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I never thought that I would be able to push the limits of sport climbing.

I mean, I was scared of failing,

so I would then end up not trying certain things

because I knew that I might not succeed on them.

Now I've already spent more than 40 days on the project,

and I don't even know how close I am to sending.

With climbing, there are so many different movements.

Mother Nature just creates so many more interesting things

than just left-right, left-right.

I think that's what's appealing about climbing.

The challenge to only use the natural features of the rock

to get up, which makes rock climbing

infinitely hard.

It was strict, yes, because it meant, like,

okay you fuckers, no more pulling on the pitons to get to the top.

Now you suddenly have a whole new game.

In Germany, they had another school of thought,

which turned out to be revolutionary.

It was absolutely counterculture.

The rotpunkt changed everything.

Complete history of climbing changed with this red dot.

The obvious beauty of free climbing

is you're actually giving the rock a chance to win.

It's a fair game.

Style. It's about style.

It gave climbing what climbing is nowadays.

Free climbing is just an expression of trying to set yourself free.

It's just a way.

Okay, it is a bit bigger than I thought.

Okay, and it is steep. It's not a slab all the way.

Jumbo Love, the first ascent was made by Chris Sharma in 2008.

Climbing it in one giant 80-meter pitch

and making it the first 9b.

The first 15b worldwide.

To everything, the route is flashable.

I think every route is flashable if you're strong enough.

It comes down to linking all the sections.

There's no trickery to it.

He wants to flash that route.

Fast flash.

Whatever.

Can't be that hard, or the sections can't be that hard.

Got a 50-50 chance of climbing it in one day.

I just give slack today.

Just give rope. Rope, rope, rope, rope, rope.

Anchor, bam...

That's it.

Start here ... end up there.

In between is just climbing.

The first time I met Alex was in a climbing gym

in Southern California.

We knew that Alex was going to be strong,

but we weren't really prepared for how strong Alex was.

It was very clear that, at that moment in the gym,

that that was the future.

The route starts off with easy 5.12d climbing.

A bit of a tricky section in there,

but afterwards you're sitting on a ledge and you get a no-hand rest

and that's where the actual 45-degrees steep climbing starts.

Oh, fuck!

Physically, he's able to climb way harder than he's climbing now.

And way harder than the grades are existing.

Yes, good...

But the mental part of this is also something which is not easy.

The actual crux is a big move to a right-hand pinch,

and from that position it's really hard to get a left foot drop-knee

from which to take a cut-loose and take a big swing.

From there, the endurance part of the route starts.

Twenty feet before the lip, there is an undercling pocket to a crimp,

which was for me the redpoint crux.

Got a bit shot down, definitely, on my first day.

On the second day, went a little bit better,

just marginally better, I would say.

Fuck!

Like I did it in multiple parts and I linked some sections

but it was still far off anywhere near sending.

You know, the hands are just a little worse.

I don't know, it just gets all the edges of the fingers.

That's why I taped up this one before.

'Cause there was one pocket that was really cutting into it

and I didn't want to open it up.

I think he's a bit nervous,

and not really confident.

On one hand he's a machine,

on the other hand, also just human.

I know I am able to climb it,

and in my head, if I want to be the best rock climber in the world,

I should have already climbed it in my eyes.

If I were to leave without climbing it, it would just mean

I've not got what it takes to be the best.

There's that personality trait where he's hard on himself.

Fuck!

You don't just go climbing for fun every day.

You're working towards something that is sort of this vision

beyond what most people probably are able to conceive.

And he was training for routes he wanted to do years later.

When there is chalk on a hold, and someone hold it before,

and when you're not able to hold it,

to accept this, "I'm not the best?

Someone climbed before and I'm not able."

God, no!

Fuck!

Fuck!

You're strong, dude.

Yeah, but not strong enough.

I wouldn't blame it on anything else, to be honest.

I mean, when it comes down,

then it actually was because I was not strong enough.

