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Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

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Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#131

Post by hackeraccount »

parthdesai wrote: post #116
e40 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the impression I got: he doesn’t feel fear like the rest of us.

That’s not true, he has debunked that. It’s due to repeated practice and his confidence in his skill set that he doesn’t feel fear under those conditions

When I go out running a might feel a twinge in Achilles. Or a pain in my knee. Maybe I'm just tired.

When that happens I have to do a mental inventory and ask myself, "Am I better off finishing the run or should I just bag it and take tomorrow off?" Two things; firstly every run hurts a little bit - especially the first mile. I usually get into a groove and sometimes, very rarely, I really have gotten to that place where I'm feeling no pain and a run seems like less effort then a walk - mostly though the nice part of a run has an undeniable unpleasantness bound up with it. I like being able to go out for a run though so I put up with the bad. Second thing. I'm an unreliable source. For all the reasons I just talked about I don't trust my ability to take stock of my physical state. I do occasionally take off or skip for days at a stretch but it's like candy - I don't trust it because I like it so.

Here's the thing. If I get that balance wrong I end up walking in the middle of my run.

I imagine Honnold has to do that same self assessment. If he gets it wrong he plunges to his death. Which - to my mind - is totally crazy. Takes all kinds though.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#132

Post by bookofjoe »

xorvoid wrote: post #128
bookofjoe wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Climbing star, 23, dies after falling from Yosemite's El Capitan [this past Wednesday] >Balin Miller, 23, was live-streamed on TikTok ascending and subsequently falling from the monolith on Wednesday. >Details of what caused the incident are not clear, but Miller's brother Dylan told AFP he was lead rope soloing - a technique that enables climbing alone while still protected by a rope - on a 2,400ft (730m) route nam…

Not sure what your point is here. He died rappelling when his bag got stuck. He didn't die free soloing. And it's unrelated to Yosemite. It was an avoidable accident and very sad. Climbers tend to die from Rappelling more than anything else. And, it's completely incomparable to Honnold's recent climb.

It was a response to this comment:

>I'm wondering if this is because El Capitan is a much more technically difficult climb and thus posing much more risk than Taipei 101.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#133

Post by qnpnpmqppnp »

komali2 wrote: post #91
qnpnpmqppnp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Statistically more danger than a free solo climber. While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..

Of all the thousands of times tens of thousands people climb, only 30 die per year. Of that 30, 30% are free solo deaths. Free solo climbing is incredibly dangerous, but the people who do it (usually) prepare extensively and train their whole lives. https://gitnux.org/rock-climbing-death-statistics/ This is in contradiction to the experience of driving, where any number of people on the road with you are untrained, u…

You did not adress the point though. This isn't about the tens of thousands of people climbing, it's about the ones climbing free-solo, which is a much, much smaller number.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#134

Post by physicles »

kqr wrote: post #99
thefz wrote: post #92

After watching the documentary about him I don't really like the person, but here's my take: will he be doing the same if there was no TV, nor social media?

He's been doing this since he was a child, much of it without TV and social media. But this specific tower? Doubt it.

He’s said in multiple interviews (like on his own climbing podcast, Climbing Gold) that he’d do it for free with no publicity. He’s been trying for a very long time to get permission to do something like this, just because it’d be really cool.

The fact that Netflix was behind it might’ve made it possible to get permission to climb this specific tower though.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#135

Post by tempestn »

kqr wrote: post #97
tempestn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's also documented that he has an underdeveloped amygdala, so he literally doesn't experience fear in the same way most people do.

...which is easily misconstrued as "feeling less fear" which I don't believe for a second. If that was the case he'd be dead by now. But it's certainly time we admit everyone feels feelings diferently. Even something basal like pain experience is hugely individual with large variation.

I certainly believe he feels less fear. Doesn't mean he wants to die. I'm sure at an intellectual level he enjoys life and doesn't want it to end. I just doubt he gets the innate "nope nope nope" of fear that 99% of people would get when contemplating an activity like this.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#136

Post by dpc050505 »

iamcreasy wrote: post #15

In his El Capitan climb (Free Solo), Alex was worried about cameras or presence of friends watching interfering with the climb. As oppose to that, this climb must have felt very different!

