The most badass person in the world? I submit: Alex Honnold

[alfred russel]

This guy is 29, lives in a van, and climbs big difficult things, often without a safety rope. One of the top climbers in the world, and the generally acknowledged top free soloist. I'm guessing he will either quit this stuff or die before 40.







The crazy thing is that, even if he never makes a mistake or a hold doesn't break, if the weatherman ever errs and it starts to rain while he is doing one of these climbs, he dies.

Some youtube videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phl82D57P58

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1jwwagtaQ

[The Brain]

I once ate so many pancakes for lunch I didn't need to eat again until lunch the next day.

[alfred russel]

I once ate so many pancakes for lunch I didn't need to eat again until lunch the next day.

That sounds like more of a submission for a thread on the person with the most bad ass. 

AKA, every thread monkeybutt posts in.

[Barrister]

There are just so many factors out of his control that if they go wrong - he's dead.

Sorry - I just can't call "stupid" being a badass.

[Berkut]

It isn't stupid, and controlling those factors is part of what makes the difference between excellent climbers and dead climbers.

They pre-run the route with ropes, for example. They clean the route ahead of time. The entire run takes some number of hours - say 3 for something like Sendero. The odds of the weather suddenly changing from "No chance of rain" to "rain" in three hours is very unlikely. They obviously control for the weather.

Which isn't to say this stuff isn't very dangerous of course. But they are far from stupid about what they are doing. It is probably no more dangerous than, say, driving a race car. Or aggressive scuba diving, or extreme skiing.

[Maximus]

A pet peeve of mine is people labeling risk-taking as "stupid" just because they wouldn't take those same risks. It might be stupid if he thought there was no risk, but I see no evidence that that is the case.

[Barrister]

It isn't stupid, and controlling those factors is part of what makes the difference between excellent climbers and dead climbers.

They pre-run the route with ropes, for example. They clean the route ahead of time. The entire run takes some number of hours - say 3 for something like Sendero. The odds of the weather suddenly changing from "No chance of rain" to "rain" in three hours is very unlikely. They obviously control for the weather.

Which isn't to say this stuff isn't very dangerous of course. But they are far from stupid about what they are doing. It is probably no more dangerous than, say, driving a race car. Or aggressive scuba diving, or extreme skiing.

Lets take driving a race car.  Absolutely a dangerous sport.  However it's also a sport that takes every opportunity to make it's drivers as safe as possible - from helmets to fire retardant suits, to five point racing harnesses - they're doing everything they can to keep the driver safe.

That's completely different from Honnold, for whom the entire point is to do the climb without safety equipment.

Look - I'm all for climbing as a hobby.  Go find the biggest, sheerest rock you can find and go climb it - with safety equipment.

[Berkut]

Of course they are not "doing everything they can". If they were "doing everything they can" they would make the cars stronger and slower. They would not allow the drivers to get so close to one another. There are literally a million things they could do to make the sport safer. That is true for pretty much every sport, for that matter.

But they do not do so because they are trying to balance the danger with the excitement, and the existence of the danger is part of what makes it so exciting.

*I* am not going to go climb a mountain with or without safety equipment, but I am certainly not going to look at those who do so and are the very, very best at an incredibly technical and difficult endeavor and call them stupid. Hell, climbing Mt. Everest with every possible safety crutch you can think of is certainly more statistically dangerous than what this guy does - and hell, plenty of people who die on Everest die because they are "stupid" in that they did not understand or control for the risks. But plenty die despite doing everything they can to control those risks.

The risk is part of the point. I would never do something like that where courting risk is the goal, but that is no surprise, I am a normal human being, and he is a bit exceptional.

He might be different from you in how he chooses to live his life, but he isn't stupid.

[alfred russel]

It isn't stupid, and controlling those factors is part of what makes the difference between excellent climbers and dead climbers.

They pre-run the route with ropes, for example. They clean the route ahead of time. The entire run takes some number of hours - say 3 for something like Sendero. The odds of the weather suddenly changing from "No chance of rain" to "rain" in three hours is very unlikely. They obviously control for the weather.

Which isn't to say this stuff isn't very dangerous of course. But they are far from stupid about what they are doing. It is probably no more dangerous than, say, driving a race car. Or aggressive scuba diving, or extreme skiing.

I agree until the point about driving a race car--the death rate among drivers is quite low. I think it is significantly higher for Honnold.

Where I do agree is that he is very measured about climbs like those in the video. He is taking an opposite tact of most of the top climbers in the world. Those guys are often spending months trying to climb extremely difficult routes and failing hundreds of times before finding success. To put it in basketball terms, they are trying to hit full court shots. Honnold is instead going for layups, only without safety equipment. I don't think he is doing this stuff for a marketing gimmick, but if he was I think there is an insight there: to a non expert climber, it is hard to differentiate the layup routes he is doing from the full court routes other guys are trying. But it is easy to see he has no safety equipment.

I understand he does a lot of free soloing climbs, and the two I linked to are the rather exceptional ones (that is why cbs is documenting one, and apparently a helicopter is there to film the other). So maybe those are like the left handed layups.

