What Alex Honnold's Boldness Can Teach You
There's a moment — and most guys who've spent serious time outdoors know exactly what it feels like — where you're standing at the edge of something that scares you. Maybe it's a ridge line you weren't sure you could cross, a stretch of whitewater you weren't sure you should paddle, or a hunt that pushed you further from the truck than you'd planned. That moment is what separates the guys who just talk about adventure from the ones who actually live it. Alex Honnold has built his entire life around that moment. And the way he approaches it says something profound — not just about climbing, but about how any man can approach the challenges that define him.
If you don't know the name yet, you need to. Alex Honnold is widely considered history's greatest ever climber in the free solo style — meaning he ascends without a rope or any protective equipment of any kind. That's not a style choice or a stunt. It's a way of life rooted in a philosophy that, when you strip it down to its bones, applies to every man who's ever tried to do something hard.
The Climb That Changed Everything
Let's set the scene, because context matters here. The documentary Free Solo follows Honnold's journey up El Capitan, a 7,569-foot mountain in Yosemite National Park in California — and what makes it so remarkable, and terrifying, is that he free solos the climb, meaning he does it without ropes, a harness, or any protective gear.
On June 3rd, Honnold completed the first-ever free solo of El Capitan, climbing the wall via Freerider (VI, 5.13a). He ascended the peak in 3 hours and 56 minutes, taking the final moderate pitch at a near run. To put that in perspective, most parties climb the 3,000-foot Freerider in 33 pitches over 3 to 5 days. The man did it alone, without a rope, in under four hours. Tommy Caldwell, himself one of the greatest climbers alive, called it "the moon landing of free soloing."
Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal — which means that on epic days of soloing, Honnold might spend 12 or more hours in the death zone. On the hardest parts of some routes, his fingers have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. There's no net. No backup plan. Just the man and the mountain.
And yet — this is the part that really gets you — Honnold began his historic ropeless climb in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m., having spent the night in the customized van that serves as his mobile base camp, rising in the dark, dressing in his favorite red t-shirt and cutoff nylon pants, and eating his standard breakfast of oats, flax, chia seeds, and blueberries before driving to El Capitan Meadow. Oats and chia seeds. Before the greatest athletic feat of his generation. That kind of steady, unrattled calm is the whole ballgame — and it didn't come from nowhere.
It Starts With the Foundation, Not the Summit
Here's something that most people get backwards when they look at Honnold: they think what he does is about raw talent or some kind of death wish. It's neither. Honnold shockingly considers himself "not the most talented climber" he knows, and spent years in a climbing gym as a kid before he ever attempted an outside climb. He started with the basics, drilling them over and over to the point of mastery, and entered the climbing circuit with nearly a decade of muscle memory and experience to pull from. That base made greatness possible.
Think about that. The guy who did something no one in the history of climbing had ever done — on the most famous rock wall in the world — started in a gym doing the boring stuff, over and over, long before anyone was watching. There's a lesson in that for every man who thinks he can skip the groundwork and jump straight to the glory. You can't. Nobody can.
Honnold insists that extraordinary outcomes come from ordinary, repeatable actions. He's kept a training and climbing journal since 2005, logging nearly every climb — not to glorify results, but to track progress. A journal. The man who free soloed El Capitan keeps a journal. He's not winging it. He's not improvising on the side of a 3,000-foot cliff. He's doing what disciplined men have always done — showing up, doing the work, and writing it down.
Small Goals, Big Results — The Honnold Formula
One of the things Honnold talks about that really lands is his approach to goals. In a culture that's obsessed with the big win, the highlight reel, the one moment that goes viral, he's almost refreshingly old school about it. He has said, "Big goals are just the outgrowth of lots of little goals done consistently," adding that "if you do enough little things, something big happens." Rather than focusing on a single summit, he builds momentum through small, achievable daily objectives.
This resonates hard, man. Think about how many big plans fall apart because guys try to eat the whole elephant at once. Honnold climbed El Capitan by thinking about the next move, the next section, the next pitch. He didn't stand at the base and stare at the top. He started where his feet were and kept moving.
That philosophy translates directly to any adventure you're planning — whether it's a backcountry elk hunt, a cross-country motorcycle trip, or a serious fishing expedition in remote waters. You plan it in pieces. You prepare for each piece. And then you string those pieces together until you're standing somewhere most people never get to stand.
Rethinking Risk — What Free Solo Climbing Actually Teaches
Most people hear "free solo climbing" and immediately think "reckless." That's an understandable reaction. But Honnold's actual relationship with risk is a lot more nuanced than that — and frankly, it's the part of his philosophy that's most useful to the rest of us.
Climbing has taught Honnold how to see risk clearly. People often assume free soloing is reckless, but he points out that most of his scariest moments happened while roped, pushing into unknown terrain. When climbing ropeless, he's actually more conservative. Let that sink in. Without a rope, he doesn't take chances. He only does what he absolutely knows he can do. The rope, paradoxically, can breed overconfidence.
That's a perspective shift that applies to life well beyond climbing. How often do men take bigger risks when they feel protected — whether by insurance, a safety net, a backup plan — than when they're truly on the line? Honnold's approach is to be so prepared, so practiced, so completely sure of every move before he makes it, that the lack of protection doesn't feel like danger. It feels like clarity.
