A pair of interesting articles on Outside Magazine’s website caught my attention recently that I wanted to share with you.
The first article by Mark Synnott is equal parts a discussion of adventure photographer Jimmy Chin and Synnott’s take on the evolution of expedition reporting. Woven throughout the article are stories from the recent trip Synnott and Chin took to Chad with Tim Kemple, Renan Ozturk and James Pearson.
The second article is a piece by David Roberts on Alex Honnold. While a lot of familiar ground is covered, the article brought up several pieces of information I was previously unaware of including the following snippet:
Honnold seems to have no self-censoring mechanism. He often speaks in short, pat locutions, and some of his one-liners can be abrasive.
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“There’s only a handful of chicks in the world who can climb big walls on my level,” he told me. And: “I took a test once; they said I was a genius.” He recently erased himself from Facebook. “It was too crazy,” he says. “I was getting 20 friend requests a day. Some kid would ask, ‘Hey, what kind of chalk bag should I buy?’ You hate to blow him off, but, like, you don’t give a shit.”Some friends think fame has taken a toll on Honnold. Weidner, his climbing partner, says, “When we started climbing together, Alex was very polite, very safety conscious.
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Now he’s more likely to badmouth you. About a year ago, I was trying to lead this pitch, and I kept falling off. Alex said, ‘Dude, what’s your f**king problem?
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It’s only 5.13.’ He may have been joshing, but it hurt my feelings. He’s got a certain attitude now, like unless you’re a world-class climber, you suck.”But Honnold is equally unsparing with himself. When I asked if anyone had approached him about writing a book, he said, “Why? I haven’t done anything yet.” At another point he claimed, “I’m a lot mellower than Tommy Caldwell. Which is why I’m not as good.”
Read the full Honnold piece here.
Wow, I’ve never really heard that side of Honnold’s story before. He and Will Stanhope are coming to Ohio State this week to climb with us at a local gym and then give a talk on Friday night. I’ll be interested to see if he makes any of those types of comments.
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Glad to hear he’s human and keeps it real, qualities I feel are truly lacking in this generation. IMO the media is a bunch of garbage in the first place that enjoys picking out and blowing out of proportion the short-comings that all of us human beings have. I don’t blame him, figure he’s just trying to take care of his stuff and keep pushing himself. I agree that Facebook is too crazy, waste of life and time. Doesn’t change my opinion of Honnold for the worse, that’s for sure.
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“Glad to hear he’s human and keeps it real, qualities I feel are truly lacking in this generation.”
I agree. Too many cyborgs just faking it these days. Where’d all the real humans go?
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Yeah, like Tiger Woods. Total media poster boy, with a perfect family and everything, turns out he’s a total dirt-bag. I’d take a guy sick of the media a little bit, rather than some douche who looks like a perfect human, but ends up being totally bogus. The media builds up and destroys who they want.
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Whatever, Honnold is the man.
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The most interesting thing to me as someone who has been out of the dating game for some time is the concept of people meeting their girlfriend/boyfriend via the Facebook. Daniel Woods did it and is getting married and now Honnold?? How does this even work???
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Smoke and mirrors 🙂
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*That* was the most interesting thing? Gettin’ old Narc. 😉
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His friend sounds like a crybaby “he hurt my feelings” AWWWW POOR LIL GUY
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this sport is small enough that. personality critiques, even just proposed ones, will undoubtedly make it back to the persona about which they’re uttered. honnold’s gonna read that people think that fame has “changed” him, and i wouldn’t be surprised if it really upset him. he passed me on freeway a few months ago, and he stopped to chat for a while, so i have a really human association with him. for some reason, it seems fine to bash tiger woods, who has a kind of immortal status, but it harsh to be so blunt about someone that you have a good chance of meeting at the cliff. it would suck to have a pretty condemnatory article written about you and published for the world to see, and somehow the intimacy of the climbing community amplifies that effect.
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Hey, Honnold is Honnold.
People like Honnold, with their shit together, are natural-born antagonists. They’re impatient to keep moving and find directness a much quicker and more efficient than coddling.
We met by chance in Ceuse, and quickly after Spain. I traveled a lot, so we’d see each other for a split second at big climbing events, but we’ve never really talked. He came across as direct, blunt, and brutally honest. He made fun of my dreads, gave me tons of shit for using my partner’s rope in Siurana…
I thought it was funny. He’s a dork, markedly utilitarian, and brash, but the man – from what I saw – has strict discipline. He wouldn’t use a McCafe’s wi-fi without buying a coffee, and he gave me a ride to the airport in Barcelona from Siurana. That’s a two hour drive.
We don’t know each other. We were just both American.
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Thanks for the insight Tiffany.
While the snippet I shared paints Honnold in a somewhat negative light I found the entire article interesting because it gives one a glimpse at the “real” Alex Honnold, both the good and the bad. More so than I recall seeing anywhere else.
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He made fun of a white girl with dreds? Totally redeemed!
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Careful Narc. You don’t want to be lumped in with ‘mainstream’ media that pull the juciest bit out of a long piece and stands it alone out of the context in which it’s written. In isolation this sounds like Honnold is a bit of a dickhead etc, or the author is attempting to bring him down, but when read in the context of what is a really good article it is not something that really jumps out. The author does a pretty good job of trying to understand Alex but the snippet you chose doesn’t really show this effort and will undoubtedly generate some uninformed web chatter.
I’m not saying you did this with intent though, just how I responded to it. Cheers.
p.s. just noticed your reply to Tiffany above but still figure I’ll post this seeing as I’ve written it now!
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I read the article post-reply, ignoramus that I try so hard to be, yet Ian P’s right, it’s ambiguous, the guy was super nice, and this sounded like a dodge ball shot to the nuts. And maybe funny in the same sense 🙂
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It’s just a crafted piece of writing for an audience of cannibals.
Seems to me that the article’s approach is to show Honnold saying or doing something questionable, boiling the reader’s blood for a minute, then backtracking and showing that in fact he’s not a jerk, he’s actually a balanced guy. The article does this with one ploy after another after another.
The effect is that it keeps the reader titilated and then soothed. Just good, effective writing.
So, in a sense, the Outside media guy just flayed his personality open in a way that makes for a good reading, then we feast on the meat, and Honnold, a real human being, afterall, HAS to watch the whole process and listent to people critique how he tastes–because that’s one of the things his sponsors pay him handsomely to do.
I bet every single human being alive could be roasted and redeemed several times throughout an article. Problem is, no one really cares about us, and Charlie, that really hurts.
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Enjoyed the read.
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