Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, and the Climbing World Reels

For example, in climbing where you have protection a much better lesson to extrapolate is that you will fail, and to be prepared for that at all times.

There's an interesting progression with regard to fear in rock climbing. Bouldering is fairly limited, fear-wise (if you don't count highballs). It's a great way for anyone to get into climbing, and just have fun.

Top-roping a wall is pretty benign as well, since if you fall it's usually just a couple feet. But the height can will still cause beginners to pause, but you should get over it fairly quickly. You will be too focused on the next move to think about the height, most of the time.

Then you progress to lead climbing, where you pull the rope up with you (attached to your harness), and clip into quickdraws. Lead falls are much farther than top rope, in general, and you have the added physical challenge of finding a good position to do the clipping. This added physical challenge leads to mental drain as you have to gauge "can I make it to the next quickdraw and have enough energy to find a position to clip without falling?" The more you move up, the farther you're going to fall..

Then you have traditional (trad) climbing, where you place protection into the rock, in the form of cams and nuts and what not, and you clip into those. The physical challenge with finding a position to put protection is similar to lead, but now you have to hold the position longer, and after it's placed, you have the added mental strain of "will that piece of gear actually hold if I fall on it?"

And then, you have Honnold here, with free soloing. You fall you die (or get super messed up).

When I went from top roping to lead, it was like starting over again. The level I was climbing at plummeted (on lead), due to the mental game. Nowadays when I top rope, it's almost a joke (fear-wise). I can fly up a route on top rope, and then struggle up the same route on lead.

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One of the most interesting things about the sport, to me, is the whole mental challenge, and any climber will tell you the same. You are not just challenging yourself physically, but mentally. We all have to fight the fear, our weakness of mind.

How on earth do you practice it? You can practice bench pressing by pressing a small weight. You can practice boxing by sparring.

You can't just climb up to a deadly height - which isn't even very much, as people regularly die from falling out windows - and work your way up from there.

You can't just do a little batsuit jump, either. You have to be going fast for the suit to make a difference.