Alex Honnold – TED Talk TRANSCRIPT
Hello. I’d like to show you guys 30 seconds of the best day of my life.
So that was El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park, and in case you couldn’t tell, I was climbing by myself without a rope, a style of a climbing known as free soloing.
That was the culmination of a nearly decade-long dream, and in the video I’m over 2,500 feet off the ground. Seems scary? Yeah, it is, which is why I spent so many years dreaming about soloing El Cap and not actually doing it.
But on the day that that video was taken, it didn’t feel scary at all. It felt as comfortable and natural as a walk in the park, which is what most folks were doing in Yosemite that day.
Today I’d like to talk about how I was able to feel so comfortable and how I overcame my fear. I’ll start with a very brief version of how I became a climber, and then tell the story of my two most significant free solos. They were both successful, which is why I’m here.
But the first felt largely unsatisfying, whereas the second, El Cap, was by far the most fulfilling day of my life. Through these two climbs, you’ll see my process for managing fear.
So I started climbing in a gym when I was around 10 years old, which means that my life has been centered on climbing for more than 20 years. After nearly a decade of climbing mostly indoors, I made the transition to the outdoors and gradually started free soloing.
I built up my comfort over time and slowly took on bigger and more challenging walls. And there have been many free soloists before me, so I had plenty of inspiration to draw from.
But by 2008, I’d repeated most of their previous solos in Yosemite and was starting to imagine breaking into new terrain.
The obvious first choice was Half Dome, an iconic 2,000-foot wall that lords over the east end of the valley. The problem, though also the allure, was that it was too big. I didn’t really know how to prepare for a potential free solo.
So I decided to skip the preparations and just go up there and have an adventure. I figured I would rise to the occasion, which, unsurprisingly, was not the best strategy.
I did at least climb the route roped up with a friend two days before just to make sure that I knew roughly where to go and that I could physically do it. But when I came back by myself two days later, I decided that I didn’t want to go that way.
I knew that there was a 300-foot variation that circled around one of the hardest parts of the climb. I suddenly decided to skip the hard part and take the variation, even though I’d never climbed it before, but I immediately began to doubt myself.
Imagine being by yourself in the dead center of a 2,000-foot face, wondering if you’re lost. Thankfully, it was pretty much the right way and I circled back to the route. I was slightly rattled, I was pretty rattled, but I tried not to let it bother me too much because I knew that all the hardest climbing was up at the top. I needed to stay composed.
It was a beautiful September morning, and as I climbed higher, I could hear the sounds of tourists chatting and laughing on the summit. They’d all hiked up the normal trail on the back, which I was planning on using for my descent.
But between me and the summit lay a blank slab of granite. There were no cracks or edges to hold on to, just small ripples of texture up a slightly less than vertical wall. I had to trust my life to the friction between my climbing shoes and the smooth granite.