Free Solo Documentary

[Proximal]

Holy crap!

While they’re planning the climb & doing preliminary climbs, some of the film crew’s eye’s are tearing up as they’re thinking about when they watch this dude fall to his death, because this climb seems impossible without a rope.

Turns out with an MRI, the climber’s brain doesn’t register fear.

While he’s doing the climb, some of the film crew are turning their heads because they can’t even watch.

[Charlie67]

Holy crap!

While they’re planning the climb & doing preliminary climbs, some of the film crew’s eye’s are tearing up as they’re thinking about when they watch this dude fall to his death, because this climb seems impossible without a rope.

Turns out with an MRI, the climber’s brain doesn’t register fear.

While he’s doing the climb, some of the film crew are turning their heads because they can’t even watch.

First documentary ever that made me close my eyes!

[KennyJ]

Holy crap!

While they’re planning the climb & doing preliminary climbs, some of the film crew’s eye’s are tearing up as they’re thinking about when they watch this dude fall to his death, because this climb seems impossible without a rope.

Turns out with an MRI, the climber’s brain doesn’t register fear.

While he’s doing the climb, some of the film crew are turning their heads because they can’t even watch.

Is that the name of the doc? Free solo?

[Proximal]

Is that the name of the doc? Free solo?

Yep!

[The God Himself]

Thats definitely worth to give it a watch. I love extreme sports, not brave enough to try myself tho lol

[Beetlegeuse]

The guy's name is Alex Honnold. What he does sounds nuts but how he approaches it is methodical and calculating. He doesn't try anything unroped until he has practiced it roped until he's figured out how to do it with an acceptable level of risk, which also minimizes the fear. That doesn't mean it won't kill him some day soon but he's already accomplished a number of ascents that nobody else but him thought was possible. But the way he climbs even an unexpected change in weather could fuck up his day.

Like Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) said in the film Point Break, if you want the ultimate rush, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.

Bodhi's other great line: "Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true." The MRI showed no activity in Honnold's amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear. Which doesn't mean he was born a mutant with no sense of fear, it means he's learned to manage it. If he didn't feel fear then he wouldn't have a normal person's safety barometer. He couldn't recognize risk and you have to recognize it before you can manage it. And in the film he lays out his process for managing the risk on the dangerous climbs.

Calming fear (or other disruptive emotions) is the objective of the form of meditation practiced by Zen Buddhists. The most difficult thing to make your mind do is absolutely nothing. Make it go dead quiet. Buddhists call the human brain's natural state "monkey mind," like it's a bunch of bickering monkeys that won't be quiet. But if you can make them all shut the fuck up, then you also you can turn off fear or any other emotion/distraction you want. Some guys who do this stuff practice meditation in preparation for the climb. For some, the climb itself puts them in a meditative state.

What astonishes me about the guys like Honnold is their muscular endurance. To spend such a long time with so many muscles in contraction and not cramp or start trembling from fatigue. They show him briefly in the film with no shirt, and he's obviously hard as nails, but he's not what you'd call 'brawny' by any stretch of the term. To me only his rhomboid muscles looked conspicuously well developed. But he's climbed the nose of El Cap in less than two hours (roped, with a partner). That comes to about 16 vertical feet a minute, going straight up like a house fly walking up a pane of window glass. But for two hours. The first men to climb that route used ropes, climbed in phases and needed 45 days. Forty-five. Versus one hour, 58 minutes and seven seconds. And even that record already has been broken.

And watching the film, unless the guy is a great actor, Honnold shows very, very little ego. Which considering what he's done might be the most remarkable thing about him.

But climbing has always been about defying death and doing the impossible. When he was a young man, Reinhold Messner had homes in the Dolomite mountains in the north of Italy and on the other side of the Dolomites in southern Austria. He lived in one of those historic Italian climbing villages where the old men spend their days sitting with their telescopes and watching the climbers. They knew all the climbers by name and kept a chalk "scoreboard" detailing who was where on what day.

