Name: Alex Honnold Replies to Fans on the Internet | Actually Me | GQ
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T12:16:52.000Z
Duration: 6 min 13 s
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Hey everyone, I'm Alex Honnold and today I'm going undercover on the Internet.

Twitter watching Alex Honnold, free solo climber on first ascent.

Absolutely entrancing, capitalized and enthralling.

People frequently ask how do you get down?

Generally I walk down, sometimes I down climb, sometimes I rappel.

I mean I have soloed things where I carry the rope and then rappel back down.

But for the most part, most things that you free solo big cliffs and you can hike off the backside.

So you just climb up and then scramble on down the back.

It's actually me, Kimberly with a couple little hearts wonders since hashtag Alex Honnold is an amazing solo climber and Aradleto has been climbing with him.

Is Jay solo climbing or sticking with the ropes?

Actually Jared's been coming up to you so many last couple weeks and he has been climbing with ropes.

I don't want to say he's a conservative climber, but

I mean, you know, he's careful with his body, which makes sense because he's not trying to be an extreme climber.

You know, he's like an A list Hollywood celebrity.

He's not trying to kill himself rock climbing.

I've actually probably spent more time soloing with Jared than climbing with a rope.

I don't want to like give away his secrets, you know.

Wikipedia though, honestly, the van is kind of nice.

I like having everything within arm's reach.

Sometimes you get put up in a really classy 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 bott.

Who wants to walk all the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night when you could just lean over, grab your bottle and go.

I feel like I could have said it a little more eloquently.

It is kind of a pet peeve when you get put in really nice hotel rooms and it's really far between.

You know, when you're used to living in a van, you want everything within a six foot radius.

It doesn't make any sense to go bumbling in the dark trying to find the bathroom.

Quora, I don't know what Quora is, but it seems important.

I mean, in a general sense it's really cool.

But it totally depends how you're doing it because sometimes it takes five days, sometimes it takes two hours.

So sometimes it's an incredible amount of work.

Sometimes it's a joyous morning and you're down by brunch.

How would Alex Honnold perform on American Ninja Warrior?

But the longer answer is that American Ninja Warrior is all dynamic, plyometric Y type bouncy, explosive strength.

That's like the opposite of what I normally do.

And so I'm really bad at that kind of stuff.

A lot of my friends are involved with that, but it's not my jam.

Which feat is technically more impressive?

Difficult, Alex Arnold's free solo or Tommy Caldwell's scale of the Dawn Wall?

Tommy's climb of the Dawn Wall is much more difficult.

He spent 19 days on a wall to successfully climb this very, very difficult route and it's arguably the hardest big wall in the world.

That said, the free solo is sort of this unquantifiable, you know.

Yeah, it's not that technically difficult, but

nobody's done it for a reason because it's really kind of scary and it's dangerous.

In some ways they represent the two opposite ends of the spectrum.

But from the phrasing of this question, yeah, Tommy's climbing the Dawn Wall is much harder.

I mean they're not like an NBA players, but I think they're, they're pretty.

How does Alex Honnold control his anxiety when climbing?

It's weird talking about myself in the third person, but how do you control anxiety?

I think the main reason that I stay comfortable while climbing is through preparation, through training, through practice, I mean whatever you want to call it.

But basically I spend enough time climbing that I feel very comfortable doing it.

The key for me has been to take small steps outside of my comfort zone so that eventually I feel comfortable in situations that I wouldn't have before.

So it's not so much a matter of getting into a situation where I feel really scared and then trying to control the fear.

And it's a matter of slowly broadening to the point that I just don't feel that scared doing things that used to be scary.

Could a good argument be made for Alex Honnold to be the greatest sports person in history?

I would strongly disagree with that, but that's not really my argument to make.

I'm pretty much bad at every other sport and I wound up being a climber because I'm bad at everything else.

So I would argue that there are many other athletes who are much more well rounded and much better sports people.

Are there any other climbers that have the technical skill and physical strength to accomplish Alex Holland's free solo climb of El Capitan but for whatever reason haven't tried?

This is an interesting question because there are a bunch of other climbers that have the physical strength and technical skill to freestyle El Cap.

I mean there are probably fewer than 10 people in the world who have climbed El Cap with ropes but haven't fallen off, like haven't used the rope for assistance.

So technically any of those people could have climbed it without a rope if they wanted to.

And then of them, none of them are soloists.

None of them are interested in free soloing.

So there's no real likelihood that any of them are going to free solo cap.

I think that at this moment there's nobody seriously considering a potential free solo call cap.

But you know, certainly in the next 20 years like somebody will, no question.

That's a question you have to sort out for yourself.

I think if you have to ask how to start free soling, you need to just go climb, you know, just climb the gym, go climb.