This is much easier climbing and you can rest on balconies every few floors. It has nothing to do with slippery granite slab or v7 boulder problems.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#137

Post by dpc050505 »

clickety_clack wrote: post #115
rurban wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you forgot that architects count the wind forces in, not just the weight of pieces hanging onto the facade. Give them dynamic spikes of factor 10, so it looks more like 1000lbs. Only once you can get your engineers to agree on only factor 2, you can build much much lighter structures.

No I didn’t, you’re talking about big sheets of stuff, which probably won’t have anything to hold onto on it. I’m talking about the fiddly little bits that he’s likely to be holding onto. A little bit of flashing around a window has a wind load approaching zero.

When I'm cleaning highrise windows I put a looot of force crimping window frames to move laterally. I haven't broken anything yet.

I've also done a facade inspection on a building where massive sheets of metal had been badly installed. The vast majority of them weren't connected to the structural steel beams, they were just held together by single screws (with no nuts!) that were falling off due to wind making the screws bore a bigger hole. A sheet had fallen off the 12th floor right onto the busy boulevard below.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#138

Post by dpc050505 »

prein wrote: post #11

I know nothing about climbing. beyond the straight flex of "I could die if I make a mistake", is there a point to doing this without safety equipment?

You spend a ton of time belaying you partner (with whom you need to coordinate free time, which is a major hassle if you're trying to climb on a weekday as an unemployed dirtbag) or just clipping the rope into protection while roped climbing. Free soloing you get to do nothing but climb. There's ways to toprope solo so you can just flow up a route without having to fiddle with any of your equipment while you're climbing, but even that will require you to spend a solid 25% of your time rigging (and that's assuming you're efficient, a lot of climbers don't rig very efficiently). A rope team will climb about 3-4 pitches of moderate difficulty in an hour if they're efficient. A free soloist can easily get this done in a quarter or a third of the time. You climb a whole lot more and you get to only climb instead of working with ropes.

Your average roped climbers at a crag might get 3 pitches of climbing in an hour (sometimes even less when they're on hard stuff where they flail). You can get that done in 15 minutes free soloing. After climbing for a while there's a lot of terrain where you know the odds of falling are minuscule, and you know exactly when you feel insecure and have the option of backing off by down climbing. It's a very common practice among alpinists, where moving fast is an enormous advantage and the terrain usually isn't difficult compared to current sport climbing standards.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#139

Post by dpc050505 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #29
komali2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Taipei tourism bureau disagrees. Many here as well. The more eyes on Taiwan, the better. I'm grateful Alex was willing to risk his life for this spectacle, now potentially millions will have at least some concept of Taipei and Taiwan in their minds.

Did he do this climb with no safety equipment for Taiwan or for Alex? I'm with the OP - watching people so willfully put their lives in danger isn't my cup of tea. I'm just glad he didn't die.

He did it because he thought it would be cool to free solo a building. He grew up idolizing Alain Robert, a french soloist who made his bread and butter out of soloing buildings. The guy was free soloing for free on his own without telling anyone about it for years, living out of his mom's minivan and eating cheap food, the media attention just allows him to be more comfortable as he keeps climbing obsessively. Also running his foundation probably gives a lot of meaning to what he's doing, he'd just be your average dirtbag loser otherwise.

I'm going to add that his coolest achievements were done with ropes. The friendly race to climbing a route graded 5.15 with Sonnie Trotter and Tommy Caldwell is a lot more interesting to me.

Re: Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net

#140

Post by SolubleSnake »

I'm going to be controversial and say that this is an interesting spectacle but it is not even remotely comparable to the difficulty of what was going on in Free Solo. This is a circus trick by comparison to that.

For example I think a lot of 'good' climbers with several multi pitch climbs behind them could do this building fairly comfortably with ropes and really the only thing interesting about this is he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.

(I have climbed pretty extensively in the UK and also in Yangshuo China). I was kind of 'intermediate/good' at one point.

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