Youthful Enthusiasm

Jordan has been bugging me for weeks to ride to afton alps, and go up and down the ski hill climb as many times as he can. I finally decided tonight was the night. Each member of the family made bets on how many times he'd do it:

Maren - 3
Jim - 4
Carla - 5
Jordan - 20

I even challenged him, saying I'll do one more than him. I also said if he clips out on the climb, it's game over.

We made our way down to the climb, and started our reps. I asked Jordan to take it easy on the early ones, to save energy for later reps. The climb itself is 230ft of vertical over 0.4miles. That's an average gradient of 10.9%. The base of the climb is the steepest at around 17%. The middle is around 9-10% with a final kick around 14%.



Jordan did the first climb in 3:50. He rattled off a couple more without any trouble. I rode the 4th one pretty hard, and he climbed at his own pace. By the 5th rep, I was getting concerned about him bonking, and started to try to convince him that was enough. After the 6th, I told him the 7th would be the last, and he was pretty disappointed. I told him if he could do the 7th in under 5 minutes, he could do 10. He attacked the hill as if it was his first rep. He paid for his effort at the top, but still did it in 3:45! Dang, now I had to do 3 more.

Each of the final 3 reps sucked. I kept reminding Jordan about the fact that we still had to ride home, plus we were doing Black Dog on Wednesday. He didn't care. He was doing 10 no matter what. I stayed behind Jordan on the 10 rep, and he kept me at bay, then sprinted at the top. He ended up doing the last rep in 4:10. Unbelievable. Exhausted at that point, I didn't remind Jordan I'd do one more than him.



Afterwards, I had to stop at the Afton Bean for dinner. Baker had a Turkey Panini yesterday, that I was dying to try. It was great. Jordan was poking fun at me for being tired. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.