It wasn’t easy for Katie and Rachel to accept their elimination from “The Amazing Race,” especially since they didn’t make any mistakes during the leg. 

Even though they had a perfect leg, they started out in last place, and instead had to hope that one of the other teams would make a mistake. Unfortunately for the beach volleyball players, that never happened.

“There really wasn’t an opportunity for us to catch up,” Rachel tells CTV.ca over the phone.

But she says she and Katie (who wasn’t available for the call) are still kicking themselves for messing up on the previous leg in Swedish Lapland.

“(We didn’t) get on the (first) flight and then we were having a really hard time with the sleds. We crashed our first two times down the mountain and then Katie’s sled went flying off the mountain so we had to switch to the bed Detour (challenge) instead so that took up a lot of time.”

They checked into the mat second last, which put them behind all the other teams when the next leg started.

After driving themselves to Norway, the girls breezed through the challenges of riding a gondola, rappelling off a bridge and delivering fish to a fisherman by boat.

But it still wasn’t enough to catch up to the other teams and when they arrived on the mat, host Phil Keoghan told them they had been eliminated.

Rachel remarked at the time she wished she could’ve raced forever – a sentiment she still stands behind.

“I just couldn’t imagine waking up and not having all these crazy things to do because in my life I’m very organized … I know exactly what I’m doing for the next two weeks and to be that spontaneous and just be really excited and anxious in a good way was awesome,” she says.

“I guess the only downfall to that would’ve been not having our phones or our families,” she says with a laugh.

But her experience on the ‘Race’ did make her feel differently about some things, in particular international travel, once she arrived home.

“I guess before the race I thought it was really difficult to get a flight and fly across the Atlantic Ocean or something, I don’t know … now it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh I can go anywhere I want, I just have to come up with the money for a plane ticket.’

“And I have been more spontaneous … it definitely improved everything.”

Being on the ‘Race’ also strengthened the bond between the teammates and friends.

“Now we have more jokes, more memories, more laughs in general … spending that much time together, going through such a hard thing of being eliminated and through all those silly tasks and crazy countries we went to, it has only improved (our friendship),” says Rachel.