does it feel different to be up there without a rope it's obviously like much higher consequence people who know a little bit about climbing they're like oh he's totally safe and then people who really know exactly what he's doing I freaked out I've thought about our cap like for years then every year I'm like that's really scary I'll never be content unless I at least put in the effort [Music] Oh cap is the most impressive wall on earth it's 3,200 feet of sheer granite it's the center of the rock-climbing universe obviously I get interview questions about it all the time Oh would you like to do that you're like yes for sure so you're a girlfriend now I heard as awesome pretty much makes life better in everywhere it's really hard for me to grasp why he wants this but if he doesn't do this stuff he'd regret it everybody who is made free soloing a big part of their life is dead now I haven't been injured in like seven years that's sudden they start getting injured all the time what if something happens what if I don't get I could just walk away but it's like I've always been conflicted about shooting a film about free soloing just because it's so dangerous it's hard to not imagine your friend falling through the frame to his death I think when he's free to enjoy he feels the most alive Louis everything how can you even think about taking it away from somebody no mistakes tomorrow start your site if you're pushing the edge eventually you find the edge [Music] I can't believe you guys actually gonna stick hey Jimmy do you copy just started quite cloud summoned make some noise for Alex Honnold [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello everybody wow that's really loud and there are a lot of you guys okay one moment okay in theory there will be a slide show of hearing hello so after listening to Peter talk a little bit I got concerned that this talk isn't quite tech heavy enough but I'll do my best anyway so I've been touring yeah you know as he said with the now oscar-winning film free solar for the last six months and so I've been pretty much giving Q&A is and chatting about the film to the audience's day and day out for six months and so I get the same sorts of questions all the time from audiences you know were you afraid did you think about death things like that and so I felt like I'd maybe start with with answering a couple of those before I get into the presentation you know is this scary yes obviously it's scary and that's why I put eight years of preparation into the climb and then just do it on day one you know because it's very scary because I felt like I had to build up to it to train for it and so what I hope to show today is sort of that preparation that went into how I took something that is very scary that seems you know fundamentally you know deeply deeply scary and and eventually made it feel very comfortable and actually really enjoyable when I did the climb and so to start from the very beginning you know I always loved climbing is this oh yeah okay you know climbing as a child started as a little kid and it wasn't until I started climbing indoors that I sort of found structured rock climbing and this is you know climbing and it's totally safe my parents took me in there's all you know great like Little League type activity and as I grew up climbing in the gym you know I started when I was about 10 years old in Sacramento full suburban experience I'd ride my bicycle to climb the gym and just spend the whole afternoon you know climbing by myself but but you know safely with row and you know my dad was sometimes Blamey but um but as I grew up I was reading climbing magazines and looking at images like this picture of Peter Croft he was sort of an iconic free soloist from the last generation and for those who don't know free soloing is climbing without a rope without a partner just totally by yourself just holding onto the the cracks or the you know holding onto the cliff and so I grew up seeing images like this at Peter and thinking that that was what I wanted to at least try someday and at the time I was you know punk teenage kid riding the bike into the gym so it was it felt like a very big gap to go from the climbing gym to climbing walls like this but um but fast forward a few years and I dropped out of UC Berkeley stole my mom's minivan started climbing outdoors all the time started on sort of smaller cliffs and and built my way up and and actually this this climb this picture of Peter is on a route called the roster when you 70 it's like 800 foot wall in Yosemite National Park and so this is actually a photo of me climbing that same cliff when I was 20 let's see I think I was 22 at the time and it sort of marked the beginning of my serious free soloing and you can see in the image that there's a rope beneath me and I and a guy down below that that's because this picture was taken by another party of climbers who were already up on the wall and you know as I came through the guy was like whoa that's crazy and took a couple pictures and then when I saw him on the bus the next week in Yosemite he was like oh I got these cool pictures of you and so anyway he gave me these but um this is before I was professional climber before you know I mean this is before smartphones this is you know this is way back in the day and so you know it sort of represents some sort of my original free soloing before before there was you know video or a camera crew or anything like that it's just me going out climbing but the important thing about this climb for me was that it represented the edge of what was possible at the time you know I had grown up looking up to people who had done things similar to this but when I did this climb and you somebody I was now reaching the edge of what had previously been done by by really anybody within climbing and and like I said I was I was 22 and so I was suddenly left with you know what's next what's the like what