'Amazing Race Canada' stars Allie Seller and Eddie Parinas reflect on 'triggering' memory challenges
"I haven't had pancakes yet. It's very triggering," Parinas said after being eliminated from the race
Memorization and breakfast foods seemed to put a wrench in the plans for The Amazing Race Canada stars, married couple Allie Seller and Eddie Parinas, the second team to be eliminated from the race.
In the first episode of Season 9 of the series, Parinas got tripped up trying to memorize and deliver pancake orders to a hungry group in Calgary. In the second episode, he was stalled again by another memory challenge, having to memorize a script about the 2024 Chevrolet Trax 2RS, and perform the vehicle introduction, with 20 facts about the car, to a prospective buyer.
"Going into the memory challenge, honestly, I felt so vulnerable," Parinas told Yahoo Canada. "This race totally showcased my weaknesses."
"I hate doing anything that's memory. ... Our plan to go into this race was I do all the high stunt stuff and all the adrenaline stuff, she does all the book stuff, the memorization, the mathematic stuff. Yeah, it didn't work out that well for me. ... And the pressure of other teams coming in and doing it super quick, and then leaving a quarter million dollars up for grabs, all that was just looming over my head and it just made it even harder for me to memorize anything."
Those memory challenges paired with the moment in the most recent episode where the racers had to make sausage sort of spoiled popular breakfast foods for Parinas.
"I haven't had pancakes yet. It's very triggering," he said. "We just did the race so it's still fresh in our memory."
"I used to love sausages until I actually had to make them. ... So that whole process was disturbing for me. ... I'm probably not going to eat sausages for quite a long time, sausages and hotdogs. They're out of there. For now I'll stick with french toast, but then I will go back to pancakes because I won't give up pancakes."
Seller stressed that going into the Chevrolet memory challenge, they didn't really have an opportunities to recover from the pancake challenge.
"We led the vast majority of day one, until the pancakes, and then not really recovering from that going into day two," she explained.
'If we were there for a short time, but it still had impact, then awesome'
While the Amazing Race Canada experience may have not gone as planned, the British Columbia couple have been getting a lot of praise for really supporting each other through the rough patches of the race.
"We've actually received a lot of positive feedback, messages from random people just saying we represent how you should treat one another," Seller said. "We had to pause and look at that, because that's just how we are, so we didn't actually recognize that as a trait or a quality, ... it's really who we are in our relationship."
"We're happy that was a takeaway. If we were there for a short time, but it still had impact, then awesome."
Looking back at their time in the race, something the couple would change about their strategy is reversing the perceived roles in challenges.
"We really had a plan on who would do certain things, but didn't necessarily have a plan on looking at the layout of the show, and how it is meant to kind of trick you and trigger you into doing the other person's role," Seller said. "So I think really the only takeaway, if it was a redo, is no matter what it says and who you think should do the role, just reverse it, because you probably have a better chance of getting the one you're better at."
Looking forward for the rest of the race, Seller and Parinas were able to identify some particularly strong teams.
"Ty [Smith] and Kat [Kastner] came out of the gate strong, right away, Deven [Condo-Mitchell] and Amanda [Larocque] we had more of an unspoken connection, just with an energy," Seller said.
"Personally, I thought Ben [Chutta] and Anwar [Ahmed] was the power team, for sure," Parinas said. "They're very athletic. ... They work well together."
While Seller and Parinas have been eliminated from Amazing Race Canada they are still very much fans of the show and will continue to watch as the season plays out in the coming weeks.
"Eddie will rewatch this show, I don't exaggerate, it would be at least 100 times. Every episode," Seller said. "I think he's already gone through Episode 1 50 times."
