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It has become popular to describe Alex Honnold as the Michael Jordan of rock climbing. Except, Michael Jordan missed over half the shots he ever took in the NBA. If Honnold misses, the stakes are much, much higher. Never was that more apparent than in the 2018 Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo, which followed Honnold as he became the first person ever to successfully free solo (that is, climb without ropes or any protective equipment) the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park.
Since then, Honnold has kept busy with the Planet Visionaries podcast—a documentary-style show in which every episode features a new guest discussing the planet’s most imperative environmental challenges—which is now in its fifth season. But the urge to climb has always remained, and on Friday, January 23 at 8 p.m. ET, Honnold is embarking on another titanic climbing expedition live on Netflix: free soloing Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan and 11th tallest in the world.
Obviously, scaling a building without any sort of safety net is terrifying to any of us who live ground-based lives. But Honnold pushes back on the idea that he possesses some completely unique brain that makes him immune to fear. Rather than his brain being built different, he posits, it’s just been exposed to so many extreme situations that it’s warped the concept of fear altogether. Before leaving for Taiwan, Honnold got into his tinfoil-hat thoughts on protein, the hardcore hand maintenance he endures, and why he’s given up climbing trees.
Alex Honnold: I mean, climbing is very full body, but it kind of comes down to fingers and arms—being able to hold on—and then legs driving you upward. Strength-to-weight [ratio] is important. You want to stay relatively lean and be able to hang onto things.
You’re just climbing all the time, which trains strength. But yeah, I occasionally do supplemental finger workouts.
Well, actually the difference is that with football, you can’t just play football nonstop because it’s too high-impact and hurts your body. But with climbing, you can just climb nonstop. You mostly just do the sport itself to get better at it. You just climb a lot.
The most common injuries are overuse injuries, like injuring your tendons and ligaments in your hands and arms. Your fingers are so relatively fragile compared to the rest of your body. It’s easy to blow a pulley in your finger, which are basically ligaments that control the way your fingers bend. It’s easy to sort of aggravate things and then have them ache for a long time or get bicep tendonitis, things like that.
I sometimes joke because as a climber, you can tweak some little thing in your finger and, basically, your whole body is fine. You have one tiny little tweak in your finger and you’re like, “Ooh, I don’t quite want to try my project,” because you just don’t want to make it worse. Then you compare that to people playing professional football where they break their femur and they take a bunch of Vicodin and go back in the game. Climbing is just so much more fragile in a way.
Yeah. Climbing is very precise. I mean, you care about your skincare, you’re trying not to cut your fingertips and things. It’s very precise because the things that you’re grabbing when you’re climbing at a high level are just tiny, tiny edges and tiny little footholds. The precision matters; how you hold things matters.
No, no. I do that all the time too. Scanning your skin and picking at things—you basically don’t want any extra little flaps because then they get torn.
I have a sanding block. You just sand your skin.
Just to be clear, it’s not like every kid was freakishly strong. A bunch of the other professional, high-end climbers are just a little more gifted. You’re like, "Oh wow, you can immediately do a thing.” I still have some friends like that that work 40 hours a week, normal jobs, and they’re just off-the-couch stronger than me in certain ways. You’re just like, “God, why are you so good at that? Why is this so hard for me?” So because of that, I’ve had to train more over the years and focus on trying to build certain types of strength.
I think it’s interesting though because you could say climbing is always split into the physical side and the mental side. For whatever reason, the mental side has always come relatively easily to me, but the physical side I have to work at. I have a lot of friends where the physical side maybe comes more naturally, but they’re just so bad mentally. It’s not clear which is better or worse. You know what I mean? Basically, someone’s always struggling with whatever it is that they lack.
It could be fear-based, but fear-based could be physical fear, like you’re afraid of getting hurt. It could also be fear of failure, it could be fear of falling, could be fear of whatever, fear of trying your hardest! But basically, just holding yourself back for whatever reason, or even just bad execution. That’s kind of mental as well, if you just can’t remember how to do something. Climbing, you have to remember your beta, how you do the thing, left hand, right hand. If you just consistently grab things the wrong way and then fumble it and fall off, you’re like, “Oh, what a botch.” Even if you’re super strong, if you don’t execute, you’re just not going to be able to do it.
