something to draw your attention. It’s one of the reasons high
sensation-seekers get used to horror movies so quickly.^4
But people involved in these types of races do get injured,
sometimes permanently. After all, many people enter OCRs with-
out adequate preparation for such unusual physical challenges. At
one event alone, over two dozen people arrived in a local emer-
gency room with burn marks from tasers, inflammation of heart
muscle, and fainting. Most were treated and released; some were
admitted to the hospital, and at least one went into intensive care.
A few required ongoing treatment for months.^5 But the majority of
runners avoid injury and finish wet, muddy, and with an enormous
sense of personal accomplishment, which may be one of the rea-
sons high sensation-seekers are typically involved in more leisure
activities than the rest of us.
Researchers polled sensation-seekers and asked them to list
the things they do for recreation. Not only did they report a larger
variety of activities than most, but also their choice of activities was
flavored by their quest for thrill and experience. When it comes to
leisure activities, high sensation-seekers try more, travel more, and
have less anxiety when they encounter risky or unusual situations.^6
People’s leisure activities, what they do when they can do
whatever they want, tells you a lot about them. What I noticed
about high sensation-seekers over and over again is that they tend
to spend their leisure time in ways that don’t seem all that leisurely.
Crawling under barbed wire in the mud or plummeting dozens of
feet into arctic-cold water does not seem like a relaxing afternoon.
Tough mudders are fully aware of this, but they do it anyway. The
question is, why?
It’s been widely established by researchers that high sensa-
tion-seekers love high risk activities like skydiving,^7 auto racing,
and hang gliding.^8 Christopher Cronin and his colleagues adminis-
tered Zuckerman’s Sensation-seeking scale to two groups: mem-
bers of a university mountain climbing club and a group of
psychology students not involved in mountain climbing. The mem-
bers of the mountain climbing club had higher total sensation-
seeking scores. They also scored higher in the experience-seeking
and thrill- and adventure-seeking subscales of the sensation-
seeking scale.^9
The higher your total sensation-seeking score, the more
likely you are to try higher-risk activities.^10 Low sensation-seekers
stick to lower-risk activities. High sensation-seekers like low-risk69 / Sports and Adventure in High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge