Breakfast Club: October 31, 2018
breakfast club
vote on election day, november 6
Alex Honnold in Free Solo. Photo: National Geographic
Good morning!
I finally watched the climbing biopic, Free Solo, in the theater. You’ve probably heard of the film—a 90-minute documentary on professional climber Alex Honnold’s attempt to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan, a 3,000-foot wall of granite, without ropes, harnesses, or protective equipment.
Honnold is a climbing savant consumed with the singular obsession of one utterly devoted to their craft. Finding mastery alone on the wall dominates his life. He doesn’t have a job. He lives in a van. He avoids meat, alcohol, and drugs. He spends his mornings climbing on rock faces and his afternoons dangling from a hangboard. His existence is exceptional, defined by the pursuit of a lone endeavor.
There’s nothing new about an ascetic soul pushing the limits of possibility. And variations of Honnold’s story have been told many times in other disciplines. So I found the build-up to his fr…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Footnotes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.