A day in the life of professional mountaineer Alex Honnold

This is an essay as told, based on a conversation with Alex Honnoldprofessional climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation. Honnold’s ropeless ascent of the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock face in Yosemite National Park was featured in the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary “Free Solo.”

Honnold is executive producer and host of the podcast “Visionaries of the planet“, which highlights pioneering environmental advocates tackling the impacts of climate change. The podcast, produced in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, returns for its fifth season on October 28.

Honnold, 40, lives in Las Vegas with his wife and two daughters.

This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I drop my daughter off at school, then I climb

I wake up and take my Athletic Greens green juice, which is a powder that you mix with water. I live in the desert, so it’s a nice morning routine because you just have to drink lots of water in the morning.

I have never drunk coffee. I think it tastes disgusting. I try to get enough sleep. I eat relatively well. I try to get enough exercise. So everything works pretty well without caffeine. I normally wake up feeling rested and excited.

After my juice, I have breakfast, which usually consists of either muesli and fruit or eggs, toast and avocado.

Then I go out and go climbing. I probably climb more than most climbers, about 30-40 hours a week. However, it doesn’t feel like a full-time job because it’s so much fun.

Now, living at home with my family, I often take my oldest daughter to school, drop her off, then head to a nearby cliff, where I climb until it’s pick-up time. I will then pick her up when I get home.

Every day for me is either a climbing day or a rest day. Traditionally, I follow a two day on, one day off routine. Rest days are different every day and do not mean bed rest. This simply means resting your skin and physically resting your muscles. It’s nice to do mentally engaging work on days off, like hosting podcasts, working with my foundation, public speaking, and all the other activities that come with being a professional climber.

My routine always changes, but I have one non-negotiable

The irony of being a professional climber is that you get sponsored because you’re good at the sport, but the reality is that you get paid to show up at events and make public appearances, so I travel all the time for work.

In a way, I’m very routine, because I eat and drink the same things all the time. But overall, I travel so much that sometimes I wake up in a different bed five days a week, so every day is different. When I do a lot of events, I start to feel like a piece of meat that has just been transported from place to place to perform.

For me, a non-negotiable form of exercise, including rock climbing at a gym. I like walking to events or using bikeshares or scooters – anything that gives me control of my own travel and allows me to be independent, rather than just being transported.

Sometimes on climbing days I can host a podcast in the morning and then do a garage workout for four hours and think, “Oh, this is the best of both worlds. I worked. I worked. This is perfect.”

I usually don’t eat breakfast and just snack during the day. If I climb the wall, I take bars. I shop online at TheFeed.com and buy bars in bulk. Every few months I spend $500 on sugary items in bulk. We have a drawer in our kitchen that just has a ton of different types of bars, and then a drawer full of technical sweet products, like the energy gels and goos popular with runners.

After school, it’s recess before going out with my wife

My oldest daughter gets home from school around 3:30 p.m. and bedtime is around 7:30 a.m., so we have about four hours left to hang out once we’re all home. We have a small swing in the back with a lovely view. We play on the patio, run outside, or go hiking. There is a small carpeted playroom in one corner of the house where the girls go crazy and spin until they fall.

Dinner often consists of pasta and vegetables, as well as Asian noodles and tofu. At home, we’ll make more salads. When I travel in my van, it’s mac and cheese or tuna.

If both babies are asleep by 8:30 p.m., that’s a big success, and my wife and I then have an hour and a half to live a normal life, which may involve responding to emails and other tasks. Often we relax or watch an episode of something together. We recently watched the first season of “Wednesday”. We joke that we have sleepovers where we basically talk for an hour and catch up.

Every once in a while we both read a little something, and I read a lot on planes and while traveling. I almost always read non-fiction. I just read “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything”, the new book by Nate Silver. I recently read “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney and thought, “Wow, fiction moves so fast compared to nonfiction.”

Ideally, we try to go to bed early because the kids wake up early and you have to be ready. This means trying to sleep from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day.

Juggling work, family and climbing

Part of the beauty of being a professional climber is that you can set your own schedule. I also have a nice home gym, so I can work out at home. We’ve kind of built our lifestyle around convenience and we live in a place with lots of climbing access.

I consider work, family, and climbing the three things I’m juggling at any given time, and you