Wok bottom – Alison Healy on alternative sports

This is the time of year when we are supposed to take up a new sport or activity, but this is no ordinary January. Surely an extraordinary year calls for an extraordinary challenge? Forget pounding the streets with the rain belting down. Just pick up a pillow and come out swinging.

The good news is that pillow fighting is now a sport and the first live pay-per-view pillow fighting championships (PFC) get under way in Florida on January 29th.

Steve Williams, the man who put the feather into featherweight, told Reuters news agency that PFC delivers the drama of hand-to-hand combat without the blood and gore of mixed martial arts or boxing. "It's hardcore swinging with specialised pillows," he warned of the bouts. The combat pillows have three holster straps for more leverage and are rip-proof so spectators don't need to worry about being covered in duck feathers.

The male and female competitors mainly come from boxing and MMA backgrounds, but he promised no sleep would be lost over the levels of violence on display.

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So, could pillow fighting be the new extreme ironing, when it comes to alternative sports? The origins of extreme ironing have been disputed because, of course, wouldn't everyone like to say they invented it? Englishman Tony Hiam believes he started the activity in 1980 when he became amused by his brother-in-law's determination to iron his clothes during a camping trip. Hiam struck while the iron was hot and began taking an ironing board to unusual places such as an airport departure lounge and on top of a telephone box. But it was his fellow countryman Phil Shaw who really popularised the activity in the late 1990s.

Since then, ironists, as they call themselves, have been pictured ironing in unexpected places such as Mount Everest and in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Clothes have been ironed while skydiving, horse-riding, canoeing and tightrope walking and there are photographs to prove it. If only they were half as interested in ironing at home, an Irish mammy might observe.

But this is a serious competition with rules around the size of the ironing board, the type of iron and the size of the garment (no smaller than a tea towel, in case you are thinking of partaking). You would have to wonder if the quality of ironing is a priority, particularly for the underwater extreme ironists. Back in 2011, 173 Dutch divers broke a new world record for extreme ironing but there is no mention of the sharpness of their creases.

Using household items as sports equipment seems to be on trend. Just look at the growing popularity of wok racing. Invented in Germany in 2003, this ice sport involves competitors sitting in round-bottomed Chinese woks and hurtling down bobsled tracks. The woks have been modified slightly for safety reasons, with the edges covered in a polyurethane foam and the bottoms reinforced, so whipping up a quick stir-fry after the race is a non-runner.

I’ve seen the photographs and the participants all look incredibly serious despite the fact that they are sitting in large pans. Of course, travelling at 100 km an hour down a bobsled track might wipe the smile off your face too. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a spatula.

But if you don't fancy taking your life in your hands while sitting in a wok, or leaping from an airplane with an ironing board attached to your chest, then there is another alternative sport to pique your interest. If you ever thought that you could sleep for Ireland, you will have the chance to do so in May, for that is when the World Sleep Championships (WSC) take place. This will involve more than 60 hours of sleep competition and the only equipment you will need is a sleep tracker and your favourite pillow.

The first WSC in 2020 was a round robin event where a competitor progressed to the next round if they posted a better sleep score than their opponent. Factors such as speed in falling asleep and length of time in each sleep stage all contributed to their scores.

Of course, it wasn't the world's first sleep competition. Ten years earlier, Spain held its first national siesta championship. This competition involved sleeping in the middle of a busy and noisy shopping centre in Madrid. Security worker Pedro Lopez (62) slept his way to victory with a 17-minute snooze and received bonus points from impressed judges for his 70-decibel snoring.

So, at a time when we should be kind to ourselves, consider the World Sleep Championships. You’ve been training for this since the day you were born.

At least sleep on it.