 I basically was led towards free soloing El Cap through this 20 year process of being a rock climber, pushing myself, getting into free soloing, and sort of free soloing all the other big walls in Yosemite until I was left with El Cap 10. Throughout the weeks and months of preparation leading up to the free solo, I had to make more of an effort to rid myself of distraction, and so part of that was erasing all the social media apps off my phone, part of it I just stopped responding to email for so long that I stopped getting emails, which was actually a pretty amazing process. I knew that I would only do the climb without a rope once, and visualization allowed me to practice something over and over that I couldn't actually physically practice because I was only going to do it the one time. Part of it meant remembering the moves, like thinking through the literal left hand goes here, right hand goes there, but more importantly, visualization helped me prepare for the emotional component of that, what it will feel like to grab the hold, what it will feel like under my fingers, what the air will feel like around me when I don't have a rope, and what it will feel like to look down at my foothold to place it on a foot just the right way, and when I look down and see that there's no rope and no partner and it's a 2,000 foot drop to the ground. On the actual free solo it's easy to not get distracted just because the actual task of hand is so engaging that I was forced to focus 100%, and I think honestly that's part of the real pleasure of free soloing is the focus that's required of me and how good that feels to be fully present in what I'm doing. Having a camera on the wall documenting this climb actually felt relatively normal for me as a professional climber, I mean that's something that I'm used to working with cameras on a wall. But having a camera watch me and my girlfriend is a little more, you know, it's a little more challenging. Before my free solo at LCAP I definitely felt my nerves a little bit, I mean it's a really big wall and you look up at it and you don't have a rope and you're like, oh that's pretty big, you know it's certainly intimidating, but at the same time I was also very excited. I had trained for years for this day and it was finally the big day, it was the moment I've been waiting for anyway. It's hard to know how much that's nervous is, how much is excitement, how much is just being amped up for this big physical challenge, but I was certainly feeling something. No matter what you're afraid of the best way to deal with your fear is to sort of systematically work through it, just systematically broaden your comfort zone until whatever it is that you're afraid of will eventually fall within your sphere of comfort. And I think that the key to broadening your comfort zone is to never go too far outside your comfort zone because basically if you do something too scary it's sort of traumatic and actually sort of sets you back a ways, but if you keep gradually increasing your level of comfort through, you know, systematically taking on bigger challenges and bigger risks or whatever it is that you're afraid of, I think that as long as you gradually push yourself over time you can eventually get used to almost anything. LCAP represented the end of this very long path for me. It's something that I worked on for many years, dreamed about for many years and there just really isn't anything quite like that. But hopefully, you know, with a few months to myself just climbing I'll start to get inspired by something again. We'll see.