Imagine climbing a 1,667-foot glass monster without ropes, smiling at passersby through the windows: the insane, magnetic, and “senseless” feat of Alex Honnold at Taipei 101, told by someone who lived it live.
- Alex Honnold climbed the Taipei 101 skyscraper free solo, without ropes.
- The feat was broadcast live worldwide on Netflix, creating incredible tension.
- The route included steel “dragons” and highly slippery outward-leaning walls.
- Despite the extreme danger, Honnold climbed with a smile, chatting with those inside.
- Pure action replaced thought in a perfect state of competitive flow.
- The meaning of the feat lies in the collective empathy of millions connected in awe.
Let’s Start From the End
You could start telling this story from the end. Alex Honnold pulling himself onto the highest point of the Taipei 101 skyscraper and saying, “Sick.” The first word that comes to his mind after an hour and a half of climbing that steel and glass monster is sick. How to translate it? I could say “hallucinatory,” “insane.” If it were me—if it were any of us, almost 100% of people—who had managed to scale that urban mountain, I don’t think I would have said anything different upon reaching the top. There aren’t many other words to express the wonder and joy of accomplishing a feat unique in the world. By “unique,” I mean whatever anyone wants to project onto it: senseless, crazy, reasonable, scientific, anything. The beauty of these feats is that everyone sees what they want in them, especially after they conclude happily.
The feat, for anyone who might have stayed away from social media or TV lately, was the free solo climb (meaning without any rope or safety device) of one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, in Taipei. Standing 1,667 feet tall with 101 floors (hence the name), it presented a set of difficulties highlighted by Netflix’s careful live direction.
Why It Was Difficult
Climbing a skyscraper is different from climbing a mountain. Rock provides more holds and offers a surface where fingers have more grip. A steel and glass skyscraper is slippery and requires remarkable mechanical strength in the hands, because Honnold had to squeeze every hold as if his limbs were clamps.
The shape of that skyscraper posed serious challenges: the initial part was relatively (okay, relative to his unique skills) simple, but what awaited him after the first third was much more complicated. Having reached that point and already burned a lot of energy, he faced the hardest part. Generally—as the Netflix commentators explained—climbers prefer to tackle the most demanding section at the beginning when they are fresher and have more energy. In this case, it was the opposite: the final two-thirds of the climb were undoubtedly the worst. Worst in what sense? Eight “pagodas,” which are eight sections of the building with walls sloping outward (so Honnold was climbing, as they say, on a negative grade), and especially 10 dragons—large sculptural flourishes covered in stainless steel, 20 to 26 feet high. On these, the holds were minimal, the climbing surface was practically a mirror, and the margin for error was negligible, if not nonexistent. And the chance of making a mistake was multiplied tenfold. It didn’t matter to get it right once: Honnold had to succeed 10 times in a row, knowing that his strength and fatigue would weigh more and more as he climbed.
Okay, and once past those, he was done, right? No: there was another pagoda section separated horizontally by progressively projecting ledges where Honnold could only hang and pull himself up with pure arm strength, a spiral (a sort of cup shape created by curved elements), and the final section, which he tackled by pulling himself up a small runged ladder because there were no climbable surfaces available.
The Smile
I remembered this event at the last minute. I tuned in when it had been going for two and a half minutes. I had no idea how long he planned to take. After five minutes (it was already 2:30 AM), I didn’t care how long it would last. I wanted and had to see it all.
I remembered Free Solo, but there was a big difference: that was a documentary where I already knew the positive outcome (though that didn’t stop me from nearly having a heart attack watching it in the theater), but this was live. Here, no one knew for sure how it would end. A gust of wind stronger than expected could have made him lose his balance. A mistake in a grip could have put him in danger or worse. A distraction, the same. The possibilities for something to go wrong were countless.
And there I was, glued to the screen, wondering how long it would take and holding my breath at every crucial move.
But there was another element that fascinated me: Honnold was always smiling. These people—be they a violinist or a tennis player—have this ability: they make their feats look easy. I watched him climbing and a part of my brain thought, “It almost looks easy.” Because he was smiling, talking to the production crew, waving to the people inside the building who were filming him. He seemed almost distracted by their presence, but also amused and happy. At one point—after clearing the ninth or tenth dragon (by that point, for my heart, it was the 300,000th; I think I was more exhausted than he was, and I know I wasn’t the only one)—he found a cameraman filming him and actually said, “Hey, how’s it going?” How’s it going? Just like that, as if he’d run into him at a bar.
Sometimes Not Thinking Is the Solution
I mean this in two ways: the first is that Honnold is pure action. Even though he was smiling and appeared relaxed, he was clearly intensely focused. He was so focused that he could afford to joke with the hosts and the people photographing him from inside the skyscraper. Action precedes thought; let that suffice, as it’s a topic that would require its own discussion. Especially in these situations, following months of preparation and meticulous planning, there is no time to think, only to act. When you are in the flow, at most there is a coincidence of action and thought, with no communication breakdown. Everything proceeds in a celestial synchrony.
But not thinking, I’ll say in conclusion, also applies to us, watching him perform such a feat, holding our breath, worrying as if we were his brother, or even asking ourselves what the point of what he’s doing is. There is no answer, there doesn’t have to be, and sometimes you can witness a historic feat without having any particular opinion on it. Did he do the right thing? Was it wrong? Does it even matter? He settled his accounts with himself and his loved ones. Does what he did make sense? Does it have to? We always feel the need to place what we see into some absurd game, as if everything had a meaning or could be judged through a moral lens. This is a story without a moral; it’s something that happened because a man was capable of seeing it through. We watched him, we were amazed, we were afraid, and we were relieved after a very difficult passage. Perhaps the only meaning of such things is that they manage to stimulate a synchronized empathy. We will never know what it means to scale a skyscraper, but for an hour and a half, millions of us shared a connection with a single person doing something nonsensical, full of meaning, rational, irrational, crazy, and profoundly healthy.