Q&A: Local guys of 'Team Texas' are ready to make their run on ‘The Amazing Race’

Josh Ahern and Tanner Kloven, who compete as "Team Texas" this season in The Amazing Race, can move fast. Sometimes they're too fast for their own good.

Ahern, 28, of Dallas and his best friend, Kloven, 26, of Fort Worth had a tendency to bolt the moment they saw a chance to get a leg up on the competition.

But they'd leave their camera crew behind in the process, which is an Amazing Race no-no.

"We got in trouble multiple times for doing that," Ahern says. "We learned real fast that the camera crew is part of your team."

It remains to be seen if they're faster than the other 10 teams competing for the $1 million prize. The season premiere is at 7 p.m. Friday on CBS (Channel 11).

Ahern, a veterinary medical device sales representative, and Kloven, a pharmaceutical sales rep, are sworn to secrecy about the outcome -- but they were allowed to talk about some of their experiences on the show.

Tanner Kloven of Fort Worth (left) and Josh Ahern of Dallas (right) are Team Texas.(CBS)

What made you want to compete in this show?

Kloven: It wasn't even our idea at first. We were contacted out of the blue by one of the casting directors through Facebook. It was just very random. He said he likes to find one team every year on Facebook.

Ahern: At first, I was very skeptical. I've gotten messages from people online who claimed they were casting for a TV show and none of it ever turned out to be real. So when someone said they're interested in casting us for The Amazing Race, I didn't believe it.

Kloven: But then, once we talked to him, we decided it sounded legit. We weren't superfans by any means, but we were familiar with the show and we decided it seemed like a fun thing to try.

How did you become best friends?

Ahern: We started out as rivals through high school sports. I went to a private school in Watauga called Harvest Christian Academy. Tanner went to a private school, too, one that we played against [Southwest Christian in Fort Worth]. When you go to a small private school and you're an athlete, you're playing every sport that you can: basketball, football, baseball. So we kept running into each other.

Kloven: I'm sure at the time we didn't like each other much. Thank goodness we got to meet in college [Texas Tech] and I got to figure out that he wasn't as bad a guy as I made him out to be in my imagination.

So why on earth did you persist in ditching your camera crew?

Kloven: Things in the race are so difficult and challenging that you're focused on the race and you forget they're even there. So we'd run off and leave them and have to wait for them to catch up.

Ahern: When you strategize, you have to think about yourself not as two people racing but as four. So when it came to travel, whether it was booking a train or airfare or whatever it might be, you had to factor them in. You're not going anywhere without your crew.

So if, for example, you came across a bicycle built for two, that's a nonstarter.

Ahern: It has to be a four-seater. Viewers might look at the things we do in the show and think it's challenging. But they should see what the crew does. Everything we do, they do it, too, except they're turned around backwards filming it. Those guys definitely have my utmost respect.

By David Martindale, Special Contributor