The Holdernesses say the key to The Amazing Race is “marriage counseling” and “stair climbing”

In 2013, instead of a holiday card, Kim and Penn Holderness sent out a musical video called “Christmas Jammies” to their friends and family, featuring the family of four dancing and rapping in matching pajamas. It quickly went viral; as the Holdernesses themselves describe it, “After we posted this… everything kind of changed.”

Both Holdernesses had previous careers in broadcast journalism, but now have crafted a new career where they offer videos that effectively and hilariously document the life of fortysomething Gen X parents of Gen Z kids. Penn is an expert at creating parody songs (like “Quarantine (Is Not Quite Over)” to the tune of “Billie Jean,”) while Kim offers funny slices of life related to everything from parenting to Peloton (Side note: My kids couldn’t watch her video on “Every Mom In Summer” with me because it was “too real.”)

Now the North Carolinian Holdernesses have 743,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel, and some of their releases have received millions of views. Kim has a blog where she discusses her battles with anxiety, in addition to everyday topics like meal planning and playlists; Penn frequently discusses his ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) in the videos and their merch offers T-shirts that read “ADHD Is Awesome.” They used the pandemic shutdown to write and publish a book: Everybody Fights: So Why Not Get Better At It? Basically, Kim and Penn have taken that initial three-and-a-half-minute video and turned it into a cottage industry.

So it’s not too surprising that CBS reality competition The Amazing Race, filled with complicated tasks and puzzles as the contestants race across the globe, would come calling to draft the pair for the show. But even though they were fans of the series, the Holdernesses still had reservations. Eventually, they did sign up for the current season 33, only to have the season cut short by COVID. They returned with several other teams for the second leg, winning four legs in the Race so far, more than any other team. Tonight they’re facing off against three other teams in the finals to attempt to win the $1,000,000 grand prize. Not bad for a fortysomething mom and dad.

Prior to tonight’s finale, we got to talk to Kim and Penn Holderness about what they learned in marriage counseling that helped them in The Amazing Race, and how overcoming the contest’s mental challenges was just as gratifying as conquering the physical ones, like that unforgettable moment when Kim bungee-jumped over 700 feet (which made Penn cry).

PH: Yeah, when it comes to reality television, it’s one of the few shows that we feel very comfortable watching with our kids and have for years. Because it gives them, for the most part, an incredibly positive, forward-moving message. And also we love to travel.

KH: Yeah, when this show first came on and I was a reporter and working in local news, and I would just sit in the back of the live truck while we were waiting for my live shot at 11 o’clock. So I started watching this 20 years ago. And then with the modern seasons, it’s just something we’re always watching as a family. I think because in terms of reality shows, it is based on a love of travel, not necessarily a conniving plan to get somebody eliminated or vote them off or something like that. Like all those strategy games, Survivor or Big Brother, they make my armpits sweat. I would self-eliminate on day one.

AVC: You can tell you love the travel because whenever you guys go somewhere on the show, you’re the ones who are looking around and saying, “Wow, this is really nice.”

PH: Yeah, yeah. We don’t have much time. We were trying to enjoy the scenery, but there’s really no time. There’s no time to stop and look at it until they stop pressing “record.” Because when you’re in the Race, you never know what a couple of seconds is going to cost you. But everywhere they took us was stunning.

AVC: How long were you thinking about being on the show? Like, were you thinking, “Oh, that could be cool”? And then your brand is getting bigger and then you wind up on the show.

KH: Well, just as a married couple, you know, we would be on a road trip and we’d be getting turned around. And we’d be like, “Oh, if we were on Amazing Race, we’d be out, we’d get eliminated.” Or if we are putting together IKEA furniture, I’m like, “We’re going to need to know how to do this on The Amazing Race.” So it was always something that we talked about. But I’ll be completely honest. Somebody within casting reached out to us and said, “Have you ever thought about applying?”

PH: And the answer was no, because it takes like, what, a month? And this is no big surprise, but they take all of your devices away so that you don’t have an unfair advantage, so you’re unable to be in touch with your family. And just the thought of being away from our kids and not to be able to talk to them for a month, that was just a deal breaker.

KH: So it wasn’t necessarily on our radar even as we were sitting on the couch like yelling at the people on TV. And also, it is famously grueling. It is. So I didn’t even know if I would have what it took to do it. So when they reached out and said, “Have you ever thought about applying?” we actually did have to apply. We went through the process and the interviews and the paperwork and all that stuff.

PH: Before we even we did that, though, we were still like “no.” But we told our daughter that we got the call and she got mad. She was like, “What are you talking about, because of us? What do you mean? You’re not going to do it because of us?”

