Another personal record shattered!

I love to ski Ninety-Nine 90! It’s a high speed quad that serves the highest point in the Canyons and a steep cirque that offers a great variety of terrain and endless options. 

The lift offers a 1,536 ft vertical drop and gets skiers to the top in less than 7 minutes. The run I take is pretty much under the lift line, is very steep, quite athletic and leaves no room for error or lack of concentration. 

In previous years, I had set two equal, personal records for the number of laps skied non stop on that lift, a first one for 25 laps on February 27, 2010 with a total vertical skied for that day 42,450 ft skied for that day, then another one for an equal 25 laps on February 15, 2020, with a total vertical skied of 43,105 ft that I had measured at an average time of 9 min 49 sec per lap. 

This year, as I’m inexorably growing older, I wanted to see if I could at least repeat or do better than that, so I picked Sunday and managed to I skied 27 times non-stop, shattering my former records, for a total vertical of 46,026 at 10 min 27 sec per lap. 

This slower average performance per lap could suggest a certain decline showing my older age (75) and a steady slow-down of my ski functions, but as an excuse for the dip, snow conditions were much more difficult today (hard, re-frozen snow) and I simply didn’t want to fall, get hurt or even die in that quest for performance. 

Besides, I wasn’t that tired after my 27 laps and could have pushed to 30, as I had plenty more reserve to go, but again didn’t want to push my luck either. That will be kept in reserve for a future attempt!