do I do now you know because up until then I've had something obvious to strive for but as soon as I did that I was like : it's up to me to sort of decide what's next and figure out what I can actually do and so yeah I'm sure many of you guys have actually out of curiosity how many you guys have hiked up half down I hope oh that is a disappointingly few my keys I mean uh actually how many of you guys live in California out of curiosity like boy well that those have been you should definitely go to you somebody and and given the opportunity you should definitely hike your path down because it's one of the most striking beautiful I mean it's just I mean you can see as natural wonder and so you know Half Dome Lords over the East End of Yosemite Valley and you can see that there's a two thousand foot wall sitting at the top of this huge you know it's basically twenty five hundred feet above the valley floor and then it's a two thousand foot rock face and so it's really quite prominent it's quite striking it's really inspiring it's written to a climber it draws draws you in and so it was the obvious next challenge for me as you know free solace I wanted to push myself a little I was like oh obviously Half Dome is the next thing to do but the problem with it was that as I said it's so high above the valley and a such a big wall that there wasn't an obvious way for me to prepare for it to practice the actual climb because to go up there and climate with a rope requires a partner and it requires really a full day commitment to hike up climb the wall hike down it's just a lot of exercising for the few of you who have actually hiked up the hiked up halftime you know how much work it is to go up there and to and just to get to the top at all and so you know I wanted to freeze all of this this route but I didn't really know how to practice for it because it's just it all felt a little too big you know one of the ways that you typically practice for it is to rappel down something by yourself but with using ropes and then sort of map it out and practice it but in this case it's just too much terrain for me to do that and and at the time I I didn't have a rope sponsor I didn't I didn't even know not much ropes I didn't really know how to to work on something of that scale and so I decided that because I didn't know how to do the preparation I was like oh I'll just we'll ignore the preparation I'll just skip that aspect of it and I'll just go up there and have an adventure and it seemed like a really good idea to do a 23 year old and I was I'll keep the experience pure it'll be a big adventure it'll be a character-building you know I'll rise to the occasion and so that's basically what I did and it turned out to be a terrible idea I I climbed it once with a partner ahead of time and so we climbed it with a rope and spent the whole day up there I sort of got a rough sense of where the route when and how to climb it and at least establish the fact that I could physically climate because we did climb the whole thing it was like okay I can do this and I have a pretty good sense of how to and then I spent the whole next day resting in my van just sitting by myself living in my van at the time and so I was just camping out in Yosemite so I spent the whole day thinking about the experience that I just had with my partner trying to remember all the key parts of the climb and then the next morning I got up super early hiked up there by myself and and free sold the roof and it basically didn't didn't really go that well in a nutshell but um you know about a thousand feet off the ground I at the last moment decided to take a little variation around one of the sections that I'd climbed two days before so I decided to skip one of the hard parts by going around it and I knew that there was a variation I knew that other people had gone that way in the past but I had never done it so I didn't know exactly where I was going so I made this big 300-foot circle around this little section of climbing but the rock was really dirty because it basically is covered in lichen deniz people hardly ever climb there and so I wasn't really sure whether or not I was doing it right and and I started to get a little afraid and it all started to crumble a little but then you know basically I found my way back to the route I pulled it back together I was like okay I'm doing fine you know keep it together but to free soul a wall like this a 2,000 foot face in the end it wound up taking me almost three hours and so it's a really long time to stay totally composed and to stay on top of my game and so you know this is just sitting on a little ledge at the top but it's but this is actually pretty one of the more relaxing parts of the route if you can imagine but the challenge of happening though actually is that the the hardest part of the whole route is actually right above where I'm sitting in this photo and it's this blank vertical slab which means a low angle piece of rock so so not quite a a wall but more like a 75 or 80 degree panel of rock but with no cracks in it no no edges to hold on to basically it's just little ripples and dishes and scoops like basically little pieces of texture that you can stick your feet on and then the rubber of your climbing shoes will stick to the friction and you can kind of tiptoe your way up the the slab and so I see a few people squirming and wiping their hands and so and that really is what slab climbing feels like it is it is kind of the most psychologically straining form of climbing because no matter how well trained you are no matter how physically strong you are it doesn't make it feel any safer because some types of climbing if you get really really strong and you know that you can hold on no matter what you know that if your foot slips it doesn't matter you can just hold on but with slab climbing it's all on your feet there no hand holds at all and so if one of your