The Real-Life Diet of Alex Honnold, Who Still Gets Scared While Climbing

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.

GQ: On a very basic level, what do you feel are the most important parts of your body when it comes to climbing?

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.

Are you doing exercises for your fingers, like grip strength stuff?

You’re just climbing all the time, which trains strength. But yeah, I occasionally do supplemental finger workouts.

Okay, I didn’t know if there were specific climbing workouts, the way that a football player would do football drills.

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.

What are the most common injuries for climbers?

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.

Does climbing teach you about the tiniest muscles in your hand and fingers that you didn’t even know existed?

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.

You’re making me think about my fingers now. I have the bad habit of picking at all the dead skin. That’s probably not good for climbing.

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.

Oh, I see. Do you get manicures?

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.

When you say struggling mentally, is that usually a fear-based thing?

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.

That’s a theme in other sports too, of course. You can be physically gifted, but it all just comes down to execution.

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.