One day Messner set out from the Italian side, solo (but roped) up a route that no one had climbed before. The old men watching told everyone that he had disappeared into the clouds and he never came down. So they assumed he had fallen. In truth, he had made the summit and walked to his home in Austria. A few weeks later he came back to his home in Italy and the villagers all thought he was a ghost.

One thing all these people have in common is they are utterly obsessed with what they do. Messner put the chiller from a drinking fountain on the water line to his shower so he could bathe in ice-cold water. So if the weather turned foul during a climb, he would be accustomed to it.

Obsessed.

He watched his older brother swept away by an avalanche on Nanga Parbat (which is shorter and less famous but a much harder climb than Everest) in 1970, which only made him more determined to conquer every mountain of note on the planet. The accident happened after they had summited (ironically, most mountain climbing accidents happen on the way down). He's lost all his toes but one and parts of several fingers to frostbite but he still climbs.

In 1978, Messner and Peter Habeler became the first men to climb Mt Everest completely without the use of supplemental oxygen. No support, no sherpas, and no oxygen. Just the two of them. When the Nepal mountain climbing organization certified the climb, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (the first man to climb Everest and his sherpa) protested, claiming it could not be done.

Two years later, in 1980, Messner climbed Everest again. Without oxygen. And solo. Neither of which are humanly possible.

But these people are not entirely human. You couldn't be and do what they do.

There are eight mountains with peaks higher than 8000 meters (~27,000 feet). Messner was the first man to climb all eight, and the first to climb all eight without supplemental oxygen. That was him taking his revenge for his brother Gunther's death.

Last year a 15-year old boy named Connor Herson free-climbed the nose of El Cap, but he did it in segments over three days, not all in one push. His most difficult climb to date was rated a 5.14c, same as Alex Honnold's most difficult climb to date, but he is less than half of Honnold's age.

[Obs]

The guy's name is Alex Honnold. What he does sounds nuts but how he approaches it is methodical and calculating. He doesn't try anything unroped until he has practiced it roped until he's figured out how to do it with an acceptable level of risk, which also minimizes the fear. That doesn't mean it won't kill him some day soon but he's already accomplished a number of ascents that nobody else but him thought was possible. But the way he climbs even an unexpected change in weather could fuck up his day.

Like Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) said in the film Point Break, if you want the ultimate rush, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.

Bodhi's other great line: "Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true." The MRI showed no activity in Honnold's amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear. Which doesn't mean he was born a mutant with no sense of fear, it means he's learned to manage it. If he didn't feel fear then he wouldn't have a normal person's safety barometer. He couldn't recognize risk and you have to recognize it before you can manage it. And in the film he lays out his process for managing the risk on the dangerous climbs.

Calming fear (or other disruptive emotions) is the objective of the form of meditation practiced by Zen Buddhists. The most difficult thing to make your mind do is absolutely nothing. Make it go dead quiet. Buddhists call the human brain's natural state "monkey mind," like it's a bunch of bickering monkeys that won't be quiet. But if you can make them all shut the fuck up, then you also you can turn off fear or any other emotion/distraction you want. Some guys who do this stuff practice meditation in preparation for the climb. For some, the climb itself puts them in a meditative state.

What astonishes me about the guys like Honnold is their muscular endurance. To spend such a long time with so many muscles in contraction and not cramp or start trembling from fatigue. They show him briefly in the film with no shirt, and he's obviously hard as nails, but he's not what you'd call 'brawny' by any stretch of the term. To me only his rhomboid muscles looked conspicuously well developed. But he's climbed the nose of El Cap in less than two hours (roped, with a partner). That comes to about 16 vertical feet a minute, going straight up like a house fly walking up a pane of window glass. But for two hours. The first men to climb that route used ropes, climbed in phases and needed 45 days. Forty-five. Versus one hour, 58 minutes and seven seconds. And even that record already has been broken.

