SHOOT to thrill

Paintballers live for the rush that comes from trying to survive

A group of players head up the road to Paintball Arkansas’ Ewok Village, the gallery’s most elaborate course.
A group of players head up the road to Paintball Arkansas’ Ewok Village, the gallery’s most elaborate course.

— “Ready?” asked referee Luke Boroughs in the direction of one side of the speedball course.

Players checked their weapons, called “markers,” and then saluted the ref with a classic insurgent gesture, the gun pumped merrily overhead.

“Ready?” he asked the other side.

What stood between the two teams was about 150 feet of giant geometric shapes. In this game, the shapes aren’t part of the challenge. They’re part of the cover, and curiously inadequate at that.

“Three, two, one.”

This is how the action begins at Paintball Arkansas. The event horizon, if you will, for what follows is a melting away of the outside world. The course becomes a void filled only by paintballs flying like swirling electrons and your own instinct to survive. Just, survive. It’s the most fear-driven burst of excited energy a person can expend this side of a bear attack or, well, real combat.

“I was expecting it to be just a lot slower, like with people sneaking around, mostly hiding, trying to shoot each other once in a while,” said first-timer Justin Huggins of Clinton. “No. It’s guns a-blazing.”

As an action-adventure sport, paintball is a peculiar one.

For one, it takes far less craft than your mainstream counter cultural sports like skateboarding or motocross, the former requiring more practice and guts - imagine riding your board sideways down a stairway handrail - and the latter requiring still more guts and muscle.

For another, it’s a sport that combines hunting and you. In a genre (action-adventure) in which gravity or the elements often serve as players’ foil, paintball is martial.

There is a guy out there, approaching, firing at you, trying to kill you. The prospect of your elimination doesn’t thrill him. It’s a numbers game he’s playing - after you, on to the next. But of course, the threat of him means everything to you.

“Have you ever tried a paintball grenade,” a little kid asks tournament player Josh Dean of Conway.

“Oh yeah,” Dean says. “They’re a lot of fun.”

At well over 6 feet tall, Dean is - there’s no other word for it - macho. He’s the kind of guy you don’t drag along with you to a singles’ dance. “I’ve rode bulls,” he says, “raced dirtbikes, jumped out of planes,” by way of limning the superior rush of paintball.

In this sport, Dean’s height and broad chest are liabilities, because skilled players can mark a hand, a gun, a helmet crown, from 50 feet or more. Some courses require belly crawling, and every course features obstacles too small for all but the smallest players to take cover behind, and it can’t be emphasized enough, the nature of the killing - er, tagging - that takes place in the course of a game is arbitrary, and even the best players are likely to succumb.

Another thing. For at least as long as you’re on the field, real-life relationships and etiquette - that is, the very stitching of our cultural fabric - yield to our survival impulses.

“I’ve already told them, don’t treat me differently because I’m a girl,” said first timer Chandra Schreyer of Morrilton, “and already I got smacked in the face, so I don’t think they are.”

“That was a pure luck shot,” said Dean, embarrassed at knocking the only girl out of the game.

“I thought she was him,” he said, fingering another player. “They all look the same from the mask up.”

Schreyer volunteers that she marked her husband, as if to regain some pride.

How did it feel to be eliminated by your wife?

“I was indifferent. I’m not out to get her,” he said.

“Really?” she said. “I was gunning for you.”

THE RUSH

In paintball, it’s better to be fast than powerful, and better to be quick than fast. It’s better to be small than big. Being a “jock” is no advantage.

A couple of pals at Cabot High School, Sean Barry, 17, and Alec Linton, 16, don’t look like athletes. Linton is wiry and light, and Barry is built like a football lineman, a position he has played.

Paintball is nothing like any high school sport, Barry says. “It’s the sprinting of baseball, the adrenaline rush of football, the craziness of basketball.”

Of these, what really interests them is the rush. “Everything just kind of races for however long,” Barry says.

That’s exactly what happens. In a sport where hiding describes offense and defense, the players’ minds and hearts are racing. Even experienced players talk about being in the zone. When the ref calls the game (upon the elimination of the last player from one side), some players say it’s like waking up.

Now, paintball is not exercise in the same manner as swimming or weightlifting. Players may breathe hard, but their muscles aren’t failing. The game itself won’t build up your VO2 max or fast-twitch muscle. But if the “rush” that players report is spikes in adrenaline, can the game have a stimulating effect on muscles and metabolism beyond normal exercise?

