This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation. Honnold’s rope-free ascent of the 3,000-foot rock wall El Capitan in Yosemite National Park was featured in the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary “Free Solo.”
Honnold is an executive producer and host of the podcast “Planet Visionaries,” which spotlights pioneering conservationists addressing the impacts of climate change. The podcast, produced in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, returns for its fifth season on October 28.
Honnold, 40, lives in Las Vegas with his wife and two daughters.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I drop my daughter off at school, then I climb
I wake up and I have my green juice from Athletic Greens, which is a powder you mix with water. I live in the desert, so it’s a nice morning routine because you just drink a bunch of water in the morning.
I’ve never been into coffee. I think it tastes disgusting. I try to get enough sleep. I eat relatively well. I try to exercise enough. So it all works pretty well without caffeine. I normally wake up feeling rested and fired up.
After my juice, I eat some breakfast, which is usually either muesli and fruit or eggs, toast, and avocado.
Then, I go outside and go climbing. I probably climb more than most climbers, around 30 to 40 hours a week. It doesn’t feel like working a full-time job, though, because it’s so freaking fun.
Now, living at home with my family, I often take my older daughter to school, drop her off, and then head to a nearby cliff, where I climb until pick-up time. I then pick her up on the way home.
Every day is either a climbing day or a rest day for me. Traditionally, I follow a two-day-on, one-day-off routine. Rest days are different every day, and they don’t mean bed rest. It just means resting your skin and physically resting your muscles. It’s nice to do mentally engaging work on rest days, such as hosting podcasts, working with my foundation, public speaking, and all the other activities that accompany being a professional climber.
My routine always changes, but I have one non-negotiable
The irony of being a professional climber is that you’re sponsored because you’re good at the sport, but then the reality is that you’re getting paid to show up at events and do public appearances, so I travel all the time for work.
In some ways, I’m very routine, as I eat and drink the same things all the time. But in the bigger picture, I travel so much that sometimes I wake up in a different bed five days a week, so every day looks different. When I’m doing a lot of events, I start to feel like a piece of meat that’s just being shipped around from place to place to perform.
A non-negotiable for me is some form of exercise, including climbing in a gym. I love walking to events or using bike shares or scooters — anything that gives me control over my own travel and allows me to be independent, rather than just being transported around.
Occasionally, on climbing days, I can host a podcast in the morning and then still do a garage training session for four hours and feel like, “Oh, it’s the best of both worlds. I did some work. I got worked. It’s perfect.”
I typically don’t eat lunch and just snack during the day. If I’m going up on the wall, I take bars. I shop online at TheFeed.com and buy bars in bulk. Every handful of months I spend 500 bucks on bulk sugar products — we have a drawer in our kitchen that’s just a tremendous number of different types of bars, and then a drawer full of technical sugar products, like the energy gels and goos that are popular with runners.
After school, it’s playtime before hangouts with my wife
My older daughter comes home from school around 3:30, and bedtime is around 7:30, so there’s about four hours to hang out once we’re all home. We have a little swing set in the back with a pretty view. We play on the patio, run around outside, or go on hikes. There’s a little carpeted playroom in one corner of the house where the girls go crazy and spin until they fall down.
Dinner is often pasta and veggies, as well as Asian noodles and tofu. At home, we’ll do more salads. When I’m traveling in my van, it’s mac and cheese or tuna.
If both babies are asleep by 8:30 p.m., that’s a great success, and then my wife and I have an hour and a half to deal with normal life, which might mean responding to emails and other work. Often, we just chill or watch an episode of something together. We recently watched the first season of “Wednesday.” We joke that we have sleepovers where basically we just chit-chat for an hour and catch up.
Occasionally, we both read something for a bit, and I read a lot on planes and when traveling. I almost always read nonfiction. I just read “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” Nate Silver’s new book. I recently read “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney and was like, “Wow, fiction goes so fast compared to nonfiction.”
Ideally, we try to get to bed early because the kids wake up early, and you have to be ready. That means trying to be asleep from 10 to 6 every day.
Juggling work, family, and climbing
Part of the beauty of being a professional climber is that you can set your own hours. I also have a pretty nice home gym, so I can train at home. We’ve kind of built our lifestyle around convenience, and we live in a place with a lot of climbing access.
I think of work, family, and climbing as the three things that I’m juggling at all times, and you just can’t have all three at the same time, really. Over the course of a week, though, I can juggle it all.
A friend and I were just in Yosemite National Park for a short dad’s trip, and even though I was on the wall for two days, I FaceTimed my family, so my 3-year-old got to see El Cap at night from the ledge. It was freaking cool.
After spending a couple of days together, my friend said, “God, you just optimize everything. You’re just so efficient.” And I was like, “Yeah, otherwise you can’t keep all the balls in the air. If you’re not tight on everything, the whole empire crumbles.”
I do everything very quickly and just turn it up to 11. By being super efficient about all the things, you get to do way more things.
Literally, our only thing is time, and then we die. So I just don’t want to waste time. I unpack from one thing, I’m already packing for my next thing.
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