feet slips you're gonna fall to your death and so you know so this top slab you guys have never done that nobody that's so weird I'm sorry you stayin out with climbers but like oh yeah you know we do that all the time no nobody okay anyway so it actually had to make the whole thing even weirder the final slab one half dome is only about a hundred 150 feet below the actual summit and so you can hear tourists you can hear people right above you and they're all laughing and having a good time people having picnics and my people on their cell phones and sometimes people look over the edge and can look straight down the 2005 and so thankfully on and it was a it was a weekend morning in September so it was totally packed and I could hear tons of people above me thankfully there's nobody watching because I was sort of having a moment by myself house I was a really grateful that there's nobody witnessing my whole debacle but um but it was kind of surreal to hear people laughing right above me well I'm having this super intense experience stalled out on the middle of the slab and and what wound up happening is like climbed up the slab to a certain point and as I said I've been getting slightly more afraid throughout the day it had all been going not quite right and I got to a certain point where I had to step up on a foothold and you know basically stand up to grab the last hold that kind of marked the end of the most difficult climbing and then a classic style I stalled out sort of right before the end it's like I just need to make one more move but I'm not sure if I can I'm not sure if this foot will stay and then I star the second guess and doubt myself like maybe I should use a different flip maybe I should try over here maybe I should switch and then try over here you know maybe I should do all these different things and and they all felt terrible when my calves are slowly getting pumped and you know there's nothing to hold on to and it's just like oh my goodness oh my goodness and then long story short I you know eventually took a deep breath trusted the foothold that I had to stood up grab the hold and at all you know I've said didn't fall to my death because we're all here chatting today but but when I grabbed it I was like you know and then I sprinted the final hundred feet to the summit or so is so amped and I know it sure it let's not super pumped and just like aha like pop over the top 1/2 down and uh it's funny because it normally when you get to the top of Half Dome you have a rope and a harness and all this gear hanging off you and so tourists are like oh my god you climb the face that's so remarkable you know how long did it take and then they engage you but uh but when you top out with nothing on you know nobody you know they just assume that you're some hiker that's too close to the edge that you got lost and they're like oh that guy that guy looks sketchy and so anyway so I popped over the edge and was like you know kind of just like ah like did anybody see that and you know nobody said it is it didn't actually speak and nobody else spoke and I was just so and I had no food or water or anything on me because you know obviously I was gonna super light up the face and so I just took my climbing shoes off which was super tight and they started hiking down and and that's when people finally saw him in they're like oh you're hiking barefoot that's so hardcore that's like indeed indeed it's a yeah anyway but the point of that whole long ramble is that you know i climbing Half Dome was was a big goal for me and it you know and I successfully climb the wall and I was pretty proud of it but you know I definitely felt like I got away with something and it was it wasn't the experience that I wanted it wasn't exactly you know it wasn't what I hoped for in climbing you know I wasn't trying to get lucky I was there I didn't want to have to get lucky in my climbing I wanted to actually feel like a great climber so you know it even though as soon as I finished half down you can see I'll captain that in the background all caps the 3000 foot wall but that I free soul on the film that was kind of the next obvious step for me so starting in in 2008 a free solid halftone so starting in 2009 I was like okay this is the year that I'm gonna free solo I'll cap but um but then actually I mean how many of you guys have at least been to Yosemite okay it's slightly better but I feel like you guys need to go enjoy nature a little more just just you know something to consider maybe but anyway but so when you drive into somebody the road drive straight at El Cap and it basically fills your entire windshield this is this imposing 3000 foot I mean it's one of the most striking walls in the world and and so every season I would drive in I'd look up at the wall and you know the whole season up to then I'd be thinking this is the year I'm gonna freestyle walk up and then I would drive in I'd see the wall I think this is definitely not the season that I'm gonna free so I'll cap like that is completely outrageous totally out of the question you know and that's basically because I would look at it and I would feel a deep sense of fear or just just existential terror like that you know the idea of being up on a face like that would seem absolutely horrifying and so the big the big change for me over the the intervening six to eight years I mean so I guess I then spent six years sort of dreaming about free soloing I'll cap you know always in the back of my mind thinking wouldn't it be incredible if I could and then two years actually preparing for it which you can see in the film and so in some ways I'll focus more on on the dreaming aspect of it because the the two years of direct preparation I did for I mean you can you can see it really well in the film for Isola but so for those six years I basically had to chip away at the idea that that I'll cap was insurmountably huge and so one of the