Months before the world tuned into Netflix’s Skyscraper Live, Alex Honnold was already deep into one of the most grueling training regimens of his life.
The famed free solo climber, 40, prepared to take on Taipei 101 — a 1667-foot titan in Taiwan with 101 floors — by visualising how it would feel to “experience those emotions ahead of time.”
“It’s this mental preparation that informs my physical training,” he said in a video posted by Netflix Sports on Thursday, January 29, captured before he achieved arguably one of the greatest physical feats of our generation on Sunday, January 25.
“A lot of my training for Taipei 101 is different than rock climbing. It’s more around simulating the feeling in my body, which is sort of deep fatigue,” noting he was gearing up to do a “vertical” climb quite quickly.
“On Taipei 101, you’re basically grabbing the same holds, almost the whole way up the building,” Honnold said. “These big metal box pinches. You’re kind of like, ‘Yeah, moving isn’t hard,’ but after 300 reps the movement becomes pretty hard. So I do hundreds of reps a day, building up my strength. Pull-ups, push-ups, core work, stretching, endurance training.”
Fans couldn’t help but notice that Honnold did a different type of pull-up, using his brute strength by holding the side of the squat rack and using the tips of his fingers.
Honnold is no flash in the pan, as he already proved to be a force by free soloing El Capitan — a 3,000-foot wall in Yosemite — without safety gear.
“Preparation is one thing, and you can practice something and it feels a certain way, but when you do something you’ve never done before, you never totally know that you’re ready. And that fear is always there,” he pointed out in the Netflix clip.
Honnold also told GQ that it’s a “full body” effort and “strength-to-weight” ratio is essential. “You want to stay relatively lean and be able to hang onto things,” he explained.
Honnold uses a sanding block to sand his skin, noting that finger strength has “always been my weakness” so he’s continually worked at improving his technique. As for what he eats, the athlete said he doesn’t always stick to a protein-rich diet, and is more of a “flexible vegetarian,” consuming fish sometimes.
Honnold yet again redefined human limits with his rope-free ascent in Taipei. Elle Duncan, who hosted the Netflix special, said Netflix did have a plan in place in case tragedy struck, even filming the special on a 10-second delay so viewers wouldn’t witness it.
“There’s something to be said when five minutes before you go on air, someone slides you a card of what you’re gonna say if a person falls off the building and dies,” she said on the “Awful Announcing” podcast. “I had a card on my lap that basically was like, ‘We’ve experienced a fall and we’re going to get off air now and we will update you as soon as we can on Alex’s condition,’” Duncan, 42, revealed. “They were going to cut away.”
She continued, “Ultimately the goal of what can you take away from watching Alex Honnold climb, which is that as he said, ‘Life is finite,’ and if you have an opportunity in your life to do something that scares you and challenges you and pushes you, then you should do it.”
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