Well, I'm gonna fly back home,

and I haven't climbed the route I wanted to climb.

The hardest part is that you feel like you've failed.

I feel like I'm probably traveling about eight months a year.

Well over 200 days, I'm gone from home.

Every time I come home from travels,

that moment when you turn into your home street

is always a special moment.

Just have my routine back that I was used to

from some years ago.

And I think that's important.

This is performance-enhancing drugs.

Double power. Orange and purple sweet potato.

They're not sweet potatoes.

Oh, rewind, rewind.

Orange and purple carrots.

Special about my hometown is that it's got the Frankenjura next to it,

which is one of the biggest climbing areas in the world, actually.

There's about 12,000 routes in the Frankenjura.

Since most crags are not very high, the routes are normally not very long,

so that means to make it hard, obviously, the moves have to be hard.

The rock is limestone.

Gnarly moves, really hard climbing.

Small holds and weird holds

that you don't really know how to grab, first of all,

and where it makes a massive difference

where you place your index finger, where you place your thumb.

made the Frankenjura famous.

Climbing is sharing, because you always are with a partner.

You have to trust your friend, your partner,

and if you trust somebody and if these are friends,

we share everything.

Maybe not same wife anymore, but ...

I met Kurt first time in '73.

It was outside climbing, Frankenjura.

"Ah, you are Kurt Albert,

and I'm Norbert Sandner," and so we climb together.

And a couple of weeks later, he moved to my house.

And from since on, we became the best friends.

He was avisionaire, and he was really smart.

He studied physics and math.

He was always up for irony and good or bad jokes.

And he was fearless.

He did a lot of powerful free solos.

He was by far the best climber I ever had seen.

And then when he started with his redpoints,

everybody was laughing about him and said, "Hey, Kurt, the redpoint."

At first it was with a brush.

With a brush and with a color.

And then later on and be sprayed them.

Redpoint, done.

At the base of the route, to let people know it was no longer an aid route,

if it had been first free-climbed,

you'd have the red circle painted at the base of it.

And that would get the rotkreis, the red circle.

Once you've started from the ground and placed all your gear on the way up,

then the red circle would get filled in,

that would get the rotpunkt , that was the redpoint.

If you fall, you have to go down, you have to pull the rope down

and then you have to restart from the ground.

That was, and still is, the definition of the redpoint climbing.

The idea of the redpoint came, well, from the coffee pot.

they had this one coffee pot, and in order to get the spout to pour,

you'd line up this red dot with the spout,

and it would open up and pour coffee,

and that's where the actual red dot thing came from.

"What do you want to do?

Do you want to paint redpoints on all the climbs we climbed free?"

And he said, "Yes, why not?

Because we have to show the community that we climbed it free,"

and it was also a little provocation for the old classic climbers.

Of course, the idea of rotpunkt, it has to do something

also with the protest against the old structures of alpinism.

We wear these kind of knickerbockers

and we go out on a Sunday afternoon.

Maybe we climb a little bit and we sit in the restaurant

and have singing songs at these times together.

Everybody will think we are drunk already.

There are still old traditionalists in Europe

thinking of those cliffs as being preparation for the big mountains.

So it really was just practice climbing and meant, if that was free climbing,

it was free climbing pulling on gear, pulling on gears, stepping in stirrups.

It just didn't matter.

There was no free climbing in Germany, it was all aid climbing.

It was strict, yes, because it meant like, "Okay, you fuckers,

no more pulling on the pitons to get to the top.

You know, it doesn't count anymore."

No, I'm not pulling on anything to get up this, just the rock's features.

So the evolution of climbing really just went from

just getting to the top of something

to, how do you get to the top of something?

It was like a revolution here.

It was absolutely counterculture

at this time because it was 100% different.

Everything was like in '68, very famous in Germany,

getting more free.

Being against structures, being against pressure.

Being against social pressure.

I think free climbing's just an expression of trying to set yourself free.

