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On June 3rd, 2017, I became the first person
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to free solo El Cap by myself without a rope.
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Alex Honnold, the young climber who made it to the top
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of El Capitan, no harness, no ropes attached.
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He scales walls higher than the Empire State Building,
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and he does it without any ropes or protection.
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I assume you love climbing, right?
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- I mean, I assume you love it. - Yeah, yeah.
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I do love climbing.
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I think Yosemite's the most beautiful place on Earth.
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It's home to so many of the most iconic walls in the world.
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There's always a bigger challenge, there's always something
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to be inspired by in Yosemite.
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Before I started making the film about free soloing El Cap,
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I'd been dreaming about free soloing El Cap for many years
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and had never even really tried or put any effort into
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it because there was no accountability.
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I never told anybody that I wanted to,
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I never put any effort into it,
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basically it just kept never happening and I reached
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a point where I was like, someday I'm gonna be
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a middle aged man and look back and be like,
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how come I never even tried, you know?
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Like, why did I always want to do this thing but never
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did it and never even put any effort into it?
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And so, a piece of advice for anybody trying something
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that's very hard for them or for something
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that seems like sort of an impossible goal,
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is to just steadily broaden your comfort zone over time.
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Basically, consistently do things that are slightly harder
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for you in the right direction,
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not necessarily specifically towards that goal,
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but sort of keep broadening yourself until eventually
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it seems possible.
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I think actually climbing affords a lot of opportunities
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for self-reflection and measuring self growth because
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the rock never changes, and so each season
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you can come back and climb the same routes
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and you see your own personal growth.
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I mean, climbing on El Cap is a perfect example,
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because I climbed it for the first time, I think,
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in 2006 and it took us 22 hours, I think,
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And then this last summer I climbed that same route
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in less than two hours.
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So it's nice to see that level of growth over a decade.
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The thing about free soloing, which is climbing without
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a rope, is that there's such a psychological component
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to it. It's not just the physical difficulty,
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It's also, Does it feel slippery?
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Does it seem scary?
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Like, is there an insecure move?
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So, I'd like to differentiate risk and consequence.
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I mean, the consequences are definitely death.
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If you fall off the wall, you're definitely gonna die.
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But the risk is sort of the likelihood
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of actually falling off, and the idea is that
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with enough preparation, with enough training,
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you can mitigate the risk.
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I mean, I think that the idea was that with two years
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of preparation, the risk for me was approaching zero,
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even though the consequences were still super high,
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at least the risk was very low.
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So, to free solo El Cap, I put maybe two years
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of direct effort into it, but then beyond that,
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I put another 10 years of sort
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of indirect effort, free soloing routes
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that are very similar, but not exactly the same.
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And then, once it seemed like El Cap was maybe possible,
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then I put two years of effort into it.
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But then the final six months I knew that it was possible,
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I knew that I could do it and I wanted to do it.
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So then I was single-mindedly focused
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on free soloing El Cap.
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And so for those six months, I was training way too much,
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like working out a lot, eating really well, really focused.
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And then there's the whole preparation on the route itself,
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because there's physically and mentally preparing for it,
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but then there's also practicing the route itself,
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which means just spending a lot of time on the wall.
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And so for me, one of the challenges was sort of to hit
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them both in the sweet spot, you know to do the solo
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while I still felt strong, but also felt prepared enough.
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I guess one of the takeaways from free soloing El Cap
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is that if you want to do something very difficult,
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you just have to put in the time and the effort,
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you just have to put in the work.
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I think for me, it was easier because I love climbing
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so much and I love the process so much
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and the goal was so inspiring.
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Basically, it hit all the sweet spots.
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Where El Cap is so impressive to me and so inspiring,
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and I love the actual day-to-day effort involved,
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So it was easy for me to put in that level
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of effort because I was inspired for it.
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So I mean, maybe the takeaway is that if you want
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to do really difficult things, make sure they're things
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that you actually want to do.
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You know, like be inspired by the work that you're doing
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and then put in the time.
