What It’s Like Competing on The Amazing Race During a Pandemic

For more than a decade, radio personalities Lulu and Lala Gonzalez have been keeping listeners entertained from NYC to South Beach, currently behind the mics for the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut Tri-state area each weeknight on iHeartRadio’s 103.5 KTU from 7 p.m. until midnight. 

So it’s not often they find themselves at a loss for words. 

But when producers gathered the twin sisters and their fellow contestants on the current season of The Amazing Race to inform them their journey had hit a Covid-shaped roadblock, they were floored. “Initially, I thought they were kind of joking around,” Lulu admitted to E! News. Having been stripped of their cell phones, “The only thing you have access to is sometimes a television in your hotel room,” explained Lala.

So while they had seen snippets of reports about the quickly spreading coronavirus, when they got to that pit stop at the University of Glasgow in late February 2020, and “they told us that they were shutting production down and flying us all back home, we were in total shock,” Lulu shared. “It was then where we realized, ‘Oh, this is for real.'”