Today is November 5 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is "What is the connection between fear and grit?
Alex Honnold is an American rock climber best known for his free-solo ascents of big walls.
He is the only person to have free-soloed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Honnold was born in Sacramento, California.
He started climbing in a climbing gym at the age of 5, and was climbing "many times a week" by age 10.
He participated in many national and international youth climbing championships as a teenager. "I was never, like, a bad climber [as a kid], but I was never a great climber, either," he says. "There were a lot of other climbers who were much, much stronger than me, who started as kids and were, like, instantly freakishly strong––like they just have a natural gift. And that was never me. I just loved climbing, and I've been climbing all the time ever since, so I've naturally gotten better at it, but I've never been gifted."
After a year, he dropped out of Berkeley, and spent time living at home and driving around California to go climbing. He gained mainstream recognition after his 2012 solo of The Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome was featured in the film Alone on the Wall and a subsequent 60 Minutes interview. He also co-authored the book Alone on the Wall: The Ultimate Limits of Adventure.
On June 3, 2017, he made the first free-solo ascent of El Capitan, completing the 2,900-foot Freerider route in 3 hours and 56 minutes. The feat, described as "one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever," was documented by climber and photographer Jimmy Chin, and was the subject of the 2018 documentary Free Solo.
As Honnold said “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.”