USD Magazine, Spring 2002

ble, Bartek says the tests of his will were the most memorable. "There were days where you didn't eat or sleep, but it was the mental part that was the most stressful. I'm acrophobic, and I had to bungee jump off a 300- foot cliff," says Bartek, whose ear-splitting scream as he leapt left him without a voice for two days."It (the race) made you do things beyond what you ever thought you could accomplish ." But what about the real chal– lenge - living for a month with a camera crew watching and tap– ing your every move? Remarkably, Bartek says he got used to eating, sleeping and living with strangers 24/7. The

hard part, he says, was keeping a lid on the emotional stuff so the pai r's dirty laundry wouldn't be aired in public.To that end, he and Baldassare agreed that if things got stressful, they'd simply say "enough said" and drop the subject until they could discuss it off-camera. "There were a lot of implo– sions going on with other rela– tionships, but we never got into it. The producer finally asked us why we kept saying 'enough said; and we just smiled," Bartek says. "The funny t hing was, we never did talk about those things that got us angry later, so they must not have been a big deal in the first place."

delay them a bit;' Bartek said of the Tunis airport, where a brief shoving match ensued."After that, anything we did at all had a hint of evilness to it. Other teams treated us like outcasts, but you can't be pals with the people you are trying to beat in a race." Bartek says he's square with his fellow contestants now that the show has ended, and is good friends with a few of the teams, who traversed 41 ,000 miles in 3 I days following clues and per– forming challenges like bungee jumping or slogging through the Paris sewers.While the opportu– nity to see the world on the network's dime was immeasura-

some horrible international inci– dent ... when we just wanted to

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