Alex Honnold free-solos Taipei 101 on Netflix

Alex Honnold has finally found something more exhausting than climbing without a rope: bedtime.

In an interview cited by The Independent, the 40-year-old climber said he has not been sleeping much since returning from “Skyscraper Live,” Netflix’s real-time broadcast in which he became the first person to free-solo Taipei 101—nearly 1,700 feet of glass-and-concrete bravado in Taiwan’s capital.

The culprit, Honnold explained, is not lingering adrenaline from the ascent but his two-year-old daughter, Allie, who has learned how to climb out of her crib. “I woke up, like, every 45 minutes,” he said, describing how he watched her through a crack in the door after putting her to bed, noting how “effortless” her escape looked. Honnold and his wife, Sanni McCandless, also have a four-year-old daughter, June.

The Taipei 101 climb itself was not a frictionless TV product. The Independent reports the event was delayed 24 hours because of rain, and Honnold still faced significant wind near the top. He completed the climb in 1:31:43. Netflix reportedly ran the broadcast on a 10-second delay so it could cut the feed if he fell—an oddly candid admission of what “live” means when liability departments are in the room.

McCandless addressed the psychological asymmetry in a press conference after Honnold returned safely: when you love someone, you might wish you could take their stress away; in this case, she summed it up more succinctly: “Thank God I’m not him!” She described the moment he left the ground as the point when her anxiety became quieter, internal, and eventually joyful.

Honnold is, of course, the man who free-soloed El Capitan in Yosemite in 2017, later immortalized in the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo. The new wrinkle is domestic. He told People (via The Independent) that he is “way more tired,” but that family life is “freaking awesome.”

Honnold said he’s still unsure how fatherhood will affect his career, adding that his “capacity to take risks probably hasn’t changed that much yet.” That line lands like a climber’s version of a politician promising fiscal restraint: technically plausible, psychologically suspect, and guaranteed to be tested by reality.

In an age where institutions sell safety as a subscription, Honnold’s appeal remains brutally simple: individual competence, honest risk accounting, and consequences that can’t be outsourced. The only new twist is that the most relentless risk manager in his life now weighs about as much as a backpack—and doesn’t care about his résumé.