The associate editor at Climbing who joined Honnold on the route two weeks before his solo noted that Honnold "seemed apprehensive about the less secure sections" — and Honnold himself said afterward, "There was no uncertainty on this. I knew exactly what to do the whole way." Two weeks apart, two different mental states. He wasn't ready until he was ready. And he didn't go until he was.
When to Back Off — The Underrated Lesson
Here's one that guys often gloss over in the Honnold story, but it might be the most importent thing he's ever done: he turned around. Before his successful free solo of El Capitan, he reflected that what changed was simply that he'd had much more practice and time on it. The failed attempt was just a step down that road — a practice attempt. He was more prepared the next time.
In adventure culture, and in American culture generally, we don't celebrate the turn-around nearly enough. We celebrate the summit. We celebrate the guy who pushed through. But Honnold understood something that experience teaches you: knowing when you're not ready is a skill, not a weakness. A man who can read his own preparedness accurately — and act on that reading — is a man who lives to try again. And often, trying again is how the great things happen.
I learned this the hard way on a float trip down a stretch of river in northern Idaho a few years back. We had a section of rapids ahead that, looking at it from the bank, I wasn't sure about. My fishing buddy wanted to run it. I pulled us over. We scouted it on foot, and what we saw from the bank confirmed what my gut was already telling me. We portaged. Made it through. The guys who tried to run it about an hour later flipped and lost two rods and a dry bag. Honnold's lesson, lived out in real time: don't go until you know.
Why Motivation Has to Come From the Inside
There's another dimension to Honnold's philosophy that doesn't get talked about enough — and it's directly tied to why he's been able to perform at the level he has, year after year, without burning out or making a fatal mistake.
From his earliest days in the gym, Honnold climbed for one reason — because he loved it. Even the filming of Free Solo balanced intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: it was a personal challenge first, and a public triumph second. That distinction matters. When motivation comes from within, your drive becomes self-sustaining — it's no longer dependent on external validation or success.
That's a quiet but powerful truth. Men who do hard things for the right reasons — because the thing itself matters, because they're driven by something internal — tend to outlast and outperform the ones who do it for the show. Honnold has never seemed interested in being a celebrity. He's interested in the climb. The recognition followed, but it was never the point.
Honnold is one of the most accomplished climbers in the realm of free soloing, the most dangerous way to climb — but his biggest fear until a couple of years ago? Public speaking. The guy who dangled thousands of feet off the ground with nothing but chalk and rubber soles was nervous about talking to a crowd. That's a humanizing detail that matters. It reminds you that confidence isn't global. It's earned, domain by domain, through repeated effort and honest self-assessment.
Finding Your Own El Capitan
You don't have to be a climber to take something real from Alex Honnold's story. That's actually the whole point of writing about him here. When it comes to achieving massive, seemingly impossible goals, few athletes embody the process better than Alex Honnold. His reflections offer lessons that apply to climbing and life alike.
Every man has his version of El Capitan. It might be a business he's been putting off starting. A fitness goal he keeps pushing to next year. A remote wilderness trip he's been talking about for a decade but hasn't pulled the trigger on. The Honnold framework applies to all of it:
- Build your foundation first. Do the boring work. Drill the fundamentals. Don't skip ahead.
- Break the big goal into small, repeatable actions. Stack the little wins. Let the big one emerge from them.
- Know your risk honestly. Don't let false security push you into moves you're not ready for.
- Track your progress. Keep a log. A journal. A notebook in your truck. It doesn't matter how you do it — just do it.
- Turn around when you need to. Coming back alive to try again is always the smarter play.
- Do it for yourself. Not for the post. Not for the story at the bar. Because the thing itself calls to you.
Honnold didn't invent free solo climbing, and he didn't do it in a vacuum. He accomplished things that have never been done before, but his wins are stacked on top of the experiences of the people who came before him. An iconic photo of legendary Canadian climber Peter Croft free soloing Yosemite in 1985 — the year Alex was born — gave him direction and inspiration. He had mentors. He had heroes. He had a lineage to respect and build upon. That's not weakness — that's wisdom.
The Bigger Picture
Celebrated as one of the greatest athletic feats of any kind, Honnold's climb set the ultimate standard: perfection or death. Most of us will never operate at those stakes. But the mindset that got him up that wall — the patience, the preparation, the honest self-appraisal, the intrinsic drive — is available to every man willing to bring it to the table.
Honnold burst onto the international scene in 2008 with two high-risk, rope-free ascents — the northwest face of Yosemite's Half Dome and the Moonlight Buttress in Utah's Zion National Park. Those free solos astonished the climbing world and set new benchmarks in much the same way that Roger Bannister redefined distance running when he broke the four-minute mile in 1954. But between 2008 and 2017, there were years of work. Years of journal entries. Years of getting it right on smaller routes before he earned the right to stand at the base of El Capitan and go.
That's the story beneath the story. And it's the one worth telling — and living.
Honnold Alex isn't just a climber. He's a case study in what happens when preparation meets courage meets honest self-awareness. And in an age where everything is instant, where every adventure gets compressed into a 60-second reel, there's something deeply refreshing — almost rebellious — about a man who spent a decade getting ready for one morning.
Go find your wall. Do the work. And don't go until you know.
