Alex, there are so many strong climbers out there. Does it ever sort of blow your mind how much

the limits of the sport, like the strength of athletes, has progressed in the last few years?

Yeah, I mean, it is, it is very impressive. In a way, it hasn't surprised me that much because

I've been in the middle of it the whole time and you're just surrounded by the constant news and whatever else. But then every once in a while I step back

and I think that when I was a kid climbing V12 was the hardest thing in the world. And now I'm like,

man, climbing V12 is stupid nowadays. It's just not even like everybody climbs V12. Like who doesn't

climb B12? You know, it's crazy.

Me, but yeah, me too sadly. Yeah, there is this sort of been an explosion in strength that's

happened, you know, through training, through the raw numbers of climbers participating in the

sport. The people we'd say are mentally strong climbers.

Do you think that that has increased at the same level as people we would just say are

mutantly strong?

Well, it depends what we mean by mentally strong, really, because if you mean managing to

deal with fear and climb dangerous routes, then I think that

that has certainly lagged behind the physical progress that we've seen in terms of grades.

But I do think that there's a mental side to climbing hard roots.

And in that respect, I think that we've probably seen tremendous improvement mentally as well, just because

you can't climb the hardest routes in the world without having a pretty solid mental game

in some way. So I don't know, I think that there definitely has been a lot of improvement on that

front. It's just less obvious. We all know that climbing is a physical endeavor, but we often forget

the mental side.

It impacts almost every side of the sport,

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