The application process for The Amazing Race is pretty well-laid out, but you might not know about what happens when you’re chosen as a semi-finalist. Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge won the 21st season of Amazing Race, and they recently spoke to Men’s Health about how they stayed fresh while running around the world (it involved sharing deodorant), as well as how the audition and interview process went.

The couple previously starred on their own show, The Fabulous Beekman Boys, and they were encouraged to apply for Amazing Race by a friend of a CBS executive. After their contact spoke to the executive, things started to move fast.

“Literally two days later they called and said, ‘We heard you wanted to run the Race, do you want to come out for the interview process?’ And we went through the whole interview process and the vetting, which is actually very rigorous. And that’s how we got on the show,” Brent explained.

The pair then flew to Los Angeles, and the process involved being “sequestered in a hotel room” so that they wouldn’t happen upon any other potential teams. Here’s how they described it the experience:

“There are about four or five interview processes where you have to fly out to LA and they’re interviewing different teams to see what your personal life is like, but then they’re also looking to see the other teams that they’re interviewing and how your personalities are going to interact with those personalities. This is something people probably don’t realize, you literally meet all the other teams on the start line.

“So when you go out for these series of interviews (and I think there were three different series that we had to go out to LA for), they sequester you in a hotel room, and you are allowed to leave the hotel room only at certain periods of time, and you’re always escorted by a staff member of the Amazing Race, because they don’t want you to have any interaction with any of the other teams that you might potentially be running against.

“And it’s interesting because we’d be in our hotel and look out at the swimming pool and you would see like a couple and you’d wonder ‘Oh I wonder if that’s one of them,’ or you’d be in the restaurant having your meal and you’d wonder ‘I wonder if that’s one of them.’ So it kind of builds up the suspense, but even on the very last interview process at the last step, you have to go through all of this kind of psychological testing and personality testing.”

And if you’ve ever applied for the show but haven’t gotten picked, the couple says you should keep going.

“So many people have come up to us and said ‘Oh, my husband and I always wanted to be on the race’. Just audition and keep auditioning.”

Original interview conducted by Adam Mansuroglu.