Yeah. If you’re the fastest player on the field, but you always run the wrong direction, you’re just like, “Oh.” You can’t remember the plays and you don’t know where the ball’s going. You have to be good at the sport and really physically gifted.
I don’t know. I think for me, it’s always been finger strength. I think my fingers just aren’t naturally that strong, so I’ve always had to work at it, and it’s always been my weakness. I’d say that technically I’m a very good climber now. I’ve gotten good technique, but that’s largely because my fingers aren’t that strong, so I have to have good technique if I want to be able to climb well. I’ve always wished I had stronger fingers, and most of my friends always have stronger fingers. I’m kind of like, “Why are my fingers just not strong?”
But the thing is. I have really big hands. In some ways that’s actually a downside I think, because leverage is part of it. The bigger the joints are, the harder it is to exert force through. In the same way that if you want to be a professional arm wrestler, you’re better off having a shorter lever arm.
No, I’ve never been good at anything else. I never really did any other sports. I did gymnastics casually for a minute as a kid. I rode my bike a ton because I bike-commuted everywhere, but I never did any organized sports. I started climbing when I was 10, so I was kind of all in.
As a kid, I was into Legos. I loved playing computer games. I was kind of a dorky kid. I read a lot. Then I got into climbing and was like, “I love climbing.” But I was really shy so I didn’t like organized sports and I didn’t like ball sports. In general I think I’m pretty anti-authority. I just don’t want all the rules. Who cares? The umpire told me that I was out? That guy can go eff himself. What do I care about what he thinks? I would just be like, “I'm out of here. This game sucks.”
The beauty of climbing is that it’s so much more elemental. Either you can do it or you can’t, and if you fall off, it’s because you can’t do it. Then you can just practice more until you can do it. It just seems so much more simple and clean and fair. Effort is always rewarded, basically.
Yeah, for sure. Learn how to climb up on the roof and then jump off the roof of the house, climbing things in your home, climbing trees. I was climbing on everything as a kid.
It’s funny, as a rock climber now, I actually don’t really like climbing trees because trees are really dirty compared to rock. Your hands get all gross and you get covered in tree sap. There’s like, bugs. Not that I’m particularly squeamish about stuff like that, but I’m kind of like, “Man, climbing on rock feels very sterile and really nice compared to climbing trees.” I don’t really climb trees anymore. It just feels kind of gross compared to rock climbing.
I’m kind of a flexible vegetarian. I eat fish sometimes. But yeah, I’d say I’m largely vegetarian. I basically never really buy meat, but for traveling and for work, I’m flexible.
My original decision to go vegetarian was strictly environmental, basically thinking about the environmental impact and how to minimize my personal footprint. I also read a bunch about health stuff and just thought it’d probably be better for me.
No. I mean, yeah, I drink some protein stuff. But in general, I think protein—I don’t want to say it’s a myth—but I think it’s a little overhyped by various lobbies and industries and things like that. As a climber, I’ve traveled quite widely and on expeditions all over the world you see peasants basically eating a diet of rice and vegetables. They are incredibly lean and incredibly strong. I think these people are doing just fine. Humans adapt to all kinds of diets. I don’t think you need X number of grams of protein every day to be strong. You can find peasants anywhere on earth that are living subsistence lifestyles who are very strong.
Basically, I just don’t think that you need to be big to be strong. Climbing specifically is so much about strength-to-weight that you’re kind of better off with a peasant build than with a body builder [build]. I don't know if that’s PC. I don't know if we’re allowed to talk about a peasant.
Any kind of dietary fad, I’m always like, “Well, how much of that is being forced upon you by industry?” I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the dairy lobby is just kind of like, “Oh, we can sell whey protein.” Basically, you can sell whey in every product now because everybody wants protein. That’s just a way to subsidize cows. I mean, I eat protein, but I don’t think you need to go crazy.
