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labrat
Trad climber
Erik O. Auburn, CA
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Somehow the write up from Tommy for Outside makes Alex's free solo seem so much more scary and real than all the other press about it.
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aspendougy
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
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For some climbs, such as Bachar Yerian, a free solo is not recommended, as the climb has a history of holds breaking off. I guess in this instance, Honnold felt that all the holds were secure................. I guess he doesn't think like I do!
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le_bruce
climber
Oakland, CA
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Sula:
I'm thinking that to do this, he had to get his mind into a place that no human mind has ever been, and keep it there for four hours.
Not something that mere words can encompass.
Thank you for articulating it. That's it, that's exactly it.
Marshall:
Q: Do you feel the world kind of needed something cool like this, at this moment in time?
Alex: What the world needs is for the U.S. to stay in the Paris Accords.
So classic. What an unbelievable achievement.
You cannot get more classic. Alex is so f*#king good. Just when Synnott begins to wax grandiose in his line of questioning (and who wouldn't given what Alex had just done?), No Big Deal Alex snaps his perspective into focus. Good god is he a classic figure, of cloth unknown.
Finally, let us shout out the badass monkeys who were up there on lines and ledges waiting for Honnold's approach. No small deal to agree to witness something like that.
From the post-climb interview, it sounds like Honnold hand picked that crew. From Chin on down, I imagine that they each went on their own journey of the soul in being up there. To be witnesses to a feat like this with an unknown life-or-death outcome for any fellow human being, not to mention one you love and care for...
I think that if I were up there waiting at Sous le Toit, or even alongside Tom looking at the viewfinder, there is zero chance I'd be able to watch as he went through, say, the Enduro or the Boulder Problem, unless I'd gone through some serious mental work to come to peace with both possible outcomes.
Since I can't fathom the place within human consciousness that Honnold's level of mastery can be found, I find myself thinking about what those monkeys were feeling on Friday night and into Saturday morning, in caves and vans and lying in the dirt behind quiet boulders around the Valley...
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WBraun
climber
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I'm thinking that to do this, he had to get his mind into a place that no human mind has ever been.
Various individuals minds in the past have been into a place far far beyond even that.
If you only knew ......
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Welcomed historical perspective Warblie!
As Mr. Honnold is rumored to have said, "America is truly great again, now I'm going to the gym to work out".
And that first trip up Señor Capitan took how many months..?
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Somehow the write up from Tommy for Outside... Who is Tommy? Oh yeah, right, almost forgot...
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thetennisguy
Mountain climber
Yuba City, CA
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Truly stunning! Breathtaking and incredible! Wonderful work, Alex!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I’m re-reading notebooks of articles I’ve read. Honnold’s solo of El Cap could be informed by something that pertains to mind and its state in extreme sports.
Quality of Experience and Risk Perception in High-Altitude Rock Climbing
Antonella Delle Fave, Marta Bassi & Fausto Massimini
Journal of Applied Sport Psychology
Volume 15, 2003 - Issue 1
Abstract:
Six climbers were monitored during an expedition in the Himalaya, comprising 13 days of traveling and 26 days of mountaineering. The aim was the investigation of the quality of experience and risk perception associated with high-altitude rock climbing. By means of experience sampling method, participants provided on-line repeated self-reports about activities carried out, and the associated quality of the experience, in terms of mood, intrinsic motivation, potency, confidence, engagement, and risk assessment. The experience fluctuation model was applied to identify experiential profiles on the basis of the perception of environmental challenges and personal skills. When both challenges and skills were positive, flow experience was reported. In particular, we found that the opportunity for experiencing flow can motivate climbers to take part in a risky expedition. The results showed that risk played a minor role in climbing, in line with a goal-directed approach to risk seeking. These findings have two implications: (a) Studies on motivation in sport should distinguish between risk and search for challenges and opportunities for action, especially in dealing with extreme sports; (b) In the recreational domain, outdoor programs, among other things, should aim at providing opportunities for flow and personal development.
