Building rappel. Chip and Jon sit on the edge of the balcony, all helmeted and carabiner-ed up, waiting to take the plunge and Spider-Man it down the side of the building face-first. As she checks out how high they actually are, Kelly admits that she's "a little scared." The music swells, and then Chip and Jon tip over the edge of the balcony and start their descent. Basically, it's not terrifically hard to do skill-wise, and it seems like it's actually easier the faster you go. When you're a good part of the way down, however, you run into a break in the wall where you can't walk down, but have to lower yourself for a bit just dangling from the rope. Chip finishes just slightly ahead of Jon, primarily as a result of doing a better job navigating that oddball spot along the wall. Chip walks over toward Jon with his arms raised in victory. "He was watching the gay man, and he learned from the gay man!" Hee. He then interviews that he thinks it just killed Jon to lose to him because he's gay. I think it did kill Jon, but more because Jon cannot abide losing to anyone than because Chip is gay. My impression is that the main reason why BuffJon cares a whit about them being gay is that they're very easily riled about it, as evidenced by Reichen's introductory comment so long ago about how he was doing the race to get revenge on all the people who didn't like him because he was gay, how they worried so much about whether David and Jeff wouldn't like them anymore when they found out, blah dee blah. Whatever else there is to say about him, BuffJon is a reasonably smart guy who unfortunately uses his intelligence in part to be a skilled button-pusher, and I think that constitutes pretty much his sole interest in the Chipsters' sexuality. Not nice at all, obviously, but different than it would look to me without any context.

Kelly and Reichen prepare to go next. "I'm a little nervous," she says at the top.

Now we cut to the beach, where David and Jeff are getting out of their cab at last and preparing to start the Fast Forward. Running along the beach, they seem to take a wrong turn (heh), but then they get pointed toward the flag and eventually get to it. The guy running the task points out a swimmer floundering in the water (don't get me started -- I did this once with my mother, and "floundering" and "foundering" are both allowed) and tells them that they have to paddle out, rescue her, slap her onto a board, and paddle her back in. They each have a board, and they grab them and run into the surf. They start to paddle, and to no one's surprise, they start in with, "Where? Where?" It would have been awesome if they had rescued the wrong person. Some poor guy out in the water, going, "Get the hell off of me, you crazy bastards!" And they'd be trying to slap him on the board, muttering, "This guy is very good at his role!" Ah, sometimes it's the road not taken that makes you sigh in regret.