> Free-climbing it is an incredible endeavor [..] Honnold didn’t just free-climb El Capitan [..] Or, that’s true for the free climb
Minor terminology pedantry: free climbing merely means making progress using only one's hands and feet (or other body parts as appropriate) on the rock. It is in contrast to other styles including aid climbing, where it's totally fine to do something like place an expanding cam in a crack and step into a sling attached to it, thus using the equipment to make progress. You can still place cams and other stuff when free climbing but they're just there to save you if you fall. It's not free climbing if you're using gear to get up the wall.
Free solo climbing is free climbing without any protective equipment. If you fall, you keep falling until something else arrests you (the ground, a ledge, etc).
Honnold practiced freeing all the moves with protection until he was confident he could solo the route.
It's common to refer to free soloing as "free climbing" but it's not the same thing. Though people who aren't climbers likely don't care about the difference anyway, and that's fine. I'm just pointing it out in case anyone here is interested.
If we're going to get into it, coding with git makes you more of a trad climber and less like a free soloist. Sometimes you run it out when the going is easy, sometimes you put in some extra protection when it looks sketchy. It's all about knowing your limits and taking calculated risks.
No one ever forces you to pull out all your gear and free solo the route, just like no one is going to delete your git repo and ask you to rewrite your code from scratch. These are just things a tiny minority of people do, sometimes with disastrous results.
That said I like the analogy. But maybe the take home is that we don't all need to be Alex Honnold, where one mistake means certain death, and can instead settle to be the guy who takes the occasional 15 foot fall.
Minor terminology pedantry: free climbing merely means making progress using only one's hands and feet (or other body parts as appropriate) on the rock. It is in contrast to other styles including aid climbing, where it's totally fine to do something like place an expanding cam in a crack and step into a sling attached to it, thus using the equipment to make progress. You can still place cams and other stuff when free climbing but they're just there to save you if you fall. It's not free climbing if you're using gear to get up the wall.
Free solo climbing is free climbing without any protective equipment. If you fall, you keep falling until something else arrests you (the ground, a ledge, etc).
Honnold practiced freeing all the moves with protection until he was confident he could solo the route.
It's common to refer to free soloing as "free climbing" but it's not the same thing. Though people who aren't climbers likely don't care about the difference anyway, and that's fine. I'm just pointing it out in case anyone here is interested.