On Friday night, famous rock climber Alex Honnold is planning to scale a 101-story skyscraper in Taipei with no ropes, nets, or any other safety gear that would prevent him from falling to his death. (The whole harrowing feat will be livestreamed on Netflix, of course.) You may remember Honnold from his 2018 documentary, Free Solo, in which he climbed El Capitan — also sans rope — but a lot has happened in his personal life since then. He got married (to the girlfriend who appeared in Free Solo, Sanni McCandless) and welcomed two daughters with her. Have any of these major life developments changed how Honnold feels about performing death-defying feats? According to a new New York Times interview about his bonkers mission, not much.
When asked whether he’s any more worried about the risk of his climbs than before he had kids, Honnold argued that he actually doesn’t “think the calculus has changed that much” because “I never wanted to die.” “I mean, implicit in the question is that I have more to live for, and, yeah, I have more to live for, and I’m still doing my very best to not die,” he said.
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So why do it? Well, he really wants to. “No one’s encouraging me to do harder things. Everyone’s kind of like, ‘Why don’t you stay at home, play with the kids?’” Honnold said. “So it means that if I’m going to do something, I have to be really psyched about it.”
Well, at least someone’s psyched. Honnold said that McCandless, who made several very concerned appearances in Free Solo, is now more stressed about the “spectacle” of the event rather than “the actual climbing,” but he also acknowledged that they don’t discuss the risks of his climbs very much, “because obviously it’s upsetting for her.” “We occasionally joke — you know, gallows humor — about how long she would wait to start dating again. How hard it would be to find somebody with the kids and all that. But that’s just us joking around,” he said.
On the bright side, Honnold is apparently getting paid “in the mid–six figures” for the livestreamed climb, so maybe he can take his wife out to a nice dinner soon. I would suggest anywhere at sea level.
