The Aiellos' Shrimp Are Cooked on Race

There are times when having four strong men on your team would be a plus, like if there's heavy lifting to be done or fighting involved. This week on The Amazing Race: Family Edition, however, was not one of those times. As the combined body weight of the uniquely formed Aiello family — father-in-law Tony, 57, and his three sons-in-law, Kevin, 31, Matt, 31, and David, 26 — not only pushed them down in the mud, it shoved them out of the race.

TVGuide.com: Four men on the ultimate road trip. What did you all pack?
Kevin: We took about four days' worth of clothes and toiletries. But looking back, we all wished we'd packed a hell of a lot less.
Matt: Because we really didn't have time to change.
Tony: One time, when we were crossing the Delaware, I just turned my socks inside out because that's all I could do. We were wet and hot and smelly.
Kevin: Definitely. We should have brought more socks and less clothes because you could be fine on two days' worth of clothes and about 10 pairs of socks.

TVGuide.com: Did the mystery bus smell like shrimp from all the people who took that detour instead of the mud run?
Tony: Yeah. Shrimp and mud. Muddy shrimp.
Matt: The bus was... interesting.

TVGuide.com: What exactly happened on the bus to set the Weaver family off?
Kevin: I think it was just the pressure of the whole thing and exhaustion. It was an eight-hour ride.

TVGuide.com: You all seemed annoyed with the Weavers last week, yet you didn't seem to have anything against them the week before.
Tony: Well, we didn't know them prior to that at all. And they came across saying one thing and doing another thing, so they were a little underhanded, I thought. There's a way of playing the game and, in my opinion, they didn't play it fairly.
Matt: And I think we were just tired of hearing the complaining and the crying. When they showed Rebecca [Weaver] on TV, it looked like she was laughing, but she was really hysterically crying and complaining about the bus and smelling like shrimp and whatnot. This is The Amazing Race. What do you expect? You're not going to get a plush limo, you know.

TVGuide.com: Well, what did you all expect from Family Edition?
Tony: We didn't know, other than the fact that we were going to have to run and run... and run some more.
Matt: I expected that, with kids on the race, it probably would be less physical and maybe it would have more puzzles and technical things that kids would excel at. In the first and third episodes the Gaghans, who have two young children, actually used the kids to their advantage; their weight alone actually helped them pass us in both tasks. They drove through the mud run on the first try, whereas we were four 200-lb. guys sinking deeper and deeper into the mud every run.

TVGuide.com: Speaking of the mud run, you did it 14 times. Why didn't you stop around time number nine?
Kevin: It was too late at that point to quit and do the shrimp detour because it was a 30-mile drive back.
Matt: We kept going at it because we're four stubborn men and we just didn't want to quit. It took two hours.
Kevin: About an hour and 50 minutes too long.
Tony: At some point I said, "Maybe I should've taken my daughters we could've done some simpler tasks."
Matt: He also said, at one point, "These guys are going to kill me."

TVGuide.com: How did you all not have a big fight in the car? The Paolos would have killed each other by then.
Kevin: It was getting there.
Matt: It might have been close.
Tony: But, in the end, it was a respect thing.
Matt: And also just knowing...
Tony: ... that we would still have to be at family dinners together kept us nice. I've got our grandchildren I need to see.

TVGuide.com: How did you decide who would go on the space-shuttle thing?
Kevin: I took myself out of that because I sure as hell didn't want to spin at 3.2 Gs.
Matt: I'd said that I wanted to do the next task regardless of what it was. It happened to be a two-person thing, so we elected Dave to go with me.

TVGuide.com: When you were spinning at that velocity, did you feel like it was pressing your privates, too?
All: [Laugh]
Matt: It actually was quite hard to breathe. But you could feel it everywhere, even your eyeballs. So I guess the answer is yes. And it felt pretty good, actually.

TVGuide.com: Where'd you go after you were eliminated?
Kevin: I can't tell you where, but we went away for a few weeks. CBS took good care of us. We did some hiking, some shopping and we spent a lot of time at the pool. And we did some ziplining. Fun stuff.
Matt: A lot of eating.
Tony: And a lot of reflecting. We asked a lot of "What ifs?" Like, "What if we'd done the shrimp?" We beat ourselves up pretty good. But there's nothing we can do about it now.