Non-climber surprises me with her take on Honnold's soloing

Will S wrote:

"beaten your girlfriend/wife unconscious, shot yourself in the foot while out drinking at the club, DUI, murder, sexual assault, rape, steroids, cocaine, weed"

Which of these things is not like the others? 

Weed is relatively harmless, has some medicinal value, and is legal in certain more civilized parts of the US.

mark felber wrote:

Weed is relatively harmless, has some medicinal value, and is legal in certain more civilized parts of the US.

But it may lead to dancing, playing the geetar, or pizza. That demon weed, it's a damn gateway drug.

jay smith wrote:

Regarding all you “old guy” haters, I’m gonna to be 57 in a few months and like most of the old school climbers still cranking I’ve got maybe 10 lbs more muscle than I had at 20 but otherwise the exact same size and weight.  Yea got some UV damage and a full head of salt n pepper, also much better endurance, a much bigger bag oft tricks, and I have to admit a much longer list of injuries.  So when I was out running 1200’ of laps on one of my favorite 11d’s last week (outdoors) I was in constant pain and that is the just the price of doing business these days.  Feel compelled to offer that even if we were willing to flush some of our increasingly precious energy down the toilet over “hot chicks” most of us could never tolerate any of the vacuous mind bogglingly narcissistic millennials currently sporting the desperate and strident obnoxiously hot pink booty shorts that made such a fuss in recent thread.

I refuse to believe a 57 year old with self confidence would post such self aggrandizing nonesense. sheesh. 

jay smith - you committed the cardinal sin on this forum, you admitted you were over 40 ... don't you know no serious climber lives that long?

Will S - pot is getaway drug ... fixed that 4 U ...

kevin deweese wrote:

the point isn't about the objective danger, it's about the perception and acceptance of that danger for the individual based upon their experience. Take two people standing below a 5.7, one a climber one not a climber. One more likely to see anyone freesoloing that climb as crazy the other more likely to think it's doable (and both understand the danger) now keep using the ante. Stand below a 5.10 climb, one a climber that routinely climbs 5.12 the other climbs 5.7. Same difference in perception and same understanding of the objective danger. 

Okay, I get that there's a spectrum of skill versus the difficulty of the route you're climbing, and there's also a spectrum of risk tolerance. But your sidewalk comparison ignores a third factor, which is that there's a fairly binary difference between "if I fall here I might die" and "if I fall here I probably won't die".

In the hiking world, there exist a few hikes which go along narrow ledges, where a fall off the ledge would kill you. I think that almost anyone could walk some of these hikes with the same risk as Honnold soloing a 5.6. But we can't pretend that this is the same as walking along a sidewalk just because the difficulty of not falling is the same. The consequences of falling are not the same.

David Kerkeslager wrote:

Okay, I get that there's a spectrum of skill versus the difficulty of the route you're climbing, and there's also a spectrum of risk tolerance. But your sidewalk comparison ignores a third factor, which is that there's a fairly binary difference between "if I fall here I might die" and "if I fall here I probably won't die".

In the hiking world, there exist a few hikes which go along narrow ledges, where a fall off the ledge would kill you. I think that almost anyone could walk some of these hikes with the same risk as Honnold soloing a 5.6. But we can't pretend that this is the same as walking along a sidewalk just because the difficulty of not falling is the same. The consequences of falling are not the same.

The sidewalk thing is just there to start the thought experiment. The movement to hiking trails is literally in the same sentence as the sidewalk aspect. When you look at the entire argument, the sidewalk part is there specifically to represent the "no risk" aspect of the continuum. 

If you're only interested in taking a single part of the thought experiment out of context and using just that to understand the overall goal of the entire piece, you're going to have a bad time. When you look at the entire argument, the sidewalk part is there to represent the "no risk" aspect of the continuum. 

kevin deweese wrote:

The sidewalk thing is just there to start the thought experiment. The movement to hiking trails is literally in the same sentence as the sidewalk aspect. When you look at the entire argument, the sidewalk part is there specifically to represent the "no risk" aspect of the continuum. 

If you're only interested in taking a single part of the thought experiment out of context and using just that to understand the overall goal of the entire piece, you're going to have a bad time. When you look at the entire argument, the sidewalk part is there to represent the "no risk" aspect of the continuum. 

There's no such thing as "no risk".

You're telling me you don't think people trip and fall on sidewalks?

David Kerkeslager wrote:

There's no such thing as "no risk".

You're telling me you don't think people trip and fall on sidewalks?

I definitely do when I try to chew gum at the same time.

David Kerkeslager wrote:

But we can't pretend that this is the same as walking along a sidewalk just because the difficulty of not falling is the same. The consequences of falling are not the same.

Actually, I think you can. Plenty of sidewalks in this world where falling into the street would mean getting run over by a speeding car. Yet most people don't think about that. I actually know a woman who tripped over a curb, fell into the street and hit her head, never to be the same. Total freak accident. 

lucander wrote:

I've got a humble house 20 minutes from the Gunks, a two year old daughter that keeps me from climbing much, and a wife that I've adored for 16 years.  Where's the doom?  

DL 

Lucky dog. My daughter is 9. And get this, I was bullshittng. :-D

AndrewArroz wrote:

Actually, I think you can. Plenty of sidewalks in this world where falling into the street would mean getting run over by a speeding car. Yet most people don't think about that. I actually know a woman who tripped over a curb, fell into the street and hit her head, never to be the same. Total freak accident. 