She said, “What are you going to remember: some random February or when you got to go on The Amazing Race?” So our seventh grader kind of talked us into it.

KH: So the first time we left was February 2020. So she was a seventh grader. And then this most recent leg post-COVID, she had just started in ninth grade.

PH: Our daughter got a foot taller between the start of talking about the Race to now.

AVC: Okay, so no devices the whole time. But when do you guys sleep? Do you all stay in the same hotel? Do you hang out with the other contestants? There just seems to be no time to do anything.

KH: Well, I know some of that stuff is part of the TV magic. But I will say when we put out on Instagram, “What questions do you guys have that we can answer?” This is the order of the questions: “When and what do you eat?” “When do you go to the bathroom?” And then “What do your kids think of it?” So we had packed a ton of protein bars the first time around and even going back because we just didn’t know.

PH: Now remember, there’s two seasons really within one season. There were the three episodes before COVID hit. And then there are several episodes after COVID. I mean, there was a chance that if we’d kept going on that first season, we were going to need to eat those protein bars. We were going to sleep on airplane floors. We were gonna need that map that we had in her backpack.

But when we went back after COVID, in order for safety, they had to keep us more in a bubble, right? So that doesn’t involve going to a street meat counter in Tibet and asking for brains. It has to all be things that have been prescreened. It made the Race in some ways more difficult. But a lot of those other things, like bohemian things that the Race is famous for, you couldn’t do.

KH: We were fed and they took care of us. So there’s no sleeping on airport floors, but definitely some camping. And there were definitely opportunities for us to communicate with other teams. I think one of the biggest surprises of this experience, because it’s so competitive, was how close we all got as a group. We started the pandemic together. I mean, we literally were together and we got the word that the coronavirus is shutting the world down, what? As that was happening, we were with this group of people. So I think it really bonded us. I didn’t expect to come away with such dear, lifelong friends.

AVC: The teams that seem to have done the best this season are the ones that are the most compassionate to each other. And the bickering teams got weeded out pretty quickly. You two have literally written a book about marriage and how to fight positively. So how did you use those skills as an Amazing Race team?

KH: I mean, there are some disadvantages to being the oldest team, right? I was always joking like, “This is a race for the young people,” it is so physically exhausting. There are advantages to being younger.

I think the advantages of being older is we knew like the hills we were going to die on and none of it was happening in that Race. If he got really stressed, I did not. We balanced each other because we had so many years of practice and communication.

PH: I mean, writing the book helped. We discovered a lot about each other. We got so much advice from people that we put into the book. And I think the piece of advice that might be the most apropos to the Race is: You know exactly how to hurt your loved one. You do. Just don’t do it. Learn how to consciously realize when you’re about to hurt your partner and stop. And watching the show, I’m seeing it happen every single week with the way that people talk. And because we wrote a book on this, we really had to get to know it and we had to go to counseling to make it out of the book. That may have been the best preparation that we did. I know we ran up a bunch of stairs, but I’ll say so far in the show, from what you’ve seen, we have not fought that much.

KH: I would say definitely climbing stairs with a backpack on and marriage counseling was the best training for The Amazing Race.

AVC: So many stairs.

KH: How many stairs? Oh my gosh. So many stairs. Too many.

AVC: That makes sense because if you have family things or relationship things, it all comes up in The Amazing Race somehow, due to the stress.

KH: Let’s also acknowledge how hard it would be to run the Race with your sibling, or your father. To me, those relationships when I watch The Amazing Race are the most fascinating. Because I love my dad, I love my brother. They would be amazing partners on this Race, but the bickering that just comes with those relationships? Yeah, I would never last.

And now put yourself in this pressure cooker situation. I actually think that Lulu and Lala, the twins, they came on and the first couple of legs you saw them they were under a lot of pressure. And when they came back, they made the biggest switch in terms of how they communicated, and they did really well after the return.

AVC: What was the most surprising thing for you, though, as a contestant, something that you weren’t expecting?

PH: For me, I was stunned that my wife jumped off that bridge. I was stunned that she was able to to walk in a straight line and jump off the bridge without needing any sort of coaching or encouragement. My cousin, who’s a therapist, is like, “She disassociated in real time.” I know my wife and I know the cards she’s been dealt in her brain and the fact that she did it, it just confirmed that she’s braver than she is anything else.

KH: Yes, I also am shocked I did that, if I can be honest. Because I am the “wear your helmet, wear a seat belt” mom. Like my greatest joy in life is to sit on the couch. Some people are adrenaline junkies and they get a thrill from jumping off of things. I am truly thrilled putting on my sweatpants and sitting on the couch and watching TV; it makes my heart race even thinking about it. I love it so much.

