ALEX HONNOLD
Alex Honnold’s death-defying ‘free solo’ ascent of one of the world’s most iconic climbs made him the most famous climber on the planet. During some rare time on terra firma, he sat down with Mark Bailey to talk climbing without ropes, new perspectives post-fatherhood, and the absence of fear
Just over a year before Alex Honnold rocked the sporting world with his historic ascent of El Capitan – the near vertical 884m-high wall of rock in Yosemite National Park – without any safety ropes or harnesses, the California-born climber lay silently in a large white tube at the Medical University of South Carolina. It was March 2016 and Honnold had agreed to undergo a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan in order to discover the answer to a simple question: ‘Am I normal?’
Honnold – the son of two community college teachers, who likes reading classic literature and eating vegan food – certainly felt pretty normal. But climbers, neuroscientists, psychologists, awestruck fans and Honnold himself were keen to know whether the brain of someone who enjoys free solo climbing – the outrageously hazardous rope-free genre of climbing – felt the same raw, nerve-scraping fear as the rest of us. Does Honnold’s amygdala – the region of the brain responsible for processing fear – light up in scary situations? Or is Honnold neurologically unique?
While lying in the scanner, Honnold was shown a series of disturbing images, including gruesome corpses and vertiginous mountain views. But after analysing all the fMRI data, the scientists discovered that Honnold’s amygdala experienced almost no activation at all. It was official: Alex Honnold is different from the rest of us. But the question that nobody could answer was whether Honnold is ice-cool by nature, or whether his years of fear-slaying adventures have made him this way. Was Honnold simply born fearless? Or has he trained his mind to neutralise his fears?
Practice makes fearless
Since that day, Honnold, now 37, has enjoyed multiple dangerous expeditions around the world on which to ponder that big question. But it was only when he and his wife, Sanni, welcomed their daughter, June, into the world last year that he began to form the answer.
“It’s funny, because I think about nature versus nurture a lot now since we have a daughter,” says Honnold. “I am constantly thinking about what’s learned versus what’s innate. And I feel pretty firmly that it [the control of fear] is mostly nurture in this case. Sure, there is definitely an element of nature, in that I’m not afraid of heights. I’ve always loved exposure. I like to be on top of a tree or on top of a building. I like air around me. I like the views. But I know that the bigger contribution is the training, the preparatio