I mean, when I was taking photos of these guys,

I was not always sure that they are pictures

that will make climbing history, or whatever.

Except, maybe, Action Directe.

I knew at this time, oh, that's something really, really special.

Kurt and myself, we met Wolfgangat a climbing festival

and we saw he's a really young, talented climber.

And three years later, he rented a room in the house.

And it started to become really well known as a climber house

where every climber can stay.

And that was when the name "Hotel Frankenjura" started.

It was always a very open house and always full of climbers,

and it was very communal.

So there was Kurt, Wolfgang, Norbert, and Ingrid, Kurt's girlfriend.

They were the four people living there first, when I first went to the house.

Yeah, Wolfgang was the sort of leading force in German climbing.

You know, he was well known in Europe by the early '80s.

Truly a great climber.

I mean, his resume is not one to be trifled with.

In 1985, one of the first big routes that Wolfgang did

was Punks in the Gym.

That was the world's first 14a.

The following year he would do Wallstreet,

which is the world's first 14b.

And then, of course, the cap was doing Action Directe.

All the things in your life influences your climbing.

Uh, one of the vertebrae is out of place.

When you only see the climbing, you see not the whole person.

With Alex, it's not that we have to show him how to do some pull-ups;

he knows, after all these years, how to train.

One of the biggest points is that we talk a lot.

He can call us day and night.

One of us, Patrick or me, we are always there for him,

to handle with the situation, to be a professional climber.

And being a professional climber is not easy.

When you see in the magazines or in Internet,

you just see them succeeding,

saying, "9a, 9a+, 9b, 9b+."

But the approach to this

and the times in between...

all their faults and all the pain and all the suffering.

This is a daily struggle.

You get up.

"How do I feel today?

Can I train hard?

Maybe today I'm not the strongest.

What's going on?

Yeah, I have to climb hard because it's my job.

My job is to climb hard."

Yesterday we filmed Wallstreet.

I think he climbed it a few times, months before.

Okay, it was very bad conditions.

28 degree and humid.

And when you're not climbing well, it means for Alex everything.

"Last year, I could do the moves and today not.

So now I'm not that strong.

So there is something wrong. I'm on a wrong way."

He never will say this.

But it's inside.

Not every day is the same.

One day is good, one day is bad.

No, every day have to be good.

And this is not possible. What can I do to accept this?

And this is not fucking easy.

I can't do it.

I'm not at the point where I can say I can deal with failure

or I'm a patient person.

Not at all.

I hate failure.

Well, I always say there is no excuses.

And then somebody replies,

"Oh, no, I mean, you could have probably climbed it in better conditions."

I say, "True, but I could have as well climbed it if I would have been stronger.

You have to change negative thoughts into positive thoughts

and think, "Okay, well, I've got a chance to improve."

I always try to help him to deal with all these ups and downs

to come back on track.

My philosophy: look good, feel good, climb good.

This is probably a good contender for the strongest shirt right now.

I climbed Fight Club in that one, I climbed Lucid Dreaming in that one.

So, I like the color yellow and I like carrots.

And these ones...

Those two were actually the ones with...

which I started having yellow shirts, because I saw these ones online,

and I really liked them, so I ordered three of those.

Each one of them, in each one of them,

I've probably climbed a thousand 8a's and harder.

I mean, I've got them since 2013.

Then in this one I climbed, um, the 9a onsight, Estado Critico.

Why do I like to combine all my patterns?

Why? Because everybody says you can't combine different patterns,

so I said, "Well, I can combine different patterns,"

and there we go.

So normally I can combine every shorts with every shirt.

I just really don't give a shit,to be honest, whether it matches or not.

Oh, my God!

I look good!

More is always more.

More flowers, more colors.

Less legs.

I always invited everybody over to the Frankenjura

to come and climb with me.

Like we have been before, he's really open.

He invites a lot, a lot of guests from everywhere to share his climbs.

