Alex Honnold, professional rock climber, soloed Taipei 101 in Taiwan on Jan. 25. Honnold scaled the 1667 feet tall skyscraper in roughly an hour and a half, occasionally pausing to wave at onlookers inside the building. The climb was live streamed on Netflix with over six million people watching, ranking it the third most watched English program that week.
Free soloing is when a structure is climbed with no safety equipment in assistance.It is extremely dangerous and should only be done by professionals with experience.
“I thought the climb was really impressive, especially with how fast he did it and how he tackled harder spots to climb,” Sloan Bonanzinga, junior, who watched the stream, said.
Spectators who observed Honnold free soloing Taipei 101, described it as almost unbearable to watch. The stress and idea of something going wrong took over watchers’ minds. Contrarily, it was difficult to look away as he continued up the building with ease.
“I was definitely worrying about the potential consequences of him falling, even with his history as a climber and it not being a necessarily “hard” thing for him to complete, it’s still an insane thing to try to climb that building,” Bonanzinga said.
Honnold was climbing the building with a smooth pace, listening to a playlist in his headphones, consisting mainly of the band Tool and other rock ‘n’ roll artists.
“It was mostly Tool, … I made it months ago while I was driving. Basically, rock music that I’ve liked my whole life,” Honnold said in an interview with Variety.
Honnold was able to climb Taipei 101 with a lifetime background in climbing and an immense amount of training.
The Netflix live stream played a brief montage of Honnold’s training, showing him doing many different exercises in order to help him during his climb.
“You’re kind of like, ‘yeah moving isn’t hard’, but after 300 reps the movement becomes pretty hard. So I do hundreds of reps each day, building up my strength. Push ups, pull ups, core work, stretching, endurance training,” Honnold said in an interview with Netflix during the live stream.
This isn’t Honnold’s first free solo either, in 2017, he free soloed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, CA. The climb was filmed for a documentary on Netflix titled “Free Solo.” In the documentary, Honnold spoke about how he’d lived in a van in Yosemite National Park for over a decade climbing almost every day.
While Honnold has not said anything about continuing to chase new milestones in climbing or free soloing, he will be starring in an upcoming show called “Get a Little Out There with Alex Honnold.”
“I don’t think he’ll do anything more mainly because of his age, keeping up a peak physique once you get older becomes much harder, but I think it’s huge to be able to do what he’s doing right now,” Bonanzinga said.
