He climbed up a 3,000-foot vertical cliff — without a rope.
Tiptoeing his fully grown body and grasping edges smaller than the width of a pencil.
To get through the hardest part of the route, he practiced a karate kick stretch for a year so he could reach his leg through one specific move.
Rockclimber Alex Honold visualized thousands of moves until deeply ingrained. Because one wrong move would send him plummeting to his death.
“Doubt is the precursor to fear, and I knew that I couldn’t experience my perfect moment if I was afraid. I had to visualize and rehearse enough to remove all doubt.”
Why the f*k would anyone do that? we might ask.
He asked the same question of himself. He drove there for 7 years, stared at the crown jewel of solos and thought: “No frickin’ way”.
But he wanted to be the first person to free solo Yosemite’s El Capitan. So Alex decided it would be done.
And so it was.
“It’s too big and too scary. But eventually I came to accept that I wanted to test myself against El Cap. It represented true…