Are you okay?

Totally normal.

Yeah, it was my dad who introduced me to the sport.

and Norbert Sandner back in the day.

Kurt infected the whole family with climbing

and took us all out.

One day, this little guy came in...

directly with his climbing shoes on.

Huge ones.

We said, "Come on, Alex, try this one."

"Yeah, Okay, Dicki", he tried.

He was not trying, he climbed it.

This was the beginning.

Yeah. Step by step, he, he climbed harder and harder and harder,

and yeah, pretty fast, we saw

that it's not normal what he is able to do.

Compared to the other kids, they were all good.

And he was Megos.

Usually he climbed 10 or 12 days, and then a half day off.

This is the difference also between other climbers.

After a hard climbing day, or two hard climbing days,

they need a rest.

Alex, no. No rest.

Alex!

From the day he began with national competitions,

he won nearly everything.

When he was 14, up till he was 18, he was really unstoppable.

In 2009 and 2010,

Alex won nine out of ten international youth competitions.

Alex expected from himself always 100%.

And, when it comes to the days when it didn't work out,

it was, "It's not okay."

There was one competition where one guy was a bit better than him.

It was the first time ever that someone could hold something

where he couldn't hold something.

He was mentally wrecked.

Every day we talked on the phone, and, "Dicki, what should I do?

Dicki, what happened? Dicki..."

He always filled up his energy with climbing outdoors.

And, uh, now you see in his eyes

that he also needed, again, to go climbing outdoors.

My psych level was ten out of ten, I would say.

I mean, as a teenager, I was 13, 14, 15,

all I wanted to do is go out on rock every day.

Straight away after school, I would ride my bike to the train station,

take a train, and then we would go out climbing

and I would be back by00 p.m.

I think when I did the 9a onsight, everything changed when that happened.

I was in Spain with a couple of mates.

Second day, I didn't know what to do, and then I had a look in the guidebook,

and I saw Estado Critico, that 9a.

I was really pumped, and really at my limit.

Got to the last bolt and looked up and saw the anchor,

still not realizing what I've done.

And as soon as I got back from the campground,

like it was all over the Internet.

And then suddenly I found myself answering emails at 3 a.m.

I think that was probably then the moment where I thought, okay,

I could become a professional climber.

I remember hearing about him in the magazines,

and then he went from being pretty good climber

to being possibly the world's best climber,

in the span of like a year.

He was just breaking records left, right and center in terms of his,

how fast, how quickly he was repeating these cutting-edge routes.

When you watch somebody who is stronger

than anyone you've ever seen before, in real life,

you almost can't believe that that's possible.

If you're going to accomplish something hard,

it's a road littered with failures.

It's really easy to get involved with a project

and have failure define the project.

That's what makes the great climbers.

Failure is part of the process, and they don't get downtrodden by it,

it just spurs them on to, "How do I do better?"

We are in the original fitness center called

The thing behind me is the legendary campus board,

and we built it '88 in the Campus Fitness Center

to have a special tool for climbing, training and workout.

You hang, you pull, you traverse, go up and down,

and have different edges here.

We have the round slopers, we have small ones, we have big ones.

I think the holds, after so many years,

they are getting smaller and smaller.

If he wouldn't train here on the campus board,

it would have taken him much, much longer to do the first ascent, or never.

The Frankenjura's gonna be a cruel place for you

if you're not prepared for it.

A campus board in a place like the Frankenjura,

where you have so many small holds and small pockets,

it would train you how to basically latch onto these holds.

because he did his special one-finger pull-up workout

for the Action Directe.

Wolfgang brought this training for climbing

on a kind of science-based level.

Now I feel good and now I start climbing the route.

And Alex is a little bit like this.

It was a milestone for training.

He was not touching the rock,

he was spending time training,

and then start to get in the route when he felt strong enough.

First of all, when he did it, nobody knew what it was.

I can't remember what he even said about the grade.

