The owner of Good Drop Wine Shop, Sarah Worley, not only survived the challenges on Bear Grylls' newest show, "I Survived Bear Grylls: Going Commando," but was the winner on her episode of the show. The episode was filmed in November of 2022 and is now available to watch via TBS. We chatted with Worley about her experience.
Source Weekly: What made you want to be a contestant on Bear Grylls' show?
Sarah Worley: I own a wine shop, and finding good service workers was hard last summer. It was stressful, I was working all the time, and I couldn't sleep one night, and I had been watching "Naked and Afraid." So I just typed into Google, survival reality shows casting now; this one came up, so I applied.
SW: So, it was never your intention to go on a survival TV show?
SW: No. But one of the application questions was what's on your bucket list. I wrote that I don't have a bucket list, but I have a "f*ck it" list that's a mile long. Which is just a list of stuff. There's nothing that I want to do. I don't say, like, I'm going to do this. But if something arises, then I'm like f*ck it. I don't put stuff on it. I roll with it, and everything goes on the list. Good and bad. Because why not, right?
SW: How did you prepare for the show?
SW: I didn't do a ton. I went to Nighthawk [Naturalist] School and took a few days' worth of classes to learn how to make a fire from scratch and what foods were edible and nonedible. I learned how to make a shelter and survive in the cold. So, the basic survival skills. I was also working out more and they asked if I knew how to swim 1,000 times. So, I knew I would be in the water, so I was swimming more and doing my High-Intensity Interval Training classes to strengthen.
SW: Can you walk me through the show?
SW: There were 40 people, and they chose five for each show. So each show is a skills-based competition, where you're trying to knock the other people off with your survival skills. For the first skills competition, we had to dive into a vat of blood and urine and find body parts that [Bear] called out from a cow or a deer. We had to find the tongue, heart and liver. So you're up to your neck in blood and then you have to jump out of this vat, run to this finish line and put it on this column before anybody else.
The second skills competition was to army crawl through mud onto a rope and then skim across the rope to the other side. The third competition was eating horrible foods. I ate a pig uterus. It was awful. Whoever couldn't do it fast enough or didn't get their food down lost that round.
The final round was a raised play structure where you're tied to a parachute. You have to weave your way through it to untangle yourself. Then once you get through the structure, you have to then go underneath it and put together a flashlight that's in pieces mixed under all sorts of leaves and debris. And then whoever made it to the finish line first was the winner.
SW: Who were you up against?
SW: I beat out a 28-year-old who was a purple heart recipient for valor in the line of duty. I beat a 30-year-old former professional cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints. I beat out a 32-year-old, 6-foot-4 carpenter out of San Francisco and a 40-year-old 6-foot-5 school teacher out of Chicago who did 250 pushups every morning.
SW: Did you expect to win?
SW: I like to win, but here I am, this 50-year-old woman from Bend, Oregon, who makes it on this national TV show. What are the chances I will beat out these younger, faster competitors? But I do.
SW: Anything else you want us to know about the show?
SW: We were able to do a fundraiser watch party to raise money for Grandma's House, a charity in Central Oregon that helps young women in abusive situations get housing and skills training and find a good place. Everyone who came had to guess how far I made it on the show and some other trivia, and whoever got the most right got to choose the charities we donated to. But, it had to stay local to Central Oregon.
SW: Are there any future survival show plans?
SW: I think I'm a one-and-done girl.
—Find Worley on "I Survived Bear Grylls" episode 2 on TBS at tbs.com/shows/i-survived-bear-grylls.
