Alex Honnold

I don't think it has to be sketchy.

How awesome is it that you're

friends and coworkers with one of your childhood heroes?

Oh, that's the best.

That's actually, I think one of the best things about being a professional climber is so many of the people that I was, that I looked up to as a kid, you know, and our friends and peers and things, and you're like, Oh, that's so great.

Yeah.

You get to like hang out with your heroes and you're like, yeah, no, it's amazing.

kid out there now thinking the same it's like i'm too afraid to go up to alex and say hello uh and uh they should just say hello yeah i don't know in the same way right yeah totally i mean in the same way that i was like so afraid to ever talk to peter when i was young and then ultimately now he's just another nice guy and we're friends we climb together it's great sort of like yeah anybody should just say hi you know it's like if they're at the if we're at the cliff like come chat you know it's like we're all doing the same thing

I'm not totally sure because in some ways, so it depends what you mean by achieving success as a climber.

Because if you're trying to climb the hardest grades or go to the Olympics or things like that, in some ways, you're almost better off being a university student or something like having a structured schedule that in some ways limits the amount that you can climb.

Because, you know, I don't know enough about other sports, but I suspect this is akin to like power lifting or something where it's like if you're trying to be really, really strong, you kind of only need to do a little bit every couple of days and then recover.

And so for a sort of elite physical training for climbing, you really only need, you know, say three or four hour sessions, four or five days a week.

And then it's like, what do you do with the rest of your time?

And so like you may as well have a job or.

And so a lot of my friends who like write code for a living or, you know, do things like that are very, very strong climbers because of the, the, the schedule that allows the structure.

Um, that said, I think if you want to be a great free solist or like a big adventure climber, you're probably better off living in a van and just doing the thing nonstop.

Because for that, you're not trying to have that peak muscular performance.

You're trying to just learn a skill and do something all the time.

And so then like hours of practice, I think matter more.

Is it just basically sleep?