Outer Edge Magazine

Reputation precedes such a man as Alex Honnold, so famously fearless, but there’s more to the climbing world’s most sung-about soloist than devil daring…

In his relatively short time in the rock climbing spotlight Alex Honnold has had his fair share of dime-a-dozen amateur psychologists inking his paperwork with the big red INSANE stamp. A couple of years ago the Sacramento Soloist took breaths away when he made ropeless ascents of Utah’s most stunning splitter crack, Moonlight Buttress, and then followed that with a similarly solo ascent of Yosemite’s massive Half Dome. Only 40 years previously it had taken legend Royal Robbins and co eight days to write their names into history as the first to breach the imposing monolith.

It took Alex two hours and 50 minutes.

The two feats, Moonlight and Half Dome, were recorded in the award winning 2010 film Alone on the Wall, and audiences around the world rose as one to shout “Oooo! Aaahhhh! You’re totally fucking bonkers!”

Is he though? I sat down with the man himself at the Banff Mountain Festival, held in the shadow of the beautiful Canadians Rockies, to find out.

MY INITIAL THOUGHT: COW. He has huge bovine eyes, the kind that are totally black. All the better for seeing the holds with, maybe? Then I shake his hand and it’s like grabbing one of those novelty, oversized inflatable mitts. Massive hands… all the better for stuffing cracks with? Am I conditioned to see him as a mutant?

Despite not being overly tall he strikes you as rangy. Gangly even. He wears a placid, easy smile that rounds out the appearance of a serene and calm character. Since his job involves doing very scary and very dangerous things, these traits are presumably all the better for staying alive with.

The first thing I want to know is how he stops the sheer scale of his solos from turning them into monsters in his mind. Visualisation is the answer – Alex is meticulous in his mental preparation. He describes a process:

“Something strikes my fancy and I start to fixate on it. Then I think about it more and more, about every aspect of the route. I visualise the actual movement, how tired I’m going to feel at certain points, how it is all going to feel, the conditions.
I imagine the whole thing.”

That preparation coalesces into a moment of clarity when he truly knows he’s ready and just steps up and does it. Then it’s like eating an elephant, one piece at a time. It doesn’t matter how long the route is, it’s all just single moves. The intense level of engagement that gives him the ability to discern the moment when he ‘knows’ he’s ready, also prepares him for the opposite. The corollary of knowing certainty is knowing doubt, and if he is not feeling it, he pulls the pin, walks away from the base of the climb and does something else. The times when he doesn’t go he learns as much about the mental state needed as the times he does.

Any climb is about control of mind and body, but this control is elevated to something else when you have to strike the word ‘attempt’ out of your vocabulary because the price of failure is certain death. The language Alex uses here brims with descriptors of containment, terms like ‘secure’ and ‘locked’ come up again and again.

“I just try and keep focused,” he says. “You try to keep it all locked in.”

This is his version of the mythical Zone that athletes speak about – that altered state in which they can do anything. It’s impossible not to notice his sentences are peppered with ‘try’, though it strikes me this is ‘try’ as in struggle not ‘try’ as in attempt. He is talking about the fight for composure, the fight to stay in the Zone, because if Yoda’s wisdom – ‘there is no try, only do and do not’ – is ever relevant, it’s in relation to soloing.

But where’s the fun in that? “Well you’re having fun for sure. You wouldn’t do it if you didn’t enjoy yourself.”
So even though he is completely dialled in, there is still scope for emotional responses? “Yeah. Sometimes soloing you get into a position where you are like ‘This is badass!’ You have moments where you step out of it and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this, this is awesome’.” Badass indeed.

Story by: Simon Madden
Images by: Tim Kemple