So that is nothing like jumping out of airplanes. Any of that stuff is not anything that has ever been on a bucket list for me. But when you go on The Amazing Race, you assume that one of you is going to have to do something like that. And let me tell you, the TV does not do it justice. 722 feet is really stinking high.

I have to say, after we got through the rest of the day, I had a full on panic attack in the hotel room after that. I feel like I held it together, and then I had that. It was a two and a half hour drive there. So you’re building it up in your mind. You have the adrenaline and then whatever happens to your brain to get you to jump off of a perfectly stable structure. And then after we had several hours left to go. It was like driving, racing, climbing stairs. And we got back in the hotel room and the adrenaline, just like poured out of my brain and I just started shaking and I was like, “What just happened to me? What did I do?” So yeah, not a great feeling. So I did it. Check! Never do it again.

AVC: It’s so impressive, especially considering how much you’ve talked about your issues with anxiety.

KH: I feel like, as a woman, I’m 45 and I can take an honest look back on my life and say my anxiety has definitely kept me from doing things. I’ve been very brave a lot of times in my life, and I’ve tried crazy things that I never thought I would. But I do know that it’s held me back and I’m trying, seeing my reflection in my own children and knowing that they may struggle [like] this one day, I’m trying to model like you can do. You can be really terrified and really afraid, but you can still do it. You can do it scared. So that’s what I’m trying to model, at least.

AVC: And this show is a perfect example of that. When you watched that episode again, were you just like, “I still can’t believe I did that”?

KH: I couldn’t actually watch it. I looked to my kids’ reaction because my kids don’t know anything about what has happened. And then it’s so funny because I watched them and then they immediately—because kids will keep you humble, man—they’re like, “Did you pass out? Because you’re kind of going a little floppy.” I’m like, “I didn’t pass out. No.” And then they started laughing at their dad for crying. So, yeah, so they keep you humble.

So it was very hard to go through this, emotionally for me as somebody with anxiety and the high pressure. I did not realize what just rewatching it would bring back. Even knowing that we as a team we did well watching it, I was shaking like I was before we started the Race that day. So I didn’t really expect that rewatching would be so emotional, too.

AVC: Penn, in the Greece episode, you talk about your ADHD and how that helped you memorize all those things in the saints challenge. How hard was that for you, mentally?

PH: It was really hard. It was a lot of information, and some of it was not particularly interesting. And the guy who was reading it, he had like a soothing, droning voice that should have put everybody to sleep. If you were watching Ryan, he just sat down.

I just knew if I was able to make it through the entire thing and be able to listen to everything that he said, that it wasn’t going to leave my brain. And that’s something that happens when you hyperfocus. It’s like a negative thing for 90% of your ADHD life. You are fixated on a video game and you don’t realize what’s going on. You are fixated on a certain task and you leave your shoes somewhere and your keys in the refrigerator. But if you’re in a vacuum like you are in The Amazing Race, where there’s really one job, which is not to screw it up and to do the best you can with one task in front of you… I think that the ADHD-wired mind is incredibly powerful when that hyperfocus is pointed in the right direction.

So it was hard. You saw me get really excited when it was done because it just was something that I had trouble with in high school, when it was reading comprehension and there was a squirrel outside in a tree or whatever, and I would just space out for 20 minutes. So that was cool.

I’m glad that CBS has made the decision to include the parts about our mental health in the interviews, because people who have ADHD need positive reinforcement. It’s the crappiest name anyone has ever given to a disorder that hasn’t been changed. There have been some crappy ones that have been changed, but it’s three negative words. In one term, it’s deficit disorder and hyperactivity that you get hit with as a kid, when you’re like 6 or 7 years old, and there’s just not a lot of positive ramifications to it. So any chance that you can get to say that out loud and have it be on national television felt really good.

AVC: Both of what you guys are going through on the show comes across and it’s even more inspiring that you’re doing so well. Especially since you’re not, like, 18 years old running up 400 flights of stairs.

PH: We are not 18. I can confirm that.

AVC: What is next for you guys? You have the book, and your videos just keep getting better. You could go on the road. You could do relationship seminars. Anything, really.

PH: We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing and we’re going to look at our life and try to make it rhyme and try to turn it into a skit. And we’re also in this season where both of our kids are playing sports and they’re traveling to do that. So our leisure time is not [happening].

KH: We started making these early videos and never thought that this would be any way we would be able to pay a mortgage. We still do work for companies behind the scenes, like we shoot and edit and create videos for companies. But we have no business plan. So I have no idea what we’re doing. I don’t know even we’re doing tomorrow.