Findings or claims made from the article:
• Activity distribution of the climbers (of 26 days): climbing 2.2%, maintenance 36.8%, other 6.2%, interaction 10.7%, thinking 2.4%, leisure 13.3%, traveling 1.9%, camp activities 26.4%. N=1033 self-reports
• Intrinsic motivation is essential to “flow”; people chose to take part in spite of objective danger; it is unrelated to external material rewards.
• The reports of anxiety were extremely low; climbers must master it.
• Risk was not a goal but a means to experience “flow.”
• The more experienced the climbers were, the more they searched for autotelic (flow) motives: the sharper their skills, the more it was a dynamic process that fostered personal growth and development of individual life themes.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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I'm thinking that to do this, he had to get his mind into a place that no human mind has ever been.
Various individuals minds in the past have been into a place far far beyond even that.
If you only knew ......
Imagine how many people who did not want to die, but who had the courage to face situations that they thought were certain death outcomes, or at least low probability of living outcomes. The soldiers in the boats waiting to reach the beach in the first wave of the Normandy invasion. They had time to think about what was coming, to plan for it, to wait for it. A child standing between an attacker and his or her mother. Less time to think there, more time to just act in spite of knowing that one's efforts aren't enough but trying anyway. Young black Americans sitting down while the full weight of the government in the guise of huge angry white men armed with weapons beating them within inches of their lives or beyond. And not fighting back, to make a point, enduring unspeakable fear and pain and death to make the point that love and compassion and justice will prevail. Jews in concentration camps that managed to cheer up their fellow torture-mates even after watching wave after wave die of emaciated over-work and under-nourishment, or gas chambers when they clung to life but were no longer able to work.
Humans have shown remarkable and humbling levels of strength in the face of circumstances that are not possible to bear, except they bear them because there is no other choice. Maybe that is part of what makes this case so special. It is not a decision how to act in the face of an unavoidable situation. It is a decision to willingly enter a situation that would crush everybody else, and for what? His fortitude has some similarities with what soldiers or people in life-threatening situations have endured, as sort of victims of circumstance, rising to unbelievable challenges, but here it's more like what a spiritual adventurer might do in exploring the boundary between life and death. It calls to mind that Bridwell quote, "my best vacation is your worst nightmare."
Maybe there has never been a better embodiment of it.
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
Boulder climber
ne'er–do–well
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Touron question: How did he *not* get the ropes up there?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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If you've free soloed much at all then you know it's a matter of comfort, familiarity, conditioning and just plain buzz of being in the groove. Do it long enough and have it saturate deep enough into the right character and you get a Reardon or a Honnold. I've done a bit of it over the years and have also free rope-soloed thousands of pitches. Even roped-solo gets pretty damn serene after a decade or two of doing it to the point where climbing with other people just isn't the same experience - not better or worse - just entirely different. Climbing alone is just a space unto itself.
And while I can't relate to the scale or sustained nature of the endeavor, I've had enough of a taste to know just how "necessary" the feeling can be. Proud and I hope he continues to find the place where he and it can co-exist over the long haul.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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aldude, can you please include the link to the interview in your first post so it's easy for people to access?
What I'm trying to figure out is how does some old dude living in a shack in the desert get the scoop on the biggest climbing story of the century, and beat all the others to the SuperTaco post?
And somebody expects him to do more than that? Come on Al, sing us a song, I miss that voice!
I know for sure I'll never understand Alex's mindset when he says, "it's the other day."
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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"Technique is our protection"
A saying attributed to Pratt, who famously asked Chris Fredericks permission to continue up on the First Ascent of Twilight Zone in September of 1965, the question asked after the gear Chris retrieved from the car would not protect in that slot. Those of us who go up to repeat those routes, now with modern gear and perhaps more importantly, with knowledge of what we will find, are often amazed what the first ascent teams accomplished, in their lack of knowledge, and lack of adequate gear, but with their technique and commitment.
It seemed to some I grew up with in climbing that "training" for climbing was cheating. There is a Sheridan Anderson cartoon of Jim Bridwell's "olympic training gym" in the Valley. And while we have the impression that those 1960s climbers somehow disdained formal training, Eric Beck recalled the various regimes he and Frank Sacherer and others would engage in, preparing to do the first free ascents, and those "route in a day" projects that are equally astounding, given their time.
