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Alex Honnold ascends the Taipei 101 tower.
S
This guy is fuckin nuts 🥜
A
I can’t remember if it was a documentary or if it was from that youtube video where he took Magnus free climbing, but I distinctly remember him casually mentioning the number of his friends that were no longer living because of free climbing.
R
“All of my free-climbing buddies either retired or had kids or died.” It was the free-climbing video with Magnus. I watched a fun doco about the pioneers of climbing in Yosemite and how it’s changed over time, it actually featured Alex and his van that he lived out of. I googled the main guys featured in it, the ones that were still young enough to be climbing. A *lot* of them are dead.
W
Not a lot of other hobbies where even just *one* mistake means you die.
R
Cave diving is one of those hobbies. The best way to become the world’s #1 cave diver is to just stay alive long enough.
H
Similar to:[ Crazy Joe, the only veteran in the field, Last years rookie of the year (Russian roulette championships.)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t2yTd6QV0c)
K
BASE jumping doesn’t have a very good stat record either
R
“How long ya been jumping?”
B
Well apparently that’s the hard part.
E
You’ve obviously never done needlepoint.
T
The art or the type of lsd? Either way youre right
K
😂
V
My first thought was acid as well. Equally as treacherous haha
C
TIL my grandma is a thrill seeker lol
K
How did your grandma die? Oh, she flipped her vet while doing needlepoint.
C
Try felting, it’s got all the danger of needlepoint turned up to 11.
F
I just watched the El Capitan free solo documentary with him… and one of the people in it made a great point on that. ‘This is like a gold medal Olympic sport… where you die if you dont win the gold.’
M
Russian roulette club member numbers shrinking at alarming rate.
I
I know you guys are probably talking about another rock climber, but I’m going to imagine you are referring to Magnus Carlsen the chess player.
E
Nope, different Magnus. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI Not safe for anxiety video
I
Thanks! I feel like I’ve seen that guy before, I just didn’t know his name.
S
Magnus carlsen
I
🤣
Q
Is that not who they were talking about? Not sure why I just assumed it was Carlsen too
E
> Nope, different Magnus. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI
W
They don’t usually die from free soloing though, I think only a couple have died that way, and one had health problems prior to climbing. They die from other things, including a couple of suicides and an avalanche
I
Irony is a cruel mistress, [Patrick Edlinger died falling down stairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Edlinger).
Z
That sounds like one of those stories where a lie is made up to cover the truth. It said he was suffering from depression and alcoholism when he died.
S
A lot of people back in the day died while cleaning guns. Never known a way to do that…
F
Well you have to taste the barrel while pulling the trigger to make sure it’s clean.
S
I don’t know the story, but how would the avalanche not be related to the climbing? Surely he wouldn’t have been in an avalanche zone otherwise. What am I missing here?
W
I’m talking about free soloing, not regular climbing
D
[Marc-André Leclerc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc-Andr%C3%A9_Leclerc) This is the free soloist he’s likely referring to. The documentary “The Alpinist” is about him. I watched this around the same time Free Solo came out on Netflix and it’s just as crazy.
D
My wife watched these a few years ago. Doesn’t Alex say that Marc is crazy in the Alpinist doc?
I
I may be wrong but I believe he has also said that people rarely die from free soloing, usually it’s a freak accident (such as a base jumping accident or rogue wave), not because of climbing. I personally would never do this tho 🥶
K
I choose to believe that all of these guys have had cats and are suffering from debilitating cases of [toxoplasmosis](https://medicine.iu.edu/blogs/research-updates/parasite-linked-spooky-behavioral-changes).
T
Actually in Alex’s case he has lowered activity in his amygdala, the fear center of the brain. https://www.newsweek.com/alex-honnolds-brain-what-fmri-study-revealed-about-climbers-lack-of-fear-11403975
2
I BASE jumped for a while after college and it’s amazing how numb you can get to it. It’s still really sad but it’s not surprising.
T
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI
S
There’s an interview of him inside his van where he talks about how one of the legends went up to climb one day and he just didn’t have the grip strength that day and he fell… and the way alex is talking about it he is almost romanticizing the idea of dying in the same way. Hes got the same mentality as a drug addict almost.
H
yeah that was on magnus channel on yt
S
That guy is fucking stupid. He may very well be an expert climber and he knows what he’s doing, sure. But one thing goes wrong and his two kids no longer have a dad. You can’t predict everything. Fucking stupid.
T
Idk if it’s purely a lack of fear, an indifference to death, or maybe perhaps climbing weighs so heavily on his internal scales he literally values it more than his own life. But I do know humans get a certain level of complacency where we have a hard time seeing times we pulled things off as down to lucky chance vs skill on our end. Or at least fail to recognize how much luck played a role. Almost like a drunk driver driving home a dozen or more times before getting into an accident, and thinking of themselves as a “good drunk driver.”
C
If I recall correctly from the documentary on him, his brain doesn’t seem to have a proper sense of fear, it’s actually wired a bit differently from the average.
R
He’s literally built different
D
His amygdala is built different. Seriously. They did an fmri on his brain and he just doesn’t experience fear (like typical people.) It’s not there.
S
>They did an fmri on his brain and he just doesn’t experience fear. This has been proven to not be true. Or at the very least, greatly exaggerated.
M
He’s said that he gets scared before every climb so obviously not true.
R
100% agree, there is no justification for this behaviour when you’re a father. I don’t care if he has no fear, or he practices a thousand times, all it takes is one fuck up and he destroys his family. Pure selfishness.
C
I’m sure it’s already been said on here multiple times, but there is a long documentary about him free soloing a huge mountain. It’s very well done and watch it on the biggest screen you possibly can. Shit is wild!
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