The modern food world is just so broken up into parts. When you think that the federal government puts so much money into agriculture, it’s all going to dairy and freaking growing corn and all these things. Then it’s like, once you have too much of that thing, you’re like, “Well, what do we do with all this shit? Milk consumption has been going down.” Well, at least whey protein’s going up." Great news! We can still sell this thing that the federal government’s paying us to grow! That’s some crazy shit. Anyway…
Yeah, you don’t at all. Even as a professional athlete, I don’t need to be jacked. You know what I mean? I want to be a good rock climber, and being a good rock climber means being able to hold on. So I want my fingers to be strong. I don’t need big muscles. I don’t need a big back. I just need to be able to hang on and weight my feet, basically, because that’s what good climbing technique is all about.
Fiber would be a good one, because no one’s going to do poorly eating too much fiber. That would sort out all kinds of things, I think. Hopefully that is the next big fad, all the fiber people just out eating grass.
I’ve certainly talked about diet with tons of climbers, tons of people. In terms of personal inspirations, my sister has been vegan for her whole adult life, and she's very fit. She’s never owned a car, so she bicycles like 100-something miles a week. She’s like an episode of Portlandia. She lives in Portland, she’s vegan, she doesn’t have a smartphone, she doesn’t have a car, she’s just living. Volunteers at the farmer’s market, all those kinds of things. She’s always been a big inspiration. Her husband is also vegan. I think that’s a good example. They’re both very ethical around it. They’re very intentional in how they make their choices and the impact that they try to have in the world. I look at them as a good example that if you make clear choices, you can reduce your impact.
There’s a lot of overlap between the climbing world and the ultra running world. I know a lot of people are ultra runners. I’ve learned a fair amount about nutrition from ultra runners over the years. Scott Jurek, he’s kind of older and retired now, but he’s written a couple books, also Rich Roll. The two of them are both vegan ultra runners. Even though I’ve never been vegan, I think there’s a lot to be learned from being intentional in your choices that way. With climbers, I talk a lot about snacks and strategy for expedition stuff, what you eat on the wall, things like that. I’m not sponsored by any kind of food stuff anymore. I buy stuff off the open market. With bars, I’m pretty equal opportunity. I eat whatever.
Yeah, that’s gone crazy. David bars, I had some of those. They’re pretty good, I think, for what they are. It makes sense. It’s like a post-gym workout sort of thing. But in general, as a climber, you’re typically eating bars more as fuel while you’re on the wall. In that case, you’re not really doing protein bars, you’re just trying to do easy carbs, things like that.
I haven’t heard of that.
It’s all food science-y stuff because it’s all artificial sweeteners and other things. It tastes like a Snickers, but in theory, it’s like sugar alcohol instead of actual sugar. You’re kind of like, “Is that really better?” I don’t know. If you’re using them as a supplement to a healthy diet—like you’re eating actual food most of the time and then occasionally having bars and things for a specific purpose—that makes sense. For me as a climber, when I’m eating normal breakfast and normal dinner, actual foods with plants involved, things like that, then if I eat some weird random snacks during the day, that’s fine.
A lot of the free soloing things that I’m doing, I’m climbing by myself for several hours. Having three hours by yourself in the middle of the day isn’t really an expedition for months. It’s just some quiet time for a moment.
But I don’t know, I’m an introvert so in general, I do well with alone time and I find it restorative in a way. I think hiking by yourself in nature is just a nice way to sort of unwind and chill. I was in Yosemite yesterday and went soloing and did a thing that took me 35 minutes to hike up, an hour and a half to climb this wall, and then an hour to hike down. All in all, it was like three hours round-trip, just strolling through the forest, climbing the wall by myself and hiking down. Before that, I’d been having breakfast with my friends. After that, I left Yosemite and went to an airport. That was a really nice three-hour part of the day, beautiful time in the forest.
Do all your work calls while you walk. I used to do that during the Free Solo promo tour when I was doing crazy, non-stop press on the phone. I would just be walking up and down stairwells in hotels or just walking in circles.