And watching the film, unless the guy is a great actor, Honnold shows very, very little ego. Which considering what he's done might be the most remarkable thing about him.

But climbing has always been about defying death and doing the impossible. When he was a young man, Reinhold Messner had homes in the Dolomite mountains in the north of Italy and on the other side of the Dolomites in southern Austria. He lived in one of those historic Italian climbing villages where the old men spend their days sitting with their telescopes and watching the climbers. They knew all the climbers by name and kept a chalk "scoreboard" detailing who was where on what day.

One day Messner set out from the Italian side, solo (but roped) up a route that no one had climbed before. The old men watching told everyone that he had disappeared into the clouds and he never came down. So they assumed he had fallen. In truth, he had made the summit and walked to his home in Austria. A few weeks later he came back to his home in Italy and the villagers all thought he was a ghost.

One thing all these people have in common is they are utterly obsessed with what they do. Messner put the chiller from a drinking fountain on the water line to his shower so he could bathe in ice-cold water. So if the weather turned foul during a climb, he would be accustomed to it.

Obsessed.

He watched his older brother swept away by an avalanche on Nanga Parbat (which is shorter and less famous but a much harder climb than Everest) in 1970, which only made him more determined to conquer every mountain of note on the planet. The accident happened after they had summited (ironically, most mountain climbing accidents happen on the way down). He's lost all his toes but one and parts of several fingers to frostbite but he still climbs.

In 1978, Messner and Peter Habeler became the first men to climb Mt Everest completely without the use of supplemental oxygen. No support, no sherpas, and no oxygen. Just the two of them. When the Nepal mountain climbing organization certified the climb, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (the first man to climb Everest and his sherpa) protested, claiming it could not be done.

Two years later, in 1980, Messner climbed Everest again. Without oxygen. And solo. Neither of which are humanly possible.

But these people are not entirely human. You couldn't be and do what they do.

There are eight mountains with peaks higher than 8000 meters (~27,000 feet). Messner was the first man to climb all eight, and the first to climb all eight without supplemental oxygen. That was him taking his revenge for his brother Gunther's death.

Last year a 15-year old boy named Connor Herson free-climbed the nose of El Cap, but he did it in segments over three days, not all in one push. His most difficult climb to date was rated a 5.14c, same as Alex Honnold's most difficult climb to date, but he is less than half of Honnold's age.

We called the fear management thinking under a rush. In life and death matters first times around most black out. Details are sketchy.
Once you learn to like the adrenaline rush it is a tool rather than a henderance. Thought processes control the flow of adrenaline and fear. It is not involuntary.
Too much and you wear out.
Climbing trees taught me pretty quick what I had forgotten riding bulls, anticipation drains you.
I started my career because I dont like heights.
I used to get so tense I would be cramping inside 10-30 minutes all over. I would inadvertently squeeze the everloving shit out of anything to keep my balance.
You have to accept it 100% or your adrenaline cooks your ass. Same as anticipating a bull, you would get tense and exhauseted before your ride just anticipating. God forbid you got a chute fighter, you would be fucked when the gate came open.

Gradually you learn that if you are screwed you are screwed and its time to focus only on winning.

Staying loose is key.
Bullriders, boxers, mma fighters, climbers, motocross, any high adrenaline sport you will see them frequetly bounce around and stretch before performing. They are "getting loose".
Changing focus and preventing adrenaline from seizing them. Visualising and clearing fear rather than becoming a victim of adrenal rigor mortis.

Fear is always there.
Mind control is why it doesnt win.

[Proximal]

In the movie it was mentioned that he is autistic. It sure looked like his tendencies to empathize with others (like his gf) was blunted, also consistent with the amygdala.

Although not a mutant Beetle, I get the impression that his interactions with fear, & others socially are not a consciously developed mechanism, but more a result of the autism.

But of course, I agree with the fact that with enough conscious effort, emotions such as anger & fear can be desensitized. I just think in his particular situation, the autism is an asset & a strong contributor.