The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber Alex Honnold doesn’t experience fear like the rest of us.
Honnold keeps a detailed climbing journal, in which he revisits his climbs and makes note of what he can do better. For his most challenging solos, he also puts a lot of time into preparation: rehearsing the moves and, later, picturing each movement in perfect execution. To get ready for one 1,200-foot-high ascent at the cutting edge of free soloing, he even visualized everything that could possibly go wrong — including “losing it,” falling off, and bleeding out on the rock below — to come to terms with those possibilities before he left the ground. Honnold completed that climb, known as Moonlight Buttress, in Utah’s Zion National Park, about 13 years after he started climbing, and four years after he started soloing.
Visualization — which we might think of as pre-consolidation, whereby a person pictures a future event rather than a past one — functions in much the same way. “To review move after move, you’d expect that he did consolidate his motor memory and as a result probably had an increased sense of competence,” Monfils says. Feelings of competence, in turn, have been shown to reduce anxiety, which helps to explain why, for example, people who are fearful of public speaking (as Honnold used to be, by the way) feel less anxious about it as they do it more often and develop their skills.
“It’s better over time if you can put yourself in a situation where you experience some fear, but you overcome it, and you do it again and again and again,” Monfils says. “It’s hard, and it’s a big investment, but it becomes easier.”
Videos of Alex climbing:
