From his Haiti youth to the time he arrived in Colorado Springs on a snowy day in the late 1990s, Christel Aime has lived his life a certain way.

“If you give me two ways of doing something,” he said, “I’m always gonna choose the hard way.”

What he chose for 2021 surpassed even his standards.

On New Year’s Eve, Aime became the third person to record 1,000 laps in a year on the Manitou Incline, up and down the mountain-spanning staircase gaining more than 2,000 feet in less than a mile. The last time someone logged more than his 1,001 ascents was 2019, when Greg Cummings set a record 1,825. That beat Roger Austin’s 2015 mark of 1,719.

Cummings and Austin were at the Incline on Friday to celebrate the newest member of the 1,000 club with cake. Aime’s tracker showed an average of three ascents a day over 365 days (sometimes zero in a day, sometimes five).

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“Brutal,” he called his year.

Just as he prefers.

“People would see me going up there over and over, listening to podcasts, and probably thinking, ‘Wow, he doesn’t have anything to do,'” Aime said. “Actually, it’s the opposite.”

A husband and father of two, Aime, 48, is a self-made man. Since coming to the Springs for nursing school, he has gone on to oversee several assisted living centers and a transportation service, along with a construction company he conceived of in 2019. That was while religiously climbing the Incline with Cummings during that record pursuit.

En route to racking up 600 ascents himself, Aime thought through a problem.

“I was trying to expand my assisted living business, but I couldn’t find a contractor to do the jobs at a reasonable price,” he said. “Doing the Incline got me reflecting, ‘How do I get this done?'”

He became his own contractor, all thanks, he said, to that time he had to think. He found the Incline to be “a meditation” toward that kind of enlightenment. Similarly, in 2021 Aime expanded his financial portfolio by listening to a podcast about cryptocurrency while laboring over the steps.

“If I was not doing this challenge, that would not happen because I would not have listened to 1,000 hours of podcasts,” he said.

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He counted that as one benefit of the 1,000-climb mission. Another: He abandoned meat for fruits and veggies — a diet better for body and mind, he found.

There were costs.

“Constant tiredness,” he said, with days on the Incline starting at 5 a.m., followed by full days of work, followed by more climbs, followed by dinner at home around 9 p.m. He persisted through heat and snow. He counted himself as “lucky” for a wife who encouraged him.

He lost 20 pounds along the way. “I’m committed to keeping that off,” he said. “And I’m committed to now always finding something harder to do.”