Whether he was the one who first proposed 9a, I can't even recall.

And the last week I remember, I never saw him before, almost crazy.

It was like feverish in his eyes.

That really was a completely new grade, Action Directe.

And it lasted for... it's still a legend.

Was the first 9a.

So, since I've started climbing and since I've climbed my first 8a,

I've started writing down every route, 8a and harder,

that I've ever done in my life.

Each of these books has got approximately 700.

And if I've got three full ones and one half a one,

that makes 700...

1,400...

2,100 and...

2,500 routes.

Yeah, since I could climb, I never wished to climb a route more than this one.

If you grow up in the Frankenjura as a kid,

everybody tells you about Action Directe.

I mean, I knew about Action Directe,

you know, the moment when I started climbing.

I said, I waited a long time,

and I was standing underneath it many, many times.

Then I climbed it and it was all within two hours.

Even if it was not my most meaningful performance,

for me it was the best and the most moving feeling

to ever top out a route.

is fundamental for our climbing world

and that's why Action Directe always was this mythical route,

and will always remain what it is.

Some of the draws are 30 years old, so...

could be that they're hanging here since then.

Oh, that's from the top of Ghettoblaster.

Look at that. Cliffhanger.

And Action Directe.

How old was he when he climbed Action Directe?

Well, he died 31st of August, '92,

and he climbed it on the 24th of September, '91.

Just before his 31st birthday.

My time in the Frankenjura ended with Wolfgang's death.

I had contacted Wolfgang, said, "Hey, we're gonna arrive at this time.

We'll meet you up at the house and go climb."

So we drove up to his house, the house was locked, and I go,

"That's kind of weird," but I knew where the key was, so we let ourselves in,

and the phone was ringing and the phone was ringing

and the phone was ringing, and finally I picked it up and it was Norbert,

and I was like, "Hey, how's it going?"

He goes, "Russ, did you hear?" I said, "No, what?"

He goes, "Wolfgang had a car accident this morning."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He goes, "Well, he was driving back from Munich and he had an accident."

And I said, "How bad?" He goes, "Very bad.

He was, uh... he was badly hurt."

Wolfgang... well, he became the legend he is.

We're here for two weeks,

trying this route that Chris Sharma bolted nine years ago,

called Perfecto Mundo,

located in, I think, one of the coolest sectors in Margalef.

One of the main walls, that's this wall that Perfecto Mundo is on,

is a 45-degree-steep wall,

which is about 20 meters long,

and the easiest route on that wall is 14c, so 8c+.

It's kind of all flat, steep rock on small holes, and

since I climbed Lucid Dreaming three years ago,

I've never really tried anything really hard.

The crux move, the move from the mono to the pinch.

As an individual move, coming from the Frankenjura

and being used to monos,

I could pretty much do that move straight away.

It kind of does not feel as hard when you just do it as an individual move.

But then just climbing in a few moves before made you realize

that move actually is hard and that will be

very most likely the crux of the route, getting past that move.

Grande catastrophe.

Knew that Stefano wanted to come down as well to Margalef to try the routes,

since he's been trying it a couple of weeks ago.

So I was curious to see how he was doing on the route.

I think like he'd have to go and train on that side...

And then Chris heard, as well, that we're both trying Perfecto Mundo,

so he decided to drive out from Barcelona a couple of days.

The route starts with a few jugs up to the second or third bolt,

and from there the hard part of the climbing starts.

Fuck!

So after you do the move, after the pinch move,

you still have to climb approximately 14b to the top.

The actual pullover above the lip is really hard too.

There is a super-shallow right-hand sloper.

The edge of the roof is right where your chest is,

so you feel like you're almost hitting.

So it's definitely not over. You've got a few more hard moves.

Nice. Come on.

Fuck.

Then you start reworking each move.

You're making sure that you've got the perfect beta,

micro-beta for each move, where all the fingers have to go,

what you have to do to make it just a tiny bit easier.