ways was as you see an image climbing with partners and with ropes just climbing the 3,000 foot face in the day and sort of getting a feel for what it's like up on the wall and and so we desensitizing myself to the level of exposure I mean cuz even being up there with a rope is still still can feel pretty outrageous you know that said I probably climbed with rope 50 or 60 times before I actually did the free solo and so certainly you know with more with more practice that all started to feel slightly more comfortable and so just to be clear I mean most people they climbed all caps spend three to five days on the wall this is uh this is OD a Qureshi I was just chatting with with Morgan and audience about potentially climbing this route and and most people that climb the wall do it in this style they basically haul big bags they haul what's called a portal edge just like a cost that you camp on and so and I certainly climbed I'll cap this way a few times as well I mean it's it's part of the experience it's just such a big wall that oftentimes it's gonna take you more than a day to get up and if if you're gonna spend more than 24 hours you probably want to be able to sleep and then you have to haul all your equipment and then it winds up being so much weight that you may as well spend three days and then it why doesn't mean five days and then and then you wind up with so much weight that you only make it a thousand feet off the ground and then you give up and you rappel back down which is actually about one of the easiest routes on our cap it has about a 50% success rate and half the people to start up it realize that they're totally over their head and they give up and they go down which is totally fine because that's that's how you learn but it's you notice and so I did this I mean I spent years just on the side of all cap climbing different routes practicing getting used to it and maybe the bigger part of of my preparation maybe not bigger so I mean I think that the preparation for potentially free soloing I'll cap can really be split into the physical on the mental and it's hard to know which is more important because you know I mean in some ways the the physical preparation underpins everything else because if you can't physically climb the route no amount of visualization or mental preparation will get you up and I mean your body has to be able to hang on and actually climb the wall but that said it's certainly not enough because a lot of people can physically climb a ballcap but being able to imagine doing it without a rope and then actually having the confidence to execute on that it's sort of a whole separate thing as well so it's not hard to say which is more important but for me the mental side has always come a little more easily and a little more naturally and so the physical preparation is always much more of a challenge for me and so a big part of the a big part of it for me was to basically train and prepare to the point where I felt confident on on that wall and so I'm gonna click through a little Rocky Balboa style training montage just a couple random pictures of of training and there's no real particular significance these I mean this is just a local actually this is quite a blurry photo but it is just taken on a friend's phone but this is a typical day in day out climbing at a cliff I actually hiked up to this cave yesterday to get a stash of gear down this is right near my home in Las Vegas and this is kind of represents the typical just day-in day-out grinding away this is a day in the office for me basically to get the fitness required to feel comfortable up on the side of a 3,000 foot cliff and this is kind of the stuff that you don't really see in the film is the the literally years spent at places like this just you know hanging on the underside of some crazy limestone cave building you know the muscular endurance to feel comfortable on a wall like that and then some of that is more specific training this is this is called hang boarding you can actually see what I'm hanging from but it's busy a wooden board with small grips on it and it's just a lot of time isolating specific fingers and and training yourself to you know the hang by your fingertips and doing pull-ups by your fingertips and things like that but it's all very basic level physical training but this is really what it underpins you know the ability to free solo a three-song thousand foot wall me because if you can't hang on you know obviously you're never gonna you know no amount of mental preparation will get you to the top and so at a certain point after several years of just climbing all the time you know conditioning myself and getting stronger eventually I was able to look at I'll cap and actually think you know this might be possible like I might actually be able to free solo this I might be able to climb this without a rope and and that's kind of where the film picks up for those actually how many of you guys have actually seen the film oh yeah okay well a few a few more than I've been to Yosemite but I feel like all these numbers are not not not that great he needs to get outdoors more but but so this is kind of the the point where where the film picks up with me and sort of documents these these next two years of the direct preparation to do the actual free solo because now I was physically ready I sort of believed that it might be possible and this is where I decided okay I'm gonna try to actually put in the work required to do this thing that I've been dreaming about for so long and so some of that said this is a picture of a friend of mine Conrad Anker climbing the bottom of El Cap with with an empty backpack on and on this particular day I mean so my preparation entailed all kinds of things you know the physical training the mental training and that some of it was just the grind and this really represents the work involved so we climbed 1500 feet up the wall to