I can’t contain myself, this is just one of the coolest things ever and I have to get it off my chest. After talking about my 360 boulder problem day, Alex Honnold decided to do a Birthday Challenge. To reword that slightly: one of my biggest inspirations was inspired by me. It’s weird, because he’s also a friend and he treats people like equals (in other words, is a normal human being…normal-ish, anyway). If I complain about people being ahead of me on a route at 8am, he dryly observes that the sun comes up at 5 (fair point). If he makes fun of my challenges for sounding heinous, I have tons of ammo to fire back with. And as I reported the trials and triumphs of my various hard days, he began toying with the idea of doing 290 pitches on his birthday, August 17th. It sounded really hard: 10 hours of climbing means roughly a pitch every 2 minutes. After a little bit of discussion, which included talk of the logistical difficulties (travel between routes, passing other climbers) and what would hurt most (feet and legs, followed by hands), he seemed to dismiss the idea. A few days later, Stacey mentioned that he’d gone through the guidebook and counted pitches on the Apron routes. We knew it was on. He’d been bitten by the challenge bug. Sunday 5AM We meet in the Apron parking lot. The sun is not yet showing itself, but some morning stratus clouds lend a dull blue-grey…
