Ironwood, Mich. – This was the first running race I've been in where organizers offered you a barf bag and an oxygen mask at the finish line.
But the Red Bull 400 was no ordinary race.
From the name, you can probably guess the event was created by the same energy drink company that dreamed up spectacles like Crashed Ice and Flugtag.
But instead of sending competitors plunging off a towering platform on ice skates or homemade flying machines, the Red Bull 400 was a contest to see who could sprint the fastest up to the top of a ski jump tower.
The event was May 12 at Copper Peak in Ironwood, a town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Copper Peak actually was built to be a "ski flying" facility, which is like ski jumping, only bigger.
The Copper Peak tower, which hosted international competitions from 1970 to 1994, is the only ski flying hill in the Western Hemisphere and the largest artificial ski jump in the world.
Running from the bottom of the hill to the top of the tower makes it the world's steepest 400-meter race, according to Red Bull. Competitors would face a 37-degree incline, climbing nearly 500 feet, or about 40 stories, over the course of a quarter mile.
Runners normally dread running uphill. There is a reason why a crucial segment of the Boston Marathon is called Heartbreak Hill.