TAR2 teams-Peggy & Claire
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The ClubHouse: Archives: TAR2 teams-Peggy & Claire

Car54

Wednesday, February 13, 2002 - 08:25 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Peggy & Claire

Peggy and Claire met about four years ago, while walking their dogs at a lake in the sierras. Their dogs quickly struck up a friendship, and so did Peggy and Claire. Last year the two spent ten days together in Santa Monica, California, and enjoyed the experience very much. The greatest difficulty was the fact that Peggy is an early riser, while Claire prefers to sleep in. When Peggy saw the AMAZING RACE application on the CBS website she called Claire, and both agreed that it would be fun to compete.

When considering how their experience in THE AMAZING RACE might change their relationship, Peggy observes, "Between the two of us, we're a hundred and twenty-something years old. It would take something more earth shattering than a TV show to change our relationship. There are some advantages to growing old! You don't sweat the small stuff."

QUESTIONAIRE

What strengths and weaknesses do you bring to the Team?

PEGGY: I have a good memory for names, places, times, and dates, am excellent at math, and enjoy everything.
CLAIRE: I can yodel. I am energetic, competitive, personable, and I've traveled extensively. I am strong for a woman of indeterminate years! A major weakness is that I rush into things without carefully thinking them out.

What strengths and weaknesses does your teammate bring to the Team?

PEGGY: Claire is very intelligent, well traveled and very well read. She can also yodel. She laughs at my stupid observations and never complains when she feels bad or loses a toenail. Her only weakness on this trip is that she moves too fast that she doesn't see things around her. I think it's just that she is so focused on getting to the end. That determination is also one of her strengths that I admire.
CLAIRE: Peggy is creative, energetic, personable, and very good company. She can charm the birds out of the trees.

What is your favorite film?

PEGGY: American Beauty
CLAIRE: A Thousand Cranes

What is your favorite TV show?

PEGGY: The West Wing
CLAIRE: THE AMAZING RACE

Who is your favorite actor?

PEGGY: Kevin Spacey
CLAIRE: Robert De Niro

Who is your favorite actress

PEGGY: Judi Dench
CLAIRE: Anne Bancroft

What is your favorite band?

PEGGY: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
CLAIRE: Willie Nelson

What comfort item from home will you miss the most?

PEGGY: Larry Jinks
CLAIRE: Kenny's cooking and my bed

Grooch

Tuesday, March 12, 2002 - 10:17 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Truckee gals take on 'Amazing Race'

Susan Skorupa
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
3/11/2002 01:35 am

If Peggy Kuhn told you where she spent the first 37 days of 2002, she’d have to kill you.

Kuhn laughs when she says that, but she’s tight-lipped about the adventure that carried her and her friend Claire Jinks all over the world for the television series “The Amazing Race 2,” which airs the first of 12 episodes on KTVN Channel 2 tonight.

Then again, the pair might not have traveled all over the globe at all; we won’t know where they went or how many episodes they made it through until the shows air.

But Truckee resident Kuhn and Jinks, a part-year Truckee resident from Los Gatos, Calif., had the times of their lives.

“It was fascinating,” Kuhn said of her travels for the CBS television program. “We had to carry everything on our backs. We started throwing things out after three days. ‘We don’t need shampoo — we can’t wash our hair. We don’t need this cold cream.’ But we got along fine.”

The point of “The Amazing Race” is for two-person teams to visit different destinations throughout the world and to compete in a series of tasks before taking off for a new destination. Tasks might be mental or physical. The teams don’t know in advance where they’re going or what they’ll do when they arrive.

On the CBS Web site, Kuhn listed her strengths for the contest as having a good memory for names, places, times and dates, an aptitude for math and an ability to enjoy anything. Jinks listed her strengths as being energetic, competitive, personable, well-traveled and strong, although she said she tends to rush into things.

Budgets and airplane travel for the episodes are restricted and the teams have to use their wits to get where they’re going, so they can end up on any conveyance from bicycles or busses to trains or camels. Teams are eliminated when they fall far behind as the race progresses. The first team to arrive at the race’s last destination wins $1 million.

“We were by far the oldest,” Huhn said in a telephone interview from her Truckee home. “I’m 63, Claire just turned 66, and was 65 when we did the race. The next oldest contestants were in their 40s, some in their 30s, most were in their 20s.

