Race Across the World stars reveal toughest parts of the show

Race Across the World is tougher than it looks.

The Race Across the World 2024 stars have shared with Yahoo the toughest parts of taking part in the BBC show and some of them may surprise you. Among the contestants, Betty didn't mind sharing that Race Across the World was tougher than the siblings could have ever prepared for.

She said: "When you talk about sleep and food and carrying a big backpack, you do think it's gonna be quite physical but actually the mental strain and how mentally tough it is to keep going for all that time every day.

"Waking up, not really know where you're gonna end up or where gonna sleep. Things like that. That's way tougher than I think we could have ever prepared for."

What surprised fellow contestant Owen was "how bloody hard it is". He said: "You just really don't get a sense of how tough it is just watching it on TV."

Summing it up, he also said: "They only show when something goes right. So it looks like we've gone up to the first person we've seen, asked for help and they've been able to help. When in fact, we've spent an hour or two hours before that asking 20 other people who haven't been able to help us.

"So it makes it look like a lot of it does go our way. The amount of effort that goes in behind the scenes, it really doesn't get portrayed on the show which is quite frustrating because you put all that work and then they only show the good bit."

Behind the scenes of the show, we take a look at the gruelling challenges the stars said they faced along the way from lack of sleep to suffering with boredom.

Food

Eugenie and Isabel hands down found the food rations the hardest. The "torturous food rations" even sparked rows between them. Isabel confessed: "It was torture, watching people eating and seeing what we could have been having, but we just genuinely couldn't afford it for that."

She explained: "We weren't actually eating very much, a small bag of crackers a day each and then on top of the lack of sleep so there was a lot of tension. And like all of the additional arguments we were having to do with the lack of food."

Isabel said she was impressed after hearing some teams had tried out fasting and she wished she had prepared herself for the lack of food ahead of the epic journey.

Owen, who was competing with his best friend Alfie, also found the lack of food the hardest thing. "The lack of food got tough," he said. "You have to suck it up and get on with it."

He explained: "But especially when you're in countries likeJapan and South Korea when everything all the food looks really nice, it all smells really nice. And you just have to walk past it and buy a loaf of bread cheese slices from a supermarket because it's the cheapest, most sustainable option. So I'd say the food was definitely a big thing for me."

Race Across the World exclusives

• Race Across the World's Stephen and Viv reveal big plans for after the show

• 'Race Across the World rows broke out because of torturous food rations'

• 'We turned down money from strangers on Race Across the World'

• 'Race Across the World is tougher than we could have prepared for'

• ‘We seemed immature on Race Across the World but now fans see who we are’

Exhaustion

The lack of sleep is a big trigger point on the BBC show. Comfort can come at the cost of the stars racing to get ahead in the competition. The contestants often are travelling through the night, including trips on overnight buses.

This leads to the stars feeling exhausted all of the time. Stephen said: "Exhaustion is definitely the hardest thing and it's not just physical. It's mental because you're alert all the time. You spend the whole day just looking for prompts, for keys, for triggers. You're looking for a map, looking for someone, so you're mentally alert. All the time and it's just exhausting."

Betty pointed out that both the lack of sleep and lack of food made everything else "more challenging for sure".

Boredom

Alfie revealed boredom was something he personally found the toughest on the show. "For me, certainly more than Owen, I really missed my phone," he said. "I got really bored. I think I haven't really said this enough when I've been asked questions about it but the worst part is genuinely boredom."

It was incredibly honest, with Alfie saying of course the trip outweighed the negatives. "What you're seeing is great," he said. "But when you're travelling overnight on a bus or a train and you've got nothing but an MP3 player, you've got no phone, no access to the outside world. It is actually quite boring. That's outweighed by the amazing things that you see and being able to get the opportunity in general but I think definitely the hardest thing for me was just boredom sometimes."

Isabel was pleased she brought books along with her to give her some time out while travelling. Her mum Eugenie kept herself entertained with an MP3 player.

Budget

Naturally, the budget was always going to be one of the hardest things on the trip, that's to be expected. The teams start off with £1,390 per person - the cost of airfare - for the 15,000km race. There's no way they can get to the checkpoint on that money alone, with planes being banned, so they must work along the way.