this very specific crack that had a bunch of loose rocks inside it and a couple bushes and things like that but you're not really supposed to trim the bushes because it's National Park so we just sort of manicured the bushes a little bit and and and clean the rocks out and the rocks are a legitimate hazard because if you're climbing and you just launch them it could kill a hiker or a climber down below its base or you could dislodge it and knock yourself off the wall and so it's all just a little bit a little bit sketchy and so we caught 1,500 feet up the wall we filled this backpack full of rocks and then we were repelled all the way back down to the ground and dumped our rocks out at the base and it felt completely ridiculous because you know we basically cleaned a 2 meter section of this 3000 foot root so you know like a body length basically six feet of climbing and we spent the whole day working to clean out six feet of crack but the thing is if those six feet of crack didn't feel climbing ball that's a hard stop on being able to climb the 3000 foot wall I mean basically if there's a single foot of the climb that I can't do that's enough to stop me from doing doing the rest of it and so I really had to be that meticulous by you know basically analyzing every foot of the whole route and making sure that everything went and so a piece by piece I would determine certain sections like work on them I'd clean them I do whatever it takes to make sure that they felt comfortable and then just slowly work my way through the whole room and so this was the the typical way that I did that this is um this is the summit of El Cap and I've got probably a thousand feet of rope hanging off me and I'm about to rappel a thousand feet down the wall by myself and basically spend the whole day just touching holds marking some of them with chalk memorizing where my hands go where my feet go and then and then trying all the different sequences sort of in the way that that a dancer or maybe a maybe a gymnast or something sort of memorizes a routine but thinking you know left foot and then right foot and then hand or should I do right foot first and then left foot and then you know I'm basically trying each sequence over and over and determining which one actually feels the best and you know it is the most repeatable which I could imagine doing with rope and then beyond that once I sort of determined the right sequence then I had to actually remember it which for 3,000 feet I mean it's just a lot to remember and a lot to process and so I included this image just because you know it's kind of unglamorous this is just the inside of my van and oh and it you can actually see the hang board on the side the little wooden wooden thing that I'm hanging from the train on and so I spent a lot of time just sitting in my car thinking you know imagining what it would feel like imagining you know trying to remember the sequences thinking about what the sequences will feel like without a rope versus with rope basically playing everything out in my head because the thing about free soloing is you you know particularly in this case I was only gonna do it one time and so you know how do you practice for something that's never been done and that and that you can't actually do I mean the only real way to practice is to think it through and to imagine it so I spent a lot of time just sitting by myself imagining and and actually in relevant to this conference I deleted all the social media off my phone I stopped responding to emails I basically stopped using I stopped communicating in any way for the month ahead of my free solo because because I felt like I needed to sort of create that open space in my life where where I wasn't busy in any way I had nothing to respond to and I had lots of open time to just sit and reflect and and that was actually really important part of my process I stopped responding to email for so long that actually stopped getting email by the end it been had been over a month I think and uh and people just gave up it was amazing I strongly recommend it somehow but ah so basically after that whole journey I got to a point where I knew that I was as prepared as I would ever be and everything was sort of lined up and and and I was ready and so I was in the position where I could either free soul oil cap or walk away from it knowing that it wasn't for me you know basically I had done everything that I could do I was in the best shape my life everything was perfectly aligned for it so either it was time to free so I'll cap or to decide very intentionally that I will never free so I'll cap because I will never be better off than I am right now and so you know I decided to free so lock up and so here are a few pictures from that and actually so a lot of the low-angle train this is this is low on the route is actually very similar to the slab on Half Dome but I was just describing with the no hand holes you know relying only on your footholds it's really quite a scary style of climbing and and that's actually where I'd spent a lot of my time practicing and because I'd spent so much time rehearsing and memorizing and and you know really dialing and exactly how to do it on the day of the free Sola it felt it felt great you know there was no hesitation there was no doubt I didn't I wasn't stressing anything it was really different than my experience I'm half time I just sort of danced up the walls like oh this is beautiful I'm having such a such a good time up here but and then this is the crack that I was just describing that we had cleaned you can see above me a couple little bushes and and some some rocks and I guess yeah depending how high resolution is you can see like a little white rock wedged in the crack above me I mean this is what we had spent a whole day servicing basically the body length of crack above me and you know like I said I'm you know it just wouldn't have been possible