Quotes from Alex Honnold

I crushed high school. I was a huge dork.

A hangboard is a little piece of wood with edges, holes, and slopes. There's different strategies for different things - hanging, varying grips, adding weight. If I do a hard finger workout, I'm definitely sore.

Big climbs energize me. It's all the other aspects of being a pro-climber that wear me down. The travel and expeditions and training can become pretty tiring. But the actual big climbs - that's what I live for.

The simple facts of Chadian life - what it takes to survive in that kind of climate with nothing but a hut and some animals - stunned me. And this made me realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy my life was compared to those of people in less privileged societies.

People think I just walk up to a sheer cliff and climb it with no knowledge of anything, when in reality, there's tons and tons of information out there, and I'm already well tapped into it.

I took a test once; they said I was a genius.

When I was a teenager, I did a lot of pull-ups and push-ups. Every night before bed, I'd do 150 - in sets of 30 or so. Looking back on it now, I'm not totally sure that's the best way to improve as a climber. But it did make me a lot better at doing pull-ups and push-ups.

The diet for climbing all the time isn't really different from the diet for living. It's not like cardio sports where you're burning a bajillion calories every day.

I love the feeling of touching the rock, the feeling of my body going up the rock.

I've gotten over my shyness from many years of doing public events.

I like the simplicity of soloing. You've got no gear, no partner. You never climb better than when you free-solo.

You might get run over; you might get hit by lightning. I mean, who knows? Each day, there is a chance you might die. And there's nothing wrong with that. Every living being on Earth is facing that same existential rift.

The thing with physical preparation is I have tons of friends who train at a really high level and who can give me advice. But with mental training, I don't really know anybody who has a much better mind for climbing, I guess, so I don't really know where I would go. It's not really a limiting factor for me.

My sister does all this community-service type stuff in Portland that makes the world a much better place. And I make as much in a two-day commercial shoot as she does in five years, which is ridiculous.

I live out of my van, which gives me a first-hand appreciation for power and lighting. A few years ago, I rebuilt the interior of my van to include solar panels and a battery that powers LEDs for lighting and allows me to charge my phone and laptop.

Seven years ago, when I started free soloing long, hard routes in Yosemite - climbing without a rope, gear or a partner - I did it because it seemed like the purest, most elegant way to scale big walls. Climbing, especially soloing, felt like a grand adventure, but I never dreamed it could be a profession.

Yosemite has the most impressive and accessible granite big walls in the world. The rock is amazing. And because of that, it's been the mecca for climbing in the U.S. - and the world to a large degree - for all of climbing history. It's the place to test yourself against the historic routes of the past.

Much as Africa has leapfrogged straight to mobile phones, it has the opportunity to skip the dirty, grid-tied power plants that currently operate across the developed world and go straight to clean, distributed power.

I think it's great that so many people are enjoying climbing. I've always loved climbing; I don't see why other people wouldn't enjoy it just as much. As long as everyone does their best to respect the areas in which they're climbing, I don't see how the growth of the sport could be a bad thing.

I'm sponsored by the solar company Goal Zero, and they were gracious enough to install panels on my van and a nice battery system for the inside. I have lights and a fridge inside the van. And of course I had panels installed on my mom's house.

My comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I've pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible.

I suppose being a bit of an antisocial weirdo definitely honed my skills as a soloist. It gave me a lot more opportunities to solo lots of easy routes, which in turn broadened my comfort zone quite a bit and has allowed me to climb the harder things without a rope that I've done now.

I have a journal of everything I've ever climbed since 2005. For the entry about free soloing Half Dome, I put a frowny face and added some little notes about what I should have done better, and then underlined it. Turns out that is one of my biggest climbing achievements.

No matter the risks we take, we always consider the end to be too soon, even though in life, more than anything else, quality should be more important than quantity.