“It was pretty brave of us to do this,” she said. “But I’d do it again. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. To be sleep deprived at our age, it kind of makes you nuts. A few times we were a little crazed.”

The contestants signed a contract stipulating they wouldn’t talk about their experiences with anyone before the episodes aired. If they bought souvenirs on their travels, they couldn’t give them as gifts or show them to anyone until the episode featuring the country where they’d bought the items aired.

Even the dates the women are to appear on such programs as “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” and “The Late Show with David Letterman” are under wraps because appearance dates can give away whether a particular team was ousted or is still in the running.

Kuhn and Jinks met in near Truckee while walking their dogs. Kuhn found the application for “The Amazing Race” on the CBS Web site more than a year ago and told Jinks about it. The friends decided to apply for the first competition in 2001.

Jinks traveled to Truckee the following weekend where Kuhn’s son-in-law shot a three-minute video for their contest application. The women knew the contest would take them to different lands where they would face language barriers, rivers, mountains and transportation difficulties. So they chased an airplane at the Truckee airport, forded the Truckee River and climbed around the area in snow shoes.

A week after submitting the tape, a CBS official called and invited them to San Francisco for an interview. Next, they interviewed in Los Angeles where they spent 10 days, getting out of their hotel infrequently. They met Leslie Moonves, president and chief executive of CBS Television.

“He asked if we would jump out of a plane,” Kuhn recalled. “We said ‘No.’ We were not cast.”

Kuhn and Jinks returned home. When the series aired in fall 2001, the women saw the seniors who won slots on the show. One was an airplane pilot.

“We said, ‘They just didn’t like us,’ but two weeks later the network called and asked us to consider ‘Amazing Race 2,’” Kuhn said.

This time, Kuhn and Jinks made the cut and left home Jan. 1 to spend more than five weeks away from home filming the 12-part series.

Tonight, Kuhn and friends and co-workers from the Resort at Squaw Creek, where she’s a concierge, will gather at the Bar of America in Truckee to watch episode one.

“The kids can’t believe I rappelled off mountains, and jumped off cliffs,” Kuhn said. “They’re all excited.”

On Wednesday, Kuhn and her husband, former Cleveland Indian baseball player Kenneth, will fly to Los Gatos to watch episode 2 with Jinks, who’s having a party for the occasion.

“It’s been so much fun,” Kuhn said. “The aftermath is almost as much fun as the race was.”

Grooch

Tuesday, March 12, 2002 - 10:20 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Gutsy grandmas: Locals compete on CBS TV's "Amazing Race 2"

Katherine Morris, Sierra Sun


When Claire Jinks and Peggy Kuhn were first introduced at Donner Lake four years ago, they'd probably heard little about the so-called "reality TV" phenomenon, let alone known they'd eventually become a part of it.

The two women, Kuhn, 63, a Tahoe Donner resident and Jinks, 65, a second homeowner in the area, will be one of 11 teams racing around the globe for a chance at $1 million on CBS' "The Amazing Race 2."

These "gutsy grandmas," as they like to call themselves, will make history when the show premieres at 10 p.m. on March 11, as they will be among the oldest women to appear in any of the barrage of reality shows that have overwhelmed the networks over the last couple years.

"We're just a couple of globetrotting Truckee gals," said Jinks, a retired journalist and part-time Los Gatos resident.

Globetrotting seems an appropriate way to describe the show, which involves teams of two racing from one country to the next, completing various mental and physical tasks along the way in order to advance in the competition. Toss a limited budget, sleep depravation, travel restrictions and a competitive element into the mix and voila, you've created a perfect climate for the drama and excitement that is innate to television's hot genre.

Teams who are the furthest behind are eliminated throughout the race, and the first pair to reach the final destination wins the race and $1 million.

"Of course, we wanted the money," said Kuhn, a concierge for the Resort at Squaw Creek. "But we also did it just to see if we could actually hang in there."

Kuhn first got the idea to apply for the show's first season after seeing an advertisement on the Internet a little over a year ago.

"I called Claire and got her excited about it, and not too long after we shot our submission video in all of our favorite Truckee hangouts," Kuhn said. "CBS must have loved it because they called us immediately."

The pair then went to San Francisco for an initial round of interviews, followed by 10 days in Santa Monica for a series of "grueling" personality, intelligence and physical tests.

