The fastest speed ever achieved on a water slide is 57 miles per hour. It was clocked in 2009 on the Kilimanjaro, a 164-foot-high, 50-degree plummet at Águas Quentes, a water park outside of Rio de Janeiro, by Jens Scherer, a German advertising executive. Scherer, 30, the reigning champion of competitive "speed chuting," also holds four Guinness world records in the sport, including the one-day distance record, for chuting 94 miles on a slide near Munich. That's like traveling all the way from New York to Philadelphia on the bare skin of your back. During those 24 hours, he slept for just an hour and a half and climbed 30,000 vertical feet worth of steps, the equivalent of hiking from sea level to the summit of Mount Everest.

Approaching 60 miles an hour on a water slide is not simply a matter of leaping and letting gravity do its thing. Speed chuting is a skill. An art. And there are people who take it very, very seriously. Almost all of them are German, and there are more of them every year. They compete on teams with names like Slide Fast, Die Young and regularly travel many hours to weekend tournaments sponsored by water parks across their country.

"Speed chuting," like "skiing," is a catchall term that encapsulates a range of events, from simple top-to-bottom timed runs to sliding marathons (fastest to cover 26.2 horizontal miles). For the moment, it remains an exclusively German sport whose place in the national athletic firmament perhaps best resembles paintball in the U.S. Those who compete are crazed; those who don't find it odd and maybe even a little scary.

When I first heard about speed chuting, this past winter, it didn't sound scary to me. It sounded freaking sweet. So in February I called up Scherer to find out how I could get in on the action. My timing couldn't have been better, Scherer told me. In late March, the German National Speed Chuting Championship, the Kentucky Derby of the sport's yearlong circuit, would be held in the Baltic Sea resort town of Scharbeutz. To my surprise, Scherer noted that the contest was open to anyone. Even more tantalizing, no American had ever competed in speed chuting, meaning the title of American champion was unclaimed. I decided I ought to do something about that.

"If you come a few days early, I would be happy to teach you my techniques," Scherer graciously offered. "You can crash on my couch."

LET ME BE FRANK: Nobody would ever mistake me for someone who belongs in a major athletic competition. My daily exercise regimen consists of a half-mile shuffle to the coffee shop to pick up a pair of banana-oat mini-muffins. Fortunately, Scherer hadn't seemed fazed when I noted my lack of fitness. He gave me some basic advice to start prepping for what he described as "rocking the tube."

Training for speed chuting, he explained, is sort of like powerlifting. All I had to do was isolate a couple of core muscles and work them until they were rock solid. "So long as your back and stomach are strong, you don't especially have to worry about the rest of the body," he said. He also wanted me to find a local water slide and take some practice runs. Easier said than done when you live in New England and it's winter. Ultimately, I committed to doing 50 sit-ups and 10 pull-ups each morning—a routine I remained fanatically devoted to for exactly eight days.

Still, I allowed myself visions of glory as I flew into Zurich and took a train across the German border to Hattingen, the tiny town where Scherer lives with his girlfriend, Sandra Westhoff, southern Germany's female speed-chuting champion. Scherer picked me up at the train station and drove us straight to the Aquasol water center, in nearby Rottweil. Facilities like Aquasol are quite popular in Germany, where long winters have people seeking out indoor exercise. Inside, there were saunas, hot tubs, lap pools, and a wicked four-story water slide Scherer called "the Black Hole." Added in 2003, it features a 394-foot tube, the longest in southern Germany. The interior is made entirely of black fiberglass and is illuminated with trippy flashing lights. As in any competition-ready chute, at each end there was a pair of laser triggers measuring times down to the millisecond.