Actually, I disagree with the whole premise. Did you read the Nautilus magazine piece or what? Obviously there’s a scene in Free Solo, it’s like a 15-second scene in the film where you kind of come out being like, “There’s something wrong with his brain. It’s different." I think if you read the longform Nautilus piece, the actual takeaway is more nuanced, which is basically that if you do something long enough, you desensitize yourself for that type of stimulus. It’s not necessarily that my brain is any different, it’s that at that point, 20 years of consistent exposure to a certain thing, you desensitize yourself to that type of stimulus.
To me, it made total sense, because climbing is scary. I’ve always been scared climbing, but I think the more obvious thing is that when you get scared all the time for years on end, you get really good at not being too scared. It loses some of its power and you get better at differentiating which fears matter and which fears don’t. That fMRI thing when they’re scanning your brain, you’re inside a steel tube, and then they show you these black and white photos. In theory, it triggers parts of your brain, your amygdala lights up. I was kind of like, “Obviously I’m not going to be scared looking at black and white photos inside of a tube. I’m so used to being really scared by all these other things in life.”
Climbing is scary. All the time you’re sort of like, “Oh my God, am I going to fall and die?” It’s kind of intense. If you spend your whole life having those intense experiences, then clearly looking at black and white photos is just not going to be scary. My takeaway is not so much that there’s anything different around my brain. It’s just that, if you get scared all the time for years on end, you’re just much less likely to be afraid of normal things. It’s not always extreme, but then sometimes it’s really freaking scary.
I used to be horrified by public speaking. I mean, I hated talking to strangers and speaking in groups, but obviously I overcame that with the help of the Free Solo film tour, which is a crash course in managing that kind of fear. This is kind of the whole thing around climbing, the amygdala stuff. You’re just so scared all the time from different things. I think you just get much better at managing other fears.
I would say as a kid, I was a little afraid of snakes and spiders and things like that. As an adult, I would say that basically, I don’t want to get bitten by a venomous snake. I don’t want to get bitten by a spider. But the ones that aren’t dangerous, that’s fine. I’m not stressed about tarantulas, let’s say, because they’re not venomous. I would say that is 100% not scary because that’s just a big, gentle animal that’s peaceful and can’t hurt me.
But what about giant hornets?
You know what I mean? I would say I’m still sort of afraid of bugs. Scorpions, I don’t really love. Things that will cause me quite a bit of pain, I’d rather not mess with that.
A little bit. Not so much the mind, but I have a little morning routine. I take Athletic Greens in the morning and I add some stuff to it. I take some fish oil, also doing a couple random things potentially for skin. I add a little scoop of collagen to my Athletic Greens in the morning.
As I’m getting older, my skin feels a little bit drier and harder. Climbing is so much around the sensation of your skin. I want my skin to be a little more supple. I don’t know if it actually does anything, but I’m sort of hedging my bets. Might as well try it, because it can’t hurt. I don’t mind having a little morning routine where I drink my green juice. I basically just have a big thing of water in the morning. Obviously that’s not going to hurt me health wise, so that’s great.
I’d say if anything, my biggest weakness is desserts, occasionally eating too many pastries or cookies. I was just working on this film project thing and there’s craft services. There’s snacks, there’s baked goods all the time. You’re like, “Man, sure.” It’s hard to say no to a cookie. Chocolate chip cookies, then brownies. ‘’
Breakfast for van life I think of as either cereal and yogurt, or occasionally eggs. My go-to dinner in the van was mac and cheese and tuna or something like that, mac and cheese with vegetables in it, mac and cheese with a can of veggie chili in it. Pasta and red sauce with veggies in it. It’s all sort of one-pot cooking where you boil your water, you make your pasta, you add all your other stuff into the pot, and then you eat the whole thing in the pot. The whole thing is just this contained, simple meal that you eat quickly, it’s hot, and it’s in a pot.
In Real-Life Diet, athletes, celebrities, and other high performers talk about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.