Alex Honnold Quotes

I've done a lot of thinking about fear. For me the crucial question is not how to climb without fear-that's impossible- but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.

There is no adrenaline rush. If I get an adrenaline rush, it means that something has gone horribly wrong.

In a real sense, I performed the hard work of that free solo during the days leading up to it. Once I was on the climb, it was just a matter of executing. The

I’ve never done drugs, and though I’ve tasted alcohol, I’ve never had a whole drink. I don’t even drink coffee. I had a small cup once—it was like drinking battery acid. I had to poop all morning. I once had a sniff of Scotch. I thought, I should be cleaning my sink with this stuff. It’s not some moral objection—drugs and booze and caffeine just have no appeal to me.

When I protested that it seemed like too serious a situation to rely only on the sun and wind, Piero drew an analogy to climbing. Sometimes you find yourself in positions where falling would mean death. So you don’t fall. It helped me understand. The nomads just don’t make mistakes.

On the summit, part of me wished that someone, anyone, had noticed that I’d just done something noteworthy—though maybe it was better that I didn’t have to talk to anybody. How could I have expressed what my last few hours had been like? It was enough that I knew. I didn’t make a sound. I took off my shoes and started hiking down the Cable route. It was only then that someone noticed. “Oh, my God,” this dude blurted out. “You’re hiking barefoot! You’re so tough!

From my adventures in the subculture of addiction recovery, I’d learned that the trajectory of one’s life often boils down to a few identifiable moments—decisions that change everything. I knew all too well that moments like these were not to be squandered. Rather, they were to be respected and seized at all costs, for they just didn’t come around that often, if ever. Even if you experienced only one powerful moment like this one, you were lucky.

I think it’s important that you do your own research, take personal responsibility for your decisions, experiment, and find what works best for you.

Doubt is the biggest danger in soloing. As soon as you hesitate, you’re screwed.

But no matter how hot the chick is, say if I was standing at the base of El Cap, and she urged me to free solo some route, my answer would be “No way.” For example, I can’t tell you how many people over the years have pressured me to drink alcohol. We’ll be at a party, and somebody will taunt me, “Alex, just try this beer, it’s not gonna hurt you to take a sip.” I’ve never given in. Booze doesn’t interest me.

The climbing and travel in this book wouldn’t have been possible without the support of my entire extended family. I’m grateful that everyone has always encouraged my adventures and not questioned my decision to take a different path.

Peter Croft once explained the feeling you get from free soloing as a heightened type of perception. A little edge that you need to stand on looks huge—everything comes into high relief. That’s just what happens to your body and your mind when you’re focused intensely on the feedback you’re getting from the environment and there are no other distractions. You become an instinctive animal rather than a person trying to do a hard climb, and that perception doesn’t immediately go away when you get to the top. It dulls over time, but for a while it feels like you almost have super senses. Everything is more intense—the sounds of the swifts flying around or the colors of the sun going down. A lot of times I don’t want to go down, I don’t want it to end.

Alex Honnold, free solo climbing phenom: The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and others: ambitones like The Zen Effect in the key of C for 30 minutes, made by Rolfe Kent, the composer of music for movies like Sideways, Wedding Crashers, and Legally Blonde Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, CEO of Automattic: “Everyday” by A$AP Rocky and “One Dance” by Drake Amelia Boone, the world’s most successful female obstacle course racer: “Tonight Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins and “Keep Your Eyes Open” by NEEDTOBREATHE Chris Young, mathematician and experimental chef: Paul Oakenfold’s “Live at the Rojan in Shanghai,” Pete Tong’s Essential Mix Jason Silva, TV and YouTube philosopher: “Time” from the Inception soundtrack by Hans Zimmer Chris Sacca: “Harlem Shake” by Baauer and “Lift Off” by Jay Z and Kanye West, featuring Beyoncé. “I can bang through an amazing amount of email with the Harlem Shake going on in the background.” Tim Ferriss: Currently I’m listening to “Circulation” by Beats Antique and “Black Out the Sun” by Sevendust, depending on whether I need flow or a jumpstart.

Have you ever stood near the edge of a high place, like a rooftop, or a cliff-side overlook, and felt a strange compulsion to step off the edge, almost like the abyss was calling to you, beckoning you to take that leap into the void? If there was nothing between you and oblivion but one hand clinging to a rock, can you say with 100 percent certainty that you wouldn't just let go? As I asked myself this question and tried to quantify things that are probably unquantifiable, I wondered if this fear of a kind of suicide, the fear that perhaps we're not actually in control of our actions and thoughts, lies at the heart of why people react so viscerally to free soloing.

The difference between sport climbing and the big-wall linkups that Alex specializes in is like the difference between sprinting and distance running. One relies primarily on power, the other on endurance. Alex is a long-distance thoroughbred, not a sprinter, and no matter how hard he trains, he will never be able to pull as hard as the world’s best sport climbers, guys like Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, and Alex Megos; just like how Haile Gebrselassie will never beat Usain Bolt in the hundred-meter dash—and Bolt will never beat Gebrselassie in the 10,000 meters. The point is that while sport climbing and big walls are part of the same sport, they’re entirely different disciplines. One of the things that makes climbing unique, though, is that the different disciplines can be combined. The Dawn Wall, which combined powerful cutting-edge sport climbing with the drawn-out effort of a medieval siege, is a perfect example.

Within all this is what’s commonly called real versus perceived risk; an example of real risk is Alex Honnold’s free solo climb up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite, while perceived risk would be climbing the same route attached to a system of ropes and anchors. One version means certain death when you fall and the other is a wedgie.

The water dripped through the floor of the portaledge onto my hammock and sleeping bag. I sort of sat in a puddle for a whole day and night. It was all right as long as I didn’t move and stir up the water. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, which fit the dreary mood. I tore the paperback in half and gave Mark the first part to read. Pretty grim, but I guess it builds character.

Try to tell him that free soloing is dangerous, and he will argue the point, every time. The closest I've come so far is to get Alex to admit that the "consequences" of a fall while free soloing would be "disastrous." But then he'll quickly point out that just because a consequence may be severe, its probability of occurring does not increase. The consequences, he'll say, are equally dire if your hand slips off the steering wheel and you swerve into the oncoming lane and collide head-on with a Mack truck.