset. You see me recover quite quickly from the little spat that we had with the doors. It’s funny because he walked through [the doors] to ask the attendant and I was walking behind him. But then I thought, “Well, I’m mad at him. I don’t want to be in there with him anyway.”

So the doors did the work for you!

Brittany: Yeah! So I just stepped back, and I was standing too close to the doors that they just closed. It made for great TV, apparently.

And then you were able to barely win the Head-to-Head, then go on to finish first and get engaged! That was a heck of a two-hour episode for you both.

Lucas:

Brittany: A perfect mix of up and down.

Let’s move away from your intrateam relations to your inter-team relations. I want to talk about your relationship with Cody and Jessica, starting with the gnome in Morocco. Brittany, do you feel the show represented what you were feeling at the time?

Brittany: It’s funny. In the heat of the race, there are a lot of things you don’t see. My initial idea was since I was standing there, she took the gnome out of my hands, and I didn’t give her permission. I assumed she had done it purposely to hinder my progress. What they don’t show is that when I did come back to get my gnome, she was still there. At the end of the day, it was so subjective that it was hard for me to know what the truth was. Lucas was really good in calming me down, talking some sense into me and saying, “Hey, it could have just have been the heat of the moment.” It’s safe to say I didn’t have much trust in her going in, but I didn’t have any hate for her. It’s a game, and at the end of the day, had she left her gnome, I wouldn’t have told her either. We were at the back of the pack; it was a strategic move. That part of it was perfectly acceptable. I no longer think, for the record, that she stole my gnome. We probably both should have realized there was a second phone to use, and we could have avoided the whole debacle! It was emotion, and it was frustration, and things happened.

Jumping forward to Prague, you get some further feelings towards Jessica when she tries to leave you and Alex high and dry at the Roadblock. What was going on there?

Brittany: The only thing they didn’t show is that I was the one to unscramble the actual phrase. We were missing the word “the,” and I just assumed that was the word. The questionnaire was very tricky, so [if you got it wrong], you assumed it was because of the questionnaire and not the phrase. Again, it was a race. She pulled a play that she thought was the best, and it got her out of there before us. At the end of the day, she gave me more words than I had to begin with. It is what it is, and we ended up beating her to the mat anyway.

So then what was the reasoning behind U-Turning them a couple of legs later? Was it purely strategic, or did it have some revenge in there as well?

Lucas: At this point in the race, from what I had watched and heard in the little research I had done, the people who usually win The Amazing Race are 80% couples. It’s not girl/girl teams; it’s not guy/guy teams. It’s usually couples who do well on the race. I knew that at one point, we were going to have to compete against other couples. And all the couples were still in the race at this point. Cody was the stronger one on that team, and he was the only other guy I was really concerned with as far as going head-to-head with me building things. He was a good builder; he beat us in the tent challenge, even though he had a head start, and he came out right behind me in the trebuchet one. I knew they were a very competitive team. I didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes regarding the gnome or the phone.

Brittany: There was definitely mistrust there.

Lucas: So we figured, at this point, they had come in first in the past two legs as far as getting to the tents and getting to the mat from the 4×4 [Detour]. It’s a no-brainer. They’re the strongest team that’s further back in the pack. You never want to U-Turn a very strong team, like the skiers. We didn’t have anything negative with them, so all we would do is create animosity if we U-Turned them and they came back from it. As you can see, our decision wasn’t a poor decision, because they came back from it anyway. Both teams made a good decision in U-Turning [Big Brother and Yale] because they’re competitive if they’re strong enough to come back from that.

We heard at the beginning of the season that you had a safe word of “pineapple.” How many times would you estimate you said that on the race?

Lucas: (Laughs.) I think we only used “pineapple” once, and that was back in Belgium. Because it didn’t work!

Brittany: Once I said it, and it didn’t do anything, and he got even more frustrated, I was like, “Well, that didn’t work.” It was a good idea, but it didn’t work. It got a lot of attention, that’s for sure.

So was that a strategy you employed before the race or was this something inherent in your relationship to begin with?

Brittany: Absolutely for the race.

Lucas: When we’re at home, and I’m driving and Brittany’s navigating, she uses her Google Maps and has the voice going on–

Brittany: He wants that! He wants me to go in there and make my own navigational strategy right on the spot as he’s turning. It’s ridiculous. (Laughs.)

Lucas: So it’s definitely something that we wanted to do on the race. Maybe we need something to calm each other down.

Brittany: My best friend actually loves me very much and decided, “You need a safe word, so when it gets to that point, you don’t make a fool of yourselves on camera.” And she came up with the word pineapple.

It’s a unique word to use, especially in Belgium!

Brittany: It is! It’s something that you wouldn’t normally say in a conversation. It’s kind of a nickname I have for her brothers, so it worked out. Every time I would say it, it would also be a way to reach out and look for support from her. So it was a bit of a therapeutic thing for me, as well as saving him from blowing up. Of course, it was only said once, so once I saw that it didn’t work, I stopped using it. To be fair, we got a little bit better during the race, so we didn’t need it quite as much.

You two came into the race already been in a relationship for nine years. Did you learn anything new about each other given this new environment to test your bonds?

Brittany: We pretty much knew every reaction that we were each going to have with the specific situations. And we were correct on all of the reactions that we had. (Laughs.) I think the one thing that we learned is, after this whole debacle that came after the show aired, all the hatred and backlash that I have personally been receiving. It’s been really hard; we’re quiet people with quiet lives who don’t really look to be in the public eye. I wasn’t expecting to get so much hate. In part because of the tension like you mentioned with another team. It’s nice to see Lucas be supportive and holding in my corner. No matter what, he’s been there non-stop to help get me through it. That’s the one thing we’ve taken away from the race: no matter what people can throw at us, we’re still going to be there for each other.