"We were basically in lockdown," Kuhn said. "They let us out to see a movie once in awhile, but that was it."

While the two were positive they'd made the cut, soon after they received word that they had not been selected because they failed to meet the "demographics" the show was looking for.

"I was just dumbfounded," Jinks said. "We thought for sure that we'd made it."

The two would get a second chance though, with auditions for the "The Amazing Race 2" last October, when CBS called the women to see if they were still interested.

"I think [CBS] realized they'd made a mistake by not choosing us the first time," Kuhn said. "Even though we were mad, we still wanted to do the show, so we accepted."

After another series of tests, shots and bureaucratic hoops, the two embarked on their adventure Jan. 1 and didn't return until more than a month later.

Because the show has yet to premiere, CBS requested that participants refrain from discussing specifics of the show and the eventual winners.

However, there were a few things that Kuhn and Jinks could share, like the fact that they made lifelong friends with all of the other amazing racers -- all of whom were at least 20 years younger.

"All of the other teams were just great," Jinks said. "All of them had grandmothers and so they really connected with us. I knew they wouldn't let anything bad happen to us."

Other teams included a pair of nightclub bouncers, married pastors, former roommate writers and sister hair stylists, to name a few.

Kuhn said it also helped that the other teams didn't perceive the gutsy grandmas as much of a threat, competition wise.

"Everyone loved us," she said.

As far as feeling that their age was a hindrance, though, Kuhn said it wasn't really a factor.

"Of course we can't run as fast as 25-year-olds can, but the game is really more about luck and being in the right place at the right time than stamina and physical power," she said. "It's about getting the cabby that speaks English or knowing when to go right instead of left."

As for how Jinks and Kuhn's relationship held up under pressure, Kuhn said they're just as good friends as they were before they left.

"I wouldn't have wanted to do this with anyone else," Kuhn said. "Claire is really amazing, the woman knows no fear."

Kuhn remembered a time when Jinks lost a toenail on a rough hike, but continued through the day without even mentioning it to her partner.

"That night I noticed that her toe was all bloody and I asked her how long it had been bothering her. She said all day, but never once did she complain about it to me," Kuhn said.

That's not to say that there weren't times when both women wanted to give up and go home, though.

"At times, the living conditions were pretty difficult," Kuhn said. "I think the sleep depravation was the worst thing. Sometimes, you'd have to go for three or four days without sleep. You had to get used to sleeping in airports, on beaches, in sleeping bags in the middle of the jungle with bugs biting you."

According to Kuhn, showers were also a precious commodity, not to mention food they felt safe eating. Combine that with having cameramen in your face and a microphone attached to your body 24 hours a day, and it's easy to see how things could get difficult.

"They never gave us enough money. We always ran out," Kuhn said. "We went without food a lot of the time and were very careful not to eat things that we thought potentially might make us sick. We drank bottled water and ate lots of bread, carbs, potato chips and candy. Really, our diets were pretty crummy."

Kuhn said they only had to use their age to their advantage a couple of times, though.

"This one night we were going to have to sleep on the beach because we were late arriving to a destination and there were no more rooms," she said. "Luckily, the woman who owned the inn felt bad for us, I think because of our age, and she gave up her own bed for us. Claire gave the woman her ring."

Other times, the grandmas had to take matters of comfort into their own hands, like sneaking into an employee shower at an airport, despite the fact that they could have been arrested.

Despite the grueling conditions, both women said they would do it again in a heartbeat if given the chance.

"I would highly recommend something like this for all of the older ladies out there," Jinks said. "We had such a great time, it was really the experience of a lifetime. This is what you do before you slip into senility."

Kuhn said it's been fun to live the life of a celebrity for the time being.

"On one of our flights, we had people ask us for our autographs," Kuhn said. "At work, too, they had a poster of the world and a sign that said, 'Where in the world is Peggy Kuhn?'"

Kuhn said she couldn't have done the trip without the support of her coworkers, in particular.

"Everyone was so supportive of this," Kuhn said. "They totally picked up extra shifts while I was away. I love my job and didn't want to have to give it up for this."

Kuhn said she will never forget her experiences on the show.

"It's great being able to say I've visited some of these places even if it was just for a moment," Kuhn said.