Alex Honnold he is not only an accomplished climber. He is one of the most daring free solo climbers out there, climbing from gigantic rock formations to skyscrapers, without any belay.
Free solo climbing is a type of climbing that forgoes any safety equipment beyond climbing shoes and climbing plaster. That means no ropes, no harness, no nothing.
Honnold is set to electrify spectators on Friday, January 23, when he attempts to scale Taipei 101, a 101-story Taiwanese skyscraper that is the 11th tallest building in the world. netflix will broadcast the event in a broadcast that it dubbed Skyscrapers live.
Honnold has been training for the stunt for months, and even downplayed the risk in a Thursday, Jan. 22, interview with the AP.
“I don’t think it’s that extreme,” Honnold said. “We’ll see. I think it’s the perfect sweet spot where it’s hard enough to be attractive to me and obviously an interesting climb.”
Keep scrolling to learn all about Alex Honnold.
Alex Honnold started climbing when he was 5 years old
Born in 1985, Alex Honnold has been climbing for most of his life. He started in a climbing gym at the age of 5, often with the help of his father. he said The New York Times in 2015 that he and his father spent “like a million hours” at gyms across California.
As a teenager, he was competing in national and international youth climbing championships.
Alex Honnold was the subject of the 2018 Netflix documentary “Free Solo”
Jimmy Chin, Alex Honnold and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesThe 2018 documentary Free solo tracked Alex Honnold’s attempt to become the first person to solo climb El Capitan, a vertical rock formation in California’s Yosemite National Park. The film followed his training and the actual attempt, which arrived in June 2017.
Free solo received critical acclaim, winning seven Primetime Emmy Awards in 2019.
Alex Honnold married fellow climber Sanni McCandless
Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless they met in November 2015 when McCandless and some friends went to see Honnold speak during his book tour. They were dating soon after, and she was a featured character Free solo documentary The two announced their engagement in 2019 and he got married in September 2020.
The couple share 2 daughters
Alex Honnold, Sanni McCandless and daughters June and Alice
Courtesy of Alex Honnold/InstagramAlex Honnold and Sanni McCandless welcomed the daughters June in 2022 and Alice in 2024.
he said the cut in a story published on Skyscrapers live that he is no longer worried about the risks of his job now that he has children.
“I mean, implicit in the question is that I have more to live for, and yes, I have more to live for, and I’m still doing my best not to die,” he said.
Honnold continued, “Nobody’s encouraging me to do harder things. Everyone’s like, ‘Why don’t you stay home and play with the kids?'” So it means if I’m going to do something, I have to be really excited about it.”
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Alex Honnold spent a decade living in a van
A true outdoorsman, Alex Honnold spent a decade living in a van and, he says, goes “basically wherever the weather is good.”
“It’s not like I love living in a car, but I love living in all these places,” he explained GQ in a video posted in 2020. “I love being able to follow good conditions everywhere. And being relatively comfortable while doing it. And that makes living in a car practically necessary… If I could, say, miraculously teleport a house from one place to another, I’d rather live in a nice, comfortable house.”
The van, however, has one thing going for it: literally everything is within arm’s reach.
“Sometimes they put you in a really fancy hotel room, and it’s really big, and you have to walk quite a ways to the bathroom, and you’re like, ‘Man, I wish I had my (pee) bottle,'” he said. “Who wants to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night when you can just bend over and grab your bottle and walk away?”