without doing all those little things even though it feels like such a tiny tiny step out of this 3000 foot wall but it's still critical that each each body length is doable and so when I got here I knew that it was as good as it could be I was ready for I had done everything that I could do and so I climbed through it I don't wanna say easily because actually this crack is not that easy to climb but um but you know I climbed through it as well as I could decide just include this this is actually the physically hardest move on the whole route and what I had spent the most time physically training for you can see I'm kicking my left foot way over to this other corner and so I'd actually been stretching for this move for for a full year ahead of time basically trying to stretch my hamstrings so I could like make the stretch thankfully I made it but and so you know I mean I opened with this slide as well but in a lot of ways I think that this really shows the exposure involved in this and this is something that you know ten years ago if I was magically transported to this position I would have just peed my pants and fall into my death immediately you know I mean it would have been completely out of the question to do anything even remotely like this and yet on the day that I actually free so little cap it felt incredible you know I felt like I was swimming up this beautiful crack I was surrounded by air there birds flying around behind me I was like this is the most heroic place on earth I feel great and and really that's that's a testament to the effort that I put into it over over the 10 years you know I mean this just it was such a long journey for me to get there but by the time I was finally ready to free saw a cop it actually did feel great and so you see when I finally summited I was very happy that's about as happy as I get I was like yay but I included this also because this is Jimmy Chen the photographer who filmed much of the movie and took many of these pictures and I felt like I needed to give him a little shout-out but also you can see he's even happier than I am because he got a happy ending happy ending for his movie he's like thank God but but really I think the reason that we were both so happy and this picture is that we had literally put years of work into this climb and so the climb itself wound up taking a little bit under 4 hours which or wait a little bit under 3 hours no little under 4 hours goodness I'm going see now is about 356 I'm confusing climbs but now I was pretty proud to break for hours you know compared to the the typical four days that people spend on the wall it's like oh it's you know it's pretty good for for our Center vocab and so in some ways that felt like a very you know I was like oh I'll only climb for four hours that morning but it represented years and years of work and so I think that uh celebrating on top was really a testament to how much we had put into this climb you know me with all the training and the visualization but him also with taking these pictures and documenting the whole process and so I think if anything that's kind of what I want to leave you guys with is just the process of taking something that should be incredibly scary incredibly you know something that seems risky this seem scary but through this incredibly long and and and really fairly difficult process slowly making it feel comfortable and you know and on the day that I did is actually you know I don't wanna say that it felt totally normal because certainly when I walked up to the base I'll cap that morning it still still looked like I'll cap is still intimidating for sure but it did feel within my comfort zone I was like is something that I can do and I'm going to do it and I feel comfortable with that and and that's certainly a very stark contrast from how it looked years before and so I think that that's really what I leave you it's just the amount of preparation it takes to broaden your comfort zone to the point it's something that they used to seem impossible now it seems maybe not routine but but doable you know doable is good enough and so with that I just want to open it up to Q&A and I think John yeah so I think we're doing some audience Q&A through the app we're gonna some microphones in the audience I'll start you out with this one in terms of preparation what technology if any did you use moderate devices anything to gauge whether wrought conditions what tech very little tech but no so I use my phone I mean I was taking notes on my phone quite a bit and I was taking pictures of things from time to time to help me help me remember specific route specific sections of the route but now I mean honestly I mostly just use my phone and normal is to call my friends mean like help bring me more rope bring me some snacks you know or whatever else well that's we got other questions coming on the app again you can submit questions on the app we do have microphones out there we can't see everybody do we have some that are standing at a yell at me if so our mic helpers handles I don't see our microphone handlers but there's a lot of hands up for my microphone handler so I'll go down this way did you know on that very day did you wake up and you're like this is it this is the day what so I mean I kind of touched on that a little in the presentation I mean I basically got to a certain point where I had done all the preparation I've done everything I needed to do I was like now it's time it wasn't like I woke up and just aside today I feel great I'm gonna go for it and and actually I mean in classic style I got to the point where ever all the preparation was done I was ready to do it and so I was thinking I'd probably go the next day and then it rained that day so then I had to spend another day going to the top to repeal the whole wall to make sure that nothing got too wet and that my tick marks the little marks with chalk that showed me like