Groundbreaking study reveals that Adventure Racers would rather get briar-whipped than go to brunch with significant other.

October 16, 2017

After an extensive three year study

spanning four continents, researchers from Henderson Community College published revolutionary, and apparently universal results, regarding adventure racer’s addiction to seemingly miserable experiences.

“This is perhaps the most bizarre thing I’ve ever documented,” said lead scientist William Thomas, pointing to the fact that even after repeated experiments, the test subjects were inevitably drawn to images and experiences that the normal population would describe as painful and terrible.

“I just don’t get it,” Thomas, a University of Illinois educated professor and PhD in Psychology, surmised.


This study, by sheer happenstance, formed when a multifaceted marketing campaign conducted by Frito-Lay had to be scrapped for their delicious Cool Ranch Doritos brand in 2003. Thomas, then acting as a Focus Group Coordinator and majoring in Marketing at Western Michigan University, was perplexed by variant results while conducting a massive consumer research study for the chip conglomerate.

“It was pretty straightforward testing,” Thomas recalls. “Participants were being given innumerable triangular shaped corn derived products with varying tastes.” Thomas goes on to explain that after trials concluded, a significant subset of the sample population graded the most unappetizing flavors as the most gustatorily satisfactory.

Publications on this particular study reveal that the subset favored abnormally sweet flavors that should not be found in a traditionally savory product - jellybean, gummybear, and Gatorade to name a few. 
Unbeknownst to the researchers at the time, the target subjects were inadvertently chosen from a non-diverse subclass of athletes termed Adventure Racers. Interns errantly selected several participants for the study by sourcing a local brewery, which happened to contain a disproportionate number of individuals that had just participated in some sort of “big expedition race”. They were, apparently, all game for eating free food.
 

“That’s when I knew I had to switch majors and get inside of these freak’s heads,” reflected Thomas after seeing the results.


He then devoted his career and scientific pursuits to study this phenomenon.  Thomas, with the support of The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), began an extensive study.
Through the course of multiple experiments, it was ultimately determined that these Adventure Racers experienced an almost Stockholm-like Syndrome regarding the sport that beats them down. The most revealing of these trials involved electrical brain stimulation (EBS), or also referred to as focal brain stimulation (FBS). Through numerous clinical neurobiological studies, repeatable patterns started to become evident. Further innovations in molecular-imaging revealed a direct correlation between specific images presented to subjects and their perceived pleasure response (PPR).

“The most interesting facet to these studies, is in what visual imagery presented to Adventure Racers triggered a perceived pleasure response." 

"Ocular stimulation in the form of acute pictures of things such as briars, flipping a canoe in ice cold waters, and carrying a bike overhead resulted in extremely high ratings of happiness. While comparable images of eggs Benedict, going on a “date night”, and the farmer’s market ranked much lower on the scale,” explains Thomas.

Which is better?
“In several test subjects, it was found that if limitations were not enforced, they would replay these seemingly miserable images through their devices until complete exhaustion, even at the exclusion of food and sleep.”
 

“Really messed up,” Thomas laments.


Matt Mitchell, one of these adventure racers, tries to explain, "My big decision come Saturday morning shouldn't be bacon or sausage links, it should be whether we attack CP8 from the spur or reentrant." His wife, Katherine, shaking her head in disdain, questions, “Can’t we just go to North End Café?”

At press time, Matt was getting his gear ready and droning on incessantly about his next self-induced pain-fest, The FIG.
     

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