Becoming the “Ultimate Couch Potato” is hard work.
Just ask Jessica Mosley, a 26-year-old education coordinator who at Baltimore’s ESPN Zone this past weekend earned the title as the area’s top couch-sitting, TV-watching sports junkie. Mosley dominated a reclining chair for a consecutive 70 hours and 45 seconds, unofficially breaking the world record of 69 hours, 48 minutes.
“At first, it was super fun,” said Mosley, an Arlington, Va., resident.
But then the conditions set in. According to rules, competitors could order any food or drink for free, but they had to stay seated and awake while watching nonstop sports — whether it was college football and professional basketball during the day or bass fishing and rugby at night. They got five minutes each hour to stretch and 15 minutes every eight hours to go outside or to the bathroom.
“We were like, ‘Well, we can’t stay comfortable, because we’ll fall asleep, and you can’t get up. When you watch sports at your house, you can stand up and cheer and stuff. You can’t do any of that here,” Mosley said. “So a couple of hours in, we were like, ‘This was a little harder than we expected.'”
She developed a plan to outlast the competition: Eat ice chips to keep hydrated and away from the bathroom, and order light foods, such as apples or avocados.
Alex Pyzik, a 23-year-old data collector from Bel Air, came in second place, taking himself out of the challenge at 9 a.m. on Sunday. He sipped the energy drink “Rockstar” throughout the competition.
The competition was Baltimore’s first, but sports fans here put to shame those who participated in New York and Chicago. In New York, the winner lasted 18 hours, about one-fourth as long as Mosley; in Chicago, the winning 39 hours was slightly more than half of Baltimore’s top time.
But Mosley still didn’t get her fill. She planned to watch Sunday night’s Virginia Tech-Duke basketball game after driving home.
“It feels good,” Mosley said of her win. “I mean, I didn’t think it was going to go that long, and I definitely didn’t expect to win.”
