In an interview, Scott said the Tough Mudder’s electric shocks and ice water are more of a “gimmicky pain”—not comparable to something like climbing Mt. Everest. “You have short bouts of pain, like smacking into muddy water,” she said. However, what’s notable about the race is that the people who run it tend to be “in lifestyles that are very comfortable and easy.” And though the pain is short-lived, it’s real: At one event Scott took part in, emergency workers were “scooping people off the floor and into ambulances” after the electric-wire obstacle, she said.

As she interviewed participants, Scott noticed most of them worked desk jobs in industries like engineering and PR. Even the participant who was a nurse said she was sedentary for most of the day. In their conversations with Scott and each other, the participants emphasized how painful it was to train for and compete in the Mudder—and how rewarding that pain felt in the end. Here’s how a man named James described the “Arctic Enema” obstacle, in which participants slide into a dumpster full of ice water, on his blog: “I can’t breathe. My legs aren’t working. My head is going to explode! My arms are too cold to drag me out. That was horrendous.”

As the event wore on, many participants described dissociating from their thoughts, as though in a zen state of unity with their mud-caked bodies. A man named Mike said, “I wasn’t feeling bad, but I wasn’t feeling good, I don’t know how to explain it, I wasn’t in shock, I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t in pain, but I wasn’t all there, I was a bit rattled.”

Scott and her colleagues argue that “Mike’s experience of not being ‘all there’ is consistent with past research arguing that extreme pain obliterates ‘the contents of consciousness.’” The intense pain helps them to forget, temporarily, the hyper-mental concerns of their daily lives as cubicle drones.

The participant named James exhibited that mentality in saying, after the Mudder was over, “Ready for our road trip back to the normality of screaming children, laptops and [the grocery store] Tescos … I wonder if we could just stay here and do it all again.”

The authors note that Tough Mudders are not the only way people try to escape the the cognitive overload of white-collar work:

These stories of overworked individuals wanting to escape the tedium of office life are consistent with other phenomena, such as hyperstressed financial workers in London paying to spend their lunch breaks floating inside darkened isolation tanks where they achieve a dream-like state. What is distinctive about Tough Mudder, though, is the way participants achieve this escape through pain rather than isolation, sensory overload rather than sensory deprivation.

Indeed, as anyone who has begrudgingly trained for a marathon on battered knees or iced themselves after Crossfit might know, the fitness industry offers any number of extreme ways to temporarily short-circuit your brain.