Lure of extreme activities explained

TAKING part in painful and extreme adventure challenges can help office workers deal with the impact of a sedentary lifestyle, researchers have found.

In a bid to find out why people pay for experiences deliberately marketed as painful, a team of researchers from Cardiff University, Kedge Business School, France, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, spoke to a number of people who took part in the adventure challenge Tough Mudder.

As well as conducting before and after-event interviews and studying what was said about the experience online, the lead researcher attended four Tough Mudder events as an entrant, observer and volunteer, in the UK, Australia and the United States between 2012 and 2015.

She spoke to 26 participants, aged 22 to 39.

Those taking part run through torrents of mud, plunge into freezing water and even crawl through 10,000 volts of electric wires and injuries have included spinal damage, strokes, heart attacks, and even death. As of 2016, more than 2.5 million participants have entered the challenge.

Dr Rebecca Scott, from Cardiff Business School at Cardiff University, said: “On the one hand consumers spend billions of dollars every year on pain relief, while exhausting and painful experiences such as obstacle races and ultra-marathons are gaining in popularity.

“How do we explain that? That’s what we aimed to find out with this research.”

The researchers found that contestants spoke about escaping the routine of everyday life and the monotony of work.

One participant said afterwards: “You kind of come away feeling like you’ve lived a little bit more. You take your mind and body to a new level of endurance.”

The research, Selling Pain To The Saturated Self, is published in The Journal of Consumer Research