Alex Honnold Relied on This 'Extreme Fatigue' Training to Free-Solo a 508m Skyscraper

Just how do you train for a 508m climb up the side of a building without any equipment? Alex Honnold created history on January 25 when he free-soloed the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan. It’s not the first time Honnold has broken (terrifying) new ground: in 2018 he became the first person to free-solo a full route on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park – an 880-metre ascent.

But buildering – the act of climbing up artificial structures – is a different proposition to Honnold’s bread and butter of regular climbing. Different muscles are required, and in this instance there was the added pressure of Netflix cameras tracking his every movement. As a result, the 40-year-old adjusted his training, preparing his mind as much as his body for the eventually successful 92-minute climb.

Hundreds of Reps Every Day

‘On Taipei 101 you’re basically grabbing the same holds, almost the whole way up the building,’ Honnold said prior to the climb. ‘These big metal box pinches. 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 a day, building up my strength. Pull-ups, push-ups, core work, stretching, endurance training.

‘The idea is to feel that ache through your whole body that I will experience on the building. And that’s ultimately what I need to feel prepared for. But, preparation is one thing, and you can practice something and it feels a certain way, but when you do something you’ve never done before, you never totally know that you’re ready. And that fear is always there.’

Those pull-ups and push-ups Honnold describes are far from traditional, though. Rather than holding onto a bar directly overhead, he would perform pull-ups while gripping either side of a squat rack. And, with grip strength a crucial aspect of his skill, Honnold continuously completed pull-ups using just the tips of his fingers. Push-ups were also performed on rings to get a deep stretch by going both as wide as possible and reaching as far in front of his body as he could.

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Getting in the Right Frame of Mind

But before even starting his physical training, Honnold needed to visualise the climb.

‘When I visualise a climb like Taipei 101, I’m thinking about what it’ll feel like – and that’s kind of the whole point of doing the visualisation. It’s to experience those emotions ahead of time so that I don’t experience them while I’m doing the climb. And it’s this mental preparation that informs my physical training.

‘A lot of my training for Taipei 101 is different than rock climbing. It’s more around simulating the feeling in my body, which is sort of deep fatigue. I have to be able to do a 1,600 feet vertical climb quite quickly.’