John Gill trained to do The Thimble, a visionary boulder high-ball problem, training tailored to build the necessary strength and skill to pull the climb off. The campus board that Wolfgang Güllich developed as a training tool for Action Directe, familiar to us all.
I recall John Bachar telling the tale of preparing for some solo, in Europe, and wiring the route on lead, getting every detail down. Unfortunately for John the imperceptible drag of the rope was enough to damp his swing on one dynamic move, drag that was absent on his attempt to solo the route and resulted in an injurious fall, so thin a margin. Bachar trained, and Dave Yerrian once told me he knew how to get in shape for climbing, Bachar had taught him.
Even the story that Bachar told of getting into soloing, John Long's question "well did you ever fall?" in reply to Bachar's "without a rope?", reveals the seed of this idea, we reach a level of mastery in climbing where we are not going to fall, everyone of us has a different level for which that is true, and everyone of us are more or less in shape at any given time, that level rises and falls, and we do well to heed where we are.
We train, we get better, and our mastery grows. For me this takes place at 5.10 and 5.11, at 63 I doubt that I would ever do a 5.12, or at least one that I would consider a "real" 5.12. And on easy ground I've soloed, not much these last few tumultuous climbing years that have seen friends hurt in falls.
But the act of soloing is a total commitment to our preparation to climb, the self acknowledgment of our mastery. There have been many many solos, some we will never know about, but we all understand the commitment, it's not like it is absent in our protected climbing, where we commit to our understanding of how to place protection, and when, in order to insure a better outcome in the unlikely event that we would fall.
Where protection is not possible, we either back off the climb or we push through. Whatever the outcome we learn something about ourselves, and we might go back and train a bit harder to improve, at whatever grade that happens, for us.
There is no justification for engaging in the risk of climbing when the consequences are that we might die, whether or not the climb is solo or roped. We climb for a multitude of reasons, none of which are worth sacrificing a life.
But we will continue to climb, and those who are determined and able will push their mastery to greater levels than we could imagine even after this amazing event. And in those feats "technique" will be their protection.
I do not want to see any of you die in any climbing accident, but if we climb we necessarily engage in risk, and the consequences of that can be death. But I also enjoy seeing the mastery of an activity I've engaged in for over 40 years now, and I understand a bit of what goes on to push for those goals, to realize those dreams.
We choose to undertake those risks ourselves, and I believe we are mindful not to do that irresponsibly.
Congratulations to Alex, again, and best wishes for a long life, our time is the only thing we truly possess, and we should have no regrets when that time is over.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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For me the most remarkable aspect of the ascent was, in his own evolution, actually being able to know and recognize with a high level of certainty that it had morphed into a doable proposition. At what exact moment was that decided? Months, weeks or days before? And how did that decision feel standing there with a first hand on the rock?
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Keeper of Australia Mt
Trad climber
Whitehorse, Yukon , Canada
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The missing clause in Genesis - ... and then God created AH. Given all the crap in the media on one topic or another it is a breath of fresh air to see such an excellent, down to earth dude imagine the impossible and then just go out an do it. Taking rad to a whole new planetary system. The climbing community and humanity is just so damned lucky to have this guy doing what he does - from Sufferfest 1 & 2 to FS the Nose - how much better does it get.
Rock on Alex. Harding just rolled over and reached for a big jug to join in the celebration!
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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This is probably my favorite quote from this climb.
Jimmy Chin: "When he got to the top, he looked at me and said “I’m pretty sure I could go back to the bottom and do it again right now.”"
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Burnin' Oil
Trad climber
CA
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Obviously an impressive feat but, on an objective level, why is it more impressive than any other hard free solos? The mystique of El Cap? The length of the climb? As Alex has said many times, the consequences of failure are horrific but the likelihood of failure is remote. The route is will within his capabilities and he had the moves wired.
I am still blown away and wish I could have watched the climb, but think his solo of Moonlight Buttress was on par with Free Rider.
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snowhazed
Trad climber
Oaksterdam, CA
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I can wrap my head around soloing hard finger cracks like moonlight, but slippery el cap granite, and the variety of technical demand makes this one vastly superior imho
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