which hand to use in which places make sure my ticks were still on the wall so basic had to do another day of preparation and then that's quite tiring the height to the summit and work on it so then I had to take another rest day I mean it's kind of class and we're like okay I'm ready then you're like oh no you know Nature has another has another idea and then you know just go and go when you're able what awesome good questions coming in over here please yes hi there awesome inspirational story I was just wondering what role do you think genetics played in it as compared to the years of preparation you put in getting ready for it yeah that's a good question I mean it's it's kind of hard to know so I have a lot of friends who were professional climbers who are I would say genetically gifted or more predisposed to climb you know people who have freakishly strong fingers they can just hang on in ways that that I actually can I mean I've never had any particular physical gift for climbing you know that said I have some degree of drive I have some kind of passion for climbing I'm willing to go out and put the work in and I'm sure there's a genetic component to that but I don't know I mean nobody in my family is an elite athlete in any way you know my parents are professors you know they're very I don't know very unethically there's genic component in in the mental aspect of a managing fear managing risk and thinking it through and then and and just having the drive having the work ethic to go out every day and you know because I sort of glossed over but but all the the time that I spent you somebody working on this route I was getting up at 4:30 every morning because the wall goes into the shade or well it stays in the shade in the morning gets not in the afternoon so basically you can't be on the wall after 11:00 a.m. or so because you it's too hot and so I spent the whole season getting up at 4 or 4:30 and doing all my work pretty early I mean you know it requires some some self discipline for sure I don't know you know it's hard to say how much of that's nature-nurture whatever you wanna also thanks for your question over you did you follow a certain nutrition plan when you were preparing for the climb uh yeah in general and vegetarian just as a way of minimizing my personal footprint and way that I can and in general I try to eat well because climbing is all about strength to weight ratio so it's typically easier to not get too big rather than have to get super super strong to carry that extra bigness you know it's all balanced so for the particular climb I was eating big sickly vegan just like extra clean diet and and I stopped eating dessert which for me is kind of a kind of a tough tough thing to do and so I was definitely the leanest and sort of the strongest that I'd probably ever been but um yeah I mean the part of the dietary choices I think were more psychological because I felt like I needed to know on the inside that I had done everything possible to prepare and diet you know realistic I think I had a pretty small impact on the actual performance you know it's probably like that last percent or something but psychologically it was really important for me to know that I had done everything within my power because I didn't want oh you know I didn't want a door for for doubt you know to be up on the wall being like should I have not eaten that cookie yesterday you know like oh maybe maybe I shouldn't have you know I just wanted to know that I'd done it right on that no bigger challenge physical or mental Wow yeah it's hard to say I mean I guess mentor I think overall the bigger challenge might have been the vision of believing that it was possible believing that I should put the work into it and try I mean I think that a lot of other climbers look up at El Cap and they're like no that is a hard toe that's totally out of the question but for whatever reason I was like well maybe you know like maybe it's worth trying and and in some ways it's a big commitment for me to put two years of effort into a climbing project with no real guarantee that I would ever be able to do it and you know I didn't why in some ways more years than that but but the two years of the film that I was directly working on a free solo I I didn't really know if I would ever feel comfortable free soloing the wall so you know I mean I think that managing that uncertainty was probably one of the biggest challenges thank you all the way to the back over here on the red shirt hello thank you very much you know I think all of us have dreams and all of us try but how have you deal with discouragement when you have tried and it didn't work you know today it feels like oh I had a plan I practiced and I did it but I think we all deal with discouragement how did you deal with it yeah well in this case I skipped all the discouraging parts because they're all depressing I just I just did the highlight reel but no I mean through the course of this this whole project and if you watch the film you'll see I had a couple climbing accidents during those two and a half years you know relatively minor but I severely sprained an ankle and spent sort of six months rehabbing the ankle to the point where I actually felt like I could you know trust my life to to certain footholds you know I mean I guess in some ways with climbing it might be easier than with other pursuits because there's no external pressure on me there's no time crunch on me to ever make this happen it was totally my own dream my own vision it was my own motivation so if I suffered a six-month setback you know that's on me I can just look at as you know I keep training keep moving forward learned something from it and in some ways I did try to learn from from my mistakes on auto cabin when I sprained my ankle I basically carelessly slipped fell hurt myself I was like well at least I carelessly slipped while I had a rope on you know it's a lot