It's things like this that make me ask myself, "Why don't I climb rocks more?"
Then I remember I have a fear of falling to my death. It's a vicious cycle.
Then I remember I have a fear of falling to my death. It's a vicious cycle.
There's an interesting progression with regard to fear in rock climbing. Bouldering is fairly limited, fear-wise (if you don't count highballs). It's a great way for anyone to get into climbing, and just have fun.
Top-roping a wall is pretty benign as well, since if you fall it's usually just a couple feet. But the height can will still cause beginners to pause, but you should get over it fairly quickly. You will be too focused on the next move to think about the height, most of the time.
Then you progress to lead climbing, where you pull the rope up with you (attached to your harness), and clip into quickdraws. Lead falls are much farther than top rope, in general, and you have the added physical challenge of finding a good position to do the clipping. This added physical challenge leads to mental drain as you have to gauge "can I make it to the next quickdraw and have enough energy to find a position to clip without falling?" The more you move up, the farther you're going to fall..
Then you have traditional (trad) climbing, where you place protection into the rock, in the form of cams and nuts and what not, and you clip into those. The physical challenge with finding a position to put protection is similar to lead, but now you have to hold the position longer, and after it's placed, you have the added mental strain of "will that piece of gear actually hold if I fall on it?"
And then, you have Honnold here, with free soloing. You fall you die (or get super messed up).
When I went from top roping to lead, it was like starting over again. The level I was climbing at plummeted (on lead), due to the mental game. Nowadays when I top rope, it's almost a joke (fear-wise). I can fly up a route on top rope, and then struggle up the same route on lead.
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One of the most interesting things about the sport, to me, is the whole mental challenge, and any climber will tell you the same. You are not just challenging yourself physically, but mentally. We all have to fight the fear, our weakness of mind.
It's not clear there is. Consider this part of the article:
Yet Honnold ended up scared, really scared, on Corrugation Corner. He clung to the big, friendly holds. “I overgripped the shit out of it,” he says. Obviously, though, he didn’t give up after that first experience. Instead, Honnold donned what he called “mental armor” and crossed the threshold of fear again and again. “For every hard pitch I’ve soloed I’ve probably soloed a hundred easy pitches,” he says.
One by one, acts that had seemed outrageous to him began to seem not so crazy: soloing moves in which he hangs only by his fingers, for example, with his feet swinging in the open air, or, as he did in June on a notorious route called The Complete Scream, climbing ropeless up a pitch that he had never ascended before. In 12 years of free solos, Honnold has broken holds, had his feet slip, gotten off-route into unknown terrain, been surprised by animals like birds and ants, or just suffered “that fraying at the edges, you know, where you’ve just been up in the void too long.” But because he managed to deal with these problems, he gradually dampened his anxieties about them.
So was he born this way, or through repeated exposure did he train himself to be this way?
Or, more likely, is it a bit of both?
The article certainly seems to suggest that we can all improve on our ability to manage fear... perhaps not to the degree Alex has, but enough so to allow us to tackle challenges that might otherwise seem insurmountable.
Go to a climbing gym and learn how climbing works. You'll see there's nothing much to worry about and you can focus on having fun. Climbing is the best thing there is, in my horribly biased opinion.