Okay, climbing, Stefano.

I was jumping to the pinch, and as soon as I would catch the pinch

and kick my foot back on, I was readjusting the pinch.

And what I was always doing is I was splitting my fingers like that.

I would have two fingers on top and two fingers at bottom,

on that pinch,

but to actually pull and do the next move,

you kind of only wanted one finger on top and three fingers on the bottom.

You kick your left foot back onto the left-hand crimp that you had before.

You readjust the pinch.

And from there you pull through to the next shallow pinch.

But I figured out a more detailed beta for the top.

-Yeah? -Which is good.

Which is very good.

Which means I'm not gonna fall anymore.

I think.

That's good.

Well... unless this happens.

No bad conditions.

There's no bad conditions.

There's only weakness.

And we take the cheese.

-The cheese. -Okay. And we still take the meat?

-Yeah. -Yes.

-I have more than this one, okay? -Okay. Later.

Yeah.

-Just for us, okay? -Thank you so much.

Okay.

-For good climbing tomorrow. -Yes, thank you.

Butt out. No core tension.

And then...

Got it!

He's got it!

Fuck.

Come on.

Fuck.

Fuck.

-Come on! -Come on, man.

Do you see how I've got my fingers fucked up on the hole?

And I can't fuckin' move. I can't move. Take!

I had it well with four fingers,but I was not able to readjust the pinch,

and I felt like I could stay there forever,

but I was not able to move anymore.

Feel free to use it.

I've never really tried anything that took me longer than ten days.

Maybe it's better like this, just wait.

This now is my longest project

and I think that's just because in the past,

I was never ready to actually project.

The pressure of trying one route, I would always stress out too much.

I think that was the reason why I was never actually trying something hard.

I slowly realized that it will take time if I want to climb my limit.

Perfecto Mundo now is the first real project, I would say, I have.

-Come on, Alex. -Come on!

Fuck!

I think everybody gets impatient

when they're trying hard routes for themselves, or projects.

I mean, I was actually planning to stay in Spain for two weeks.

After those two weeks, I stayed two more weeks.

From the moment when I knew that every next try could be the try,

I was thinking 24/7 about the route.

It felt like I was on the edge.

I felt like I was not fun to hang out with anymore,

just because I am just so much on the edge

that I almost can't cope with people anymore.

I kind of wanna be for myself,

and I think that's a hard time to be around.

Dealing with failure or not succeeding all the time

for a long period of time kind of gets you.

The biggest challenge probably...

to not lose your mind on the way.

I recently learned to accept failure more than I did in the past,

'cause I realized that climbing hard

is probably, more than 99% of the time, failing...

just to succeed one time.

How many sequences of me taping did you film already?

Over the years? Millions.

-Of taping I did? -Yeah.

-Come on! -Come on!

Come on, Alex!

Yes.

Yes!

Yes!

I would say that is my greatest first ascent.

For sure the hardest that I've climbed,

and for sure the greatest first ascent I've done.

Nice.

I mean, I knew, obviously, at the beginning

that I was capable of climbing it,

but knowing that you're capable of climbing it

and actually climbing it are two totally different things.

The art of climbing lies in the rotpunkt.

Alex embodies the philosophy that Wolfgang began.

He's like an artist being creative.

Doing your thing, not what the others are doing.

Being a creator, it's the most beautiful thing

you can do in life, I think.

I wanna know what he's working towards.

Is he gonna be the first one to climb 16a?

I don't think that Perfecto Mundo is at my limit.

I'm trying to find the right way for me to get to the limit of human potential.

The idea of a human overcoming an obstacle,

something that is seemingly impossible, is inspiring.

It inspires us to be better at whatever it is we do.

We'd like to see something impossible and make it possible.

Climbing's no different than anything else.

I've already spent more than 40 days on the project,

and I don't even know how close I am to sending.

I'll never be satisfied. Which is all right.