better to sprain my ankle and and be reminded of how serious the climbing can be than to think that it's all relaxing and easy and then fall off without a rope and die you know so it's like well you know it's better to learn those lessons well while you're safe but I don't know I think that was climbing in general you know there's no pressure on me to do this so as long as I just take a very long view of it and just keep moving forward keep trying to learn you know I think it's fun awesome thanks for your question go right down here in the front thank you so preparation aside people are gonna look at you and go that dudes crazy right like what he does is crazy is there anyone that you look at or any profession that you look at and think to yourself like that person is crazy or what they do goes crazy I mean to be fair I see all the cloud computing stuff and I'm like nothing's crazy I'm like I'm like I'm like I don't really get it you know yeah I mean if you mean in a more literal sense I look at you know say big wave surfers or something and I think that seems totally outrageous that seems dangerous but that's because I'm not a very good swimmer I don't really like the ocean you know I mean I think everybody yeah I think that it's hard to understand sports that you have no no connection with you know and I think that rock climbing is so far out of the mainstream people just don't don't know that much about us so it seems totally crazy but but I don't know I mean the cloud I mean the cloud what does that even mean I don't know it's like they're clouds oh good question we're coming all the way over on this side thank you hey Alex you in terms of your mental daily routine do you do you do anything significant to get you through mental blocks so meditation or mental hacks like it sounds like you you did a lot of mental preparation and just logic yes so interestingly before the actual free Sola I wasn't doing anything structured like that and that's kind of why I said that I I freed my schedule up so that I'd have lots of unstructured time because I'm actually pretty bad about sitting down like saying I'm gonna sit down and visualize for the next hour and a half I find it really hard to do that in a structured way but what I need is a lot of free time where I am cutting vegetables for my dinner and then I start to think about a certain section of the route and then I'm able to just sit down and think about it for five or ten minutes and then sort of remember that I'm supposed to be cutting vegetables and go back to what I was doing you know I needed time like that sort of more unstructured time just because I never really knew when my imagination would sort of take me to different parts of the route though it's funny actually you mentioned meditation because with film tour the last six months of totally outrageous travel with the movie I'm actually got into like a daily meditation type thing sort of just to see what it was all about because I've always I'd always assumed that it wouldn't that it wasn't useful for me cuz I was like oh I get that through climbing who cares and and actually I've seen some real value in that as well but um yeah I don't really know for sure but for me was important just to have open time awesome thank you I know we got one more over here maybe the last audience question right hey Mike I've no idea where that came from so first off I did walk on me in door for the first time two months ago was the hardest thing so much respect you mentioned after Half Dome you know you had this kind of like itch of what next which is an awesome way of looking at setting and hitting goals so my question to you now that you passed and free soloed El Capitan what's next yes yeah it's hard to say I don't know I mean so in terms of free soloing I don't know if there will ever be anything bigger more iconic or certainly more historic then I'll cap and I don't know if there exists such a wall in the world I mean right now I'm focused on on the physical side of climbing I've been training indoors a lot and part of that's because I've been on this film tour so it's kind of the only thing I can do is trained in the climbing gym but I've sort of embraced that as a way to see if I can improve my physical abilities and so I'm sort of devoting the rest of this year to seeing how how hard I can climb you know measured by by rating not by size at the wall or scale of the challenge but just by sheer physical difficulty and so you know we'll see basically I'll just keep trying my best try to improve in my own way I got one good last question which is scarier climbing El Cap or talking to a bunch of cloud tech folks oh cloud tech huh no I mean you know obviously climbing I'll cap is scarier for sure but that said I mean public speaking had always been probably the scariest thing in in my life I mean certainly going through school I was the idea of speaking in front of the class was completely out of the question like I would run from a room rather than then have to speak in front of it and in a lot of ways I see the the value in preparation in practice more from from something like this I mean the last six months that I've been on the film tour I've been doing QED days in front of movie theaters you know sometimes four or five times in a day for six months and you just get so comfortable standing and speaking and just just being yourself regardless of the situation I mean you know really is the same that you know practice makes perfect you just wow this is far from perfect but but practice makes you feel more comfortable you know and so yeah I mean I think that you do enough you slowly get better at it because good enough is it right well as my mom says but ladies and gentlemen how about one more incredible round of applause for the star of the oscar-winning documentary Alex Honnold okay thank you guys thank you for spending time with us really appreciate it Alex thank you