[Jacob]

Yeah, I'm fine with not considering people into extreme sports stupid. They value the adrenaline kick and other types of satisfaction higher than the risk (which they minimize as much as possible within their chosen parameters). It's a hobby or a way to make a living that I wouldn't chose, but it's not stupid.

I wouldn't call them badass, though, at least not on the strength of their extreme sport activity. I've been trying to figure out how to articulate it and ultimately I think a badass is someone who has a proven record of overcoming unexpected physical and psychological adversity; it's someone who you'd like to have on your side when the shit hits the fan because even if they haven't dealt with this particular type of situation, they've been through stuff like it and beaten the odds.

Climbing rocks for kicks, no matter how challenging, does not make you a badass. It may be that Mr. Honnold is a badass, and the rock climbing is part of what made him that way, but the ability to climb stuff is not enough to be a badass IMO.

[alfred russel]

Yeah, I'm fine with not considering people into extreme sports stupid. They value the adrenaline kick and other types of satisfaction higher than the risk (which they minimize as much as possible within their chosen parameters). It's a hobby or a way to make a living that I wouldn't chose, but it's not stupid.

I wouldn't call them badass, though, at least not on the strength of their extreme sport activity. I've been trying to figure out how to articulate it and ultimately I think a badass is someone who has a proven record of overcoming unexpected physical and psychological adversity; it's someone who you'd like to have on your side when the shit hits the fan because even if they haven't dealt with this particular type of situation, they've been through stuff like it and beaten the odds.

Climbing rocks for kicks, no matter how challenging, does not make you a badass. It may be that Mr. Honnold is a badass, and the rock climbing is part of what made him that way, but the ability to climb stuff is not enough to be a badass IMO.

Rock climbing is, basically by definition, pointless. One could compare that to many other activities, like video games.

What he demonstrates, to a remarkable degree:
-endurance, mental and physical
-physical strength
-physical courage
-perseverance
-dedication

To a lesser degree, some measure of intelligence.

You mentioned responding to adversity: forgetting the things on film, I am sure there are many times in his life he pushed himself maybe a bit too far, or things weren't quite going the way he wanted, and he had to respond.

None of that means he is a good person. And maybe we want to define being a badass in a way that incorporates that, such as stepping in to be a father to your nephews because their parents are drug addicts. But I was thinking more along the lines of a morally neutral superhero type badass.

[mongers]

Yeah, I'm fine with not considering people into extreme sports stupid. They value the adrenaline kick and other types of satisfaction higher than the risk (which they minimize as much as possible within their chosen parameters). It's a hobby or a way to make a living that I wouldn't chose, but it's not stupid.

I wouldn't call them badass, though, at least not on the strength of their extreme sport activity. I've been trying to figure out how to articulate it and ultimately I think a badass is someone who has a proven record of overcoming unexpected physical and psychological adversity; it's someone who you'd like to have on your side when the shit hits the fan because even if they haven't dealt with this particular type of situation, they've been through stuff like it and beaten the odds.

Climbing rocks for kicks, no matter how challenging, does not make you a badass. It may be that Mr. Honnold is a badass, and the rock climbing is part of what made him that way, but the ability to climb stuff is not enough to be a badass IMO.

I think in that case I'd go with Ernest Shackleton.

There must be people living to day who beat his achievement of getting to South Georgia and rescuing all of his crew, but I haven't heard of them. Though I guess things like GPS and instant comms flip the scales in favour of the modern adventurer.

[derspiess]

You know what's really badass?  Helping those in need.

[MadImmortalMan]

That John Glenn guy must be the world's biggest idiot. Who in their right mind would strap themselves into a flying bomb and then shoot themselves into freaking orbit? I mean you can't breathe up there. If you break a window you'll turn into beef jerky. And that little capsule he was in had less processing power than an Atari console. How is it supposed to recalculate the reentry if something goes wrong? And then finally, he's supposed to drop back into the fucking ocean inside what is essentially an iron meteorite and hope his parachutes don't burn up or deploy badly. What a moron.

[Berkut]

The argument posed reminds me of the argument made by Raz in the CW thread - how can rifles be more deadly than muskets if the actual casualty rate doesn't increase when everyone is armed with rifles as opposed to muskets?

The answer is the same - because the increase in deadliness is so profound it fundamentally changes the behavior of the humans involved.

If your company has to get from point A to point B across an open field and you know there are men in the woods with muskets about 80 yards away, you might take the chance (assuming the mission is important enough or you commander is stupid enough) to accept that you will lose 10% of your men getting across.

If you know there are men with rifles, and you will lose 80% of your men, you simply don't even try.

Same thing here - if you are climbing up something, and you know that that next hold is a tough grab, and you have a 20% chance of missing it, you might take that chance with safety equipment...and then the safety equipment might just fail.

If you know that you have no safety equipment, there is a 0% chance of you taking the risk. Or rather, anyone dumb enough to take the risk will only do so about 5 times at best before they are an ex-solo climber.

You can't just say "Hey, do the same thing, but use safety equipment!" If you use safety equipment, it isn't the same thing anymore, and the very process is certainly radically different.

The guy, by my standards, if fucking nuts. But he isn't stupid.