Balls of steel

my hands just dripped!

Seriously though there are some strange people in the world.

What brains?

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TheTank said...

And I repeat. There's some really strange people out there.

The article in Outside mag on Honold is great

www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/rock-climbing/No-Strings-Attached.html?page=1

Honnold shrugged. "Hey, we've all gotta die sometime. You might as well go big."

The blas? attitude concerns his close friends. "I'm worried that he's going to kill himself," says Chris Weidner, 36, one of Honnold's longtime climbing partners. "I think free soloing is a numbers game. The more you solo, the greater the chance of making a mistake. Alex disagrees. He says, 'Even though I solo a hundred pitches in a month, on each one the chances of falling are almost zero.'"

Caldwell expresses his concern more succinctly. "I really like Alex," he says. "I don't want him to die."

LAST OCTOBER, I spent a week with Honnold at Smith Rock, a massif of volcanic stone rising out of central Oregon farmland. Honnold wanted to visit Smith, the site of the first 5.14 ever climbed in the United States, before leaving on a four-month tour of Chad, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and Greece.

We met in Portland and drove southeast, me in a rental, Honnold in the Econoline, which is clean and well organized. When we stopped at a motel, I asked if I could pose a few questions. "Sure," he said. "Might as well get the media B.S. out of the way."

I did a double take. "Don't take it personally," he continued. "Going to Virginia next week for The North Face to do a dog-and-pony show. Banff"?the annual adventure-film festival where Honnold was scheduled to speak?"will be full-on B.S. It's fun sometimes, but it's annoying. It takes away from actual climbing."

Honnold seems to have no self-censoring mechanism. He often speaks in short, pat locutions, and some of his one-liners can be abrasive. "There's only a handful of chicks in the world who can climb big walls on my level," he told me. And: "I took a test once; they said I was a genius." He recently erased himself from Facebook. "It was too crazy," he says. "I was getting 20 friend requests a day. Some kid would ask, 'Hey, what kind of chalk bag should I buy?' You hate to blow him off, but, like, you don't give a ****."

Some friends think fame has taken a toll on Honnold. Weidner, his climbing partner, says, "When we started climbing together, Alex was very polite, very safety conscious. Now he's more likely to badmouth you. About a year ago, I was trying to lead this pitch, and I kept falling off. Alex said, 'Dude, what's your ****ing problem? It's only 5.13.' He may have been joshing, but it hurt my feelings. He's got a certain attitude now, like unless you're a world-class climber, you suck."

Alex Honnold is an exception to the rule - that first image on the vid (below) was where he was free climbing at Yosemite & had a moment of doubt & fear popped in to his head for the first time. Whilst he was being filmed, he simply sat down & reflected on what he was doing for a minute, then kept on his way - amazing mental strength!



I've witnessed first-hand solo free-climbers and although it's very hard to watch them whilst climbing (actually made my stomach turn), and you constantly say to yourself "ficken idiot!" - there's a strange feeling when they reach the top that you want to shake their hand & congratulate them. I watched an overweight 45-50y/o slowly, but successfully climb a (grade 19) solo (with Asics sneakers!) whilst being watched by his partner & 6y/o son earlier this year. Not an overly difficult climb for a lightweight, but plenty of verticals and not a lot of anchor points - not for me thanks.

Each to their own.

[edit] I just found the clip where he talks about that moment at 3:02.

My balls of steel just evaporated watching these clips