The analogy I often use is driving on a mountain road with no guardrail (there are lots of these here in Colorado).  I often drive through a turn with my tires less than a meter from the cliff's edge and think "if I jerk my hand 10cm to the left, we all die".  That's a very small movement that kills everyone in the car.  

And yet I never do this, and neither do 99.9999% of all drivers.

Honnold is in positions where, with a similar small movement of his hand, he would be dead.  But this hasn't happened so far.

David Kerkeslager wrote:

There's no such thing as "no risk".

You're telling me you don't think people trip and fall on sidewalks?

Good job, you got me. I should have realized you were trolling me. I blame myself for wanting to believe you were interested in a discussion. That, or I blame myself for being bored at work and looking for a way to distract myself. 

I'm saying that, factually, free soloing carries a very significant risk of death. Comparing free soloing to walking down a sidewalk is an attempt to make free soloing seem like a common level of risk, but it doesn't carry a common level of risk--that's just not factual. Free soloing is not comparable to walking down a sidewalk at any skill level. The two activities do not have similar levels of death risk.

I'll point back to an earlier post: 25% of the famous, highly skilled free soloists which were listed died free soloing. Free soloing is extremely dangerous, and I'm not going to submit to this inaccurate narrative in which it's just as safe as risks we all take every day.

I'm not saying no one should take that risk. I'm merely insisting on an accurate view of reality. If that makes me a troll in your mind, so be it.

David Kerkeslager wrote:

I'm saying that, factually, free soloing carries a very significant risk of death. Comparing free soloing to walking down a sidewalk is an attempt to make free soloing seem like a common level of risk, but it doesn't carry a common level of risk--that's just not factual. Free soloing is not comparable to walking down a sidewalk at any skill level. The two activities do not have similar levels of death risk.

I'll point back to an earlier post: 25% of the famous, highly skilled free soloists which were listed died free soloing. Free soloing is extremely dangerous, and I'm not going to submit to this inaccurate narrative in which it's just as safe as risks we all take every day.

I'm not saying no one should take that risk. I'm merely insisting on an accurate view of reality. If that makes me a troll in your mind, so be it.

Let it go, your response to my "thought experiment" was only a fraction as insightful as you imagined, and I'm being charitable.  

You know what goes on here.

David Kerkeslager wrote:

I'll point back to an earlier post: 25% of the famous, highly skilled free soloists which were listed died free soloing. Free soloing is extremely dangerous, and I'm not going to submit to this inaccurate narrative in which it's just as safe as risks we all take every day.

I think you've hit on the fundamental disconnect we're seeing in this thread. Guys like Bachar and Honnold are famous PRECISELY because they do/did things that are limit-pushing. They're like the wing-suiters of the climbing world. You're correct that their kind of free-soloing is probably quite dangerous, statistically. But I think the larger conversation where has been about free-soloing in general. And the point is very legit that almost all of us at some point "free solo" things where if we fell we would die. Yet we think very little about that because we're well within our limits and not going to fall. 

AndrewArroz wrote:

I think you've hit on the fundamental disconnect we're seeing in this thread. Guys like Bachar and Honnold are famous PRECISELY because they do/did things that are limit-pushing. They're like the wing-suiters of the climbing world. You're correct that their kind of free-soloing is probably quite dangerous, statistically. But I think the larger conversation where has been about free-soloing in general. And the point is very legit that almost all of us at some point "free solo" things where if we fell we would die. Yet we think very little about that because we're well within our limits and not going to fall. 

That belief (that we're well within our limits and not going to fall) isn't borne out by the evidence either. For example:

Climbing unroped was the leading contributory cause of accidents reported. Source. While we may think we're well within our limits, a great many of our accidents are caused by us being wrong about that (us being the climbing community as a whole in this case).

Note that from what I can tell, only the most relevant contributory cause is listed for each accident, so climbing unroped may have been a factor in greater than 16.9% of accidents (note that the next two most common contributory causes, "Exceeding abilities" and "Placed no/inadequate protection" are related).

Again, I'm not against soloing. I'm only against the way people on this thread are trying to downplay the risks associated with free soloing.

Well this thread got boring, check you guys later. 

I can't stop thinking about the original post. We have a concrete example of a similar scenario described by John RB's date. Remember the widely reviled (on MP) video of those guys doing the rope swing at Corona Arch? And that poor teenager that killed himself by going and trying to do  the same thing? Sadly, and for lots of reasons, his death had quite the cooling effect on that specific activity. I recall a lot of us were in the "don't post these types of activities to the internet" camp. A non-climber would look at Honnold and those guys at Corona as the same.

I feel like we've played out the discussion at this point.

The one point I hope we can agree on at least is a hope that Alex Honnold lives a long life.

Hey Jack Clueless,

Sounds like an awesome personal confidence challenge. OK so here’s a classically old school response.  

Duel to the death. Bring your own body bag (bivi sack will also work).  

I’m currently stuck here on the front range, otherwise JT, RR, Squamish, Cochise, Gunks, etc. would be fine as well. 

Post your phone # or email me at deadmantalking@gentlemanmail.com and then we can meet at Eldo say 5 am, (we can start out on something moderate, say Bastille Crack for example) or at Lumpy, maybe Kor Flake, or for some softer numbers maybe BC, if you like.  Or if you prefer Alpine, then maybe RMNP, or Crestone perhaps Ellingwood Arête Direct, or the Casual Route, only couple moves of 5.10, to warm up.

You try to follow me free solo and we will see how long you stay alive.

Anytime you say the word, it’s your funeral.  Let’s get some real provocateurmanship going on here.

When you play with the pigs you wanna fully debase yourself otherwise what’s the point eh?