Epinephrine (“adrenaline”) is called the “fight or flight” hormone, and its working definition is that it mobilizes the body in times of extreme stress. Blood pressure rises (even as vessels dilate) as do blood sugar levels. Fats are converted into fatty acids, and metabolism rises. Not surprisingly, synthesized epinephrine is used in performance supplements.

Recent studies suggest that highly trained athletes in the course of exercise secrete more adrenaline than untrained people, and that this in part explains their performance. In other words, there’s an endocrine component to superior conditioning - in addition to cardiovascular fitness and fast-twitch muscle bulk, and practice and competitive focus.

“They’re better able to secrete more epinephrine ... given the same amount of activity,” says Nick Hays, an assistant professor in geriatrics and nutrition at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “And the receptors that take this epinephrine in at the muscle ... there are more of those, too.”

TARGET ZONE TONER?

What the “rush” of paintball is not going to do, Hays says, is melt the fat off your waistline and tone your gluteals simply because you’re inducing a fight-or-flight response in a simulated game every Saturday.

“So, yeah, you could sit somewhere in a chair and be nervous, or you know, think about something and have an adrenaline rush somehow mentally, but you’re not going to have increased fitness.”

Oh well. It was a nice idea.

Look, Hays says, there are two things paintball’s epinephrine surge has going for it, and they’re not to be dismissed. The first is that a strong surge is likely to make you feel good, or at least not bad, about getting exercise. The second is “if you’re playing paintball, and you have that adrenaline rush, you’re going to sprint harder, play longer, have a more intense exercise session.”

Over time, “that greater intensity, those faster, harder workouts, they’re obviously going to have a fitness benefit.”

READY AIM

The paintball set is wary of stereotypes - gun-loving rubes simmering with clan hatred, wrapped in camouflage but not up to real combat.

OK, Dean is wary. He has seen the sport get bad press: neighborhood gangs that hit bums or prostitutes in drivebys.

But the suspicion that this is a macho sport is probably true. The popular trade magazine is called Action Pursuit Games, and the January 2011 cover - they work a ways out - features mixed martial arts bonecrusher Randy Couture in warrior, um, couture.

But they’re “markers,” not guns, Dean said, and players get “hit,” not shot.

At the world-class level, courses can be the size of small villages, and events take place in the context of “scenarios,” thus making the players slightly less like commandos and slightly more like re-enactors.

The “Oklahoma D-Day” scenario that attracts a few thousand and takes place each year at Wyandotte, Okla., involves operations and strategy, soldiers and command staff, even staged Higgins boats to simulate mass arrival on the beachheads. It’s a 24-hour operation with many interior scenarios, and organizers actually advise participants to do some preparatory study of the actual event.

Harrison Jones, 15, of Conway, hasn’t made it to “Oklahoma D-Day,” but he hopes to. It’s expensive, he says. This summer he “hardly played at all” because he was working, saving up for paint.

His own marker costs about $1,500. Then, it’s another $150 for the “hopper” (the bulbous tank that holds the paintballs), perhaps as much again for a mask. Then there’s the paint - $68 for a case of 2,000 balls. That quantity might not last a trigger happy paintballer a weekend of play.

For beginners, the hurt the sport may put on their pocketbooks pales beside the real, actual pain of the sport.

Doesn’t it hurt to get hit by a paintball traveling 280 feet-per-second? It may, but most bruises are caused when people shoot each other point blank with guns whose velocity regulator is turned up too high.

“It’s a misconception that it hurts because most people who have been hurt got shot in their backyards by their brother at 5 feet with a Wal-Mart gun that’s turned up way too high by a ball that’s a year old that’s turned rock-hard,” said manager Andy Hill.

Then he lifted a pants leg to show off a dull indigo spot the size of a baby’s fist and wrapped in a yellow halo.

In competition, he said, things move a little faster.

More about paintball

One way to find a paintball gallery close to home is to visit the website www.pbreview.com/fields/53. There you’ll find 15 paintball places throughout the state, each with its own page that lists a phone number, an address and all of the reviews.

These reviews appear to be genuine (not all of them are kind), and the number of reviews corresponds to the popularity and longevity of the complex (Paintball Arkansas has 23 reviews, while South Arkansas Paintball Complex, closed since 2008, has none).

ActiveStyle, Pages 25 on 11/22/2010

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