Reality Rally

(Pictured: Rick Fortin, John Vataha, and Steve Pickett--"The Three Amigos")

2016 will bring a special segment on the blog from phone interviews. Your Reality Rally Blogger (that’s me, Taryn!) is hoping to capture the inside scoop from Reality Stars coming to Reality Rally in 2016. These stars include Reality Rally Production Team members and sponsors. Today, we are thrilled to start off with John Vataha, a longtime supporter of Reality Rally.

Vataha first heard about Reality Rally from a Facebook post some years ago. He and a group of friends, who call themselves “The Three Amigos”, are Survivor junkies who saw a notification for Reality Rally and jumped at a chance to tie Survivor and charity efforts together. The first year Reality Rally launched, they were there--ready to compete and raise funds for Michelle’s Place.

Not only did Vataha and his friends compete, but they raised an astounding amount of funds as well. The impetus for their fundraising? Gillian’s offer of immunity from a challenge at the event.

“The three of us are super competitive. We’ve been trying to get on Survivor. Gillian’s event is more like The Amazing Race but it still has competitive elements, and there were Survivors that were there. So the three of us were like, ‘Well, if we’re going to do this, we want to make sure that we can get every possible advantage.’ So we made that goal of $5,000. She had a ‘Skip a Challenge’ reward if you got to that level of fundraising, so that’s how we set the bar pretty high right of the bat,” he said.

It took Vataha and his friends a couple of months to reach their goal as they made calls to friends and family.

“It wasn’t hard to get people to jump on board with us,” he said.

Since their first year, Vataha and his friends have extensively increased their fundraising.

“Last year we went over $10,000. It was our goal because one of the other participants the year before had gone up over $10,000. We felt that was incredible on their part and so we didn’t want to be outdone in the fundraising efforts. We started a little earlier and cast a net a little bigger, and I think we were at $10,500 last year,” he said.

Undoubtedly, Vataha wants to exceed that number this year.

Not only has Vataha set the bar for fundraising, but he and his friends have won the Reality Rally every year except for one.

“We literally start training in January. We start running and working out and everything like that. Come the day before the race we got out to Old Town and walk around the streets and get a lay of the land, not knowing what we’ll have to do but just trying to familiarize ourselves with the streets. Anytime Gillian has a fundraising advantage we make sure we hit that. The other part is picking a good teammate, since the three of us are going to have to add a fourth, we want to make sure that whoever is playing with us has the same competitive juice and they want to win too,” he explained.

Although Vataha and his friends did not win one year, some controversy still surrounds their loss.

“We have heard that the team that won, let’s say, cut some corners. There were other teams who came back to the after party later on and said, ‘Hey, you know what they did?’ Two or three different teams claimed to have seen inappropriate moves out on the field. But we just said, ‘Okay, we’ll take it for what it is.’ And that was the year before last. We decided we were going to come back with a vengeance and make sure that didn’t happen again. We won by 20 minutes last year so we felt like we redeemed ourselves,” Vataha said with a laugh.

Apart from their victories, the “Three Amigos” have also been deeply impacted by the cause behind Reality Rally.

“It’s really meant a lot to us. Year one it was more about us going out and competing in a really cool event, but now it’s more about how we can support Gillian in a really great local cause.”

Since his participance in Reality Rally, Vataha has taken his love for competition and Survivor and melded them together in a Survivor-like event called “Durham Warrriors Challenge” (http://www. durhamwarriorschallenge.com/).

“We take Survivor fans and create a Survivor-like event just for people who are super fans. We call it Survivor cramped into four days.”

Bob Crowley, winner of Survivor, offered Vataha one hundred acres of land on which to conduct the event. Since then, the challenge has been wildly successful, with nearly 70 applicants last year. The trailer for the challenge can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=_KYKfwtoPuk.

Vataha looks forward to attending Reality Rally in 2016. And as the record shows, he and his amigos are ready to blow everyone out of the water.

Thank you, John, for your relentless support for Michelle’s Place and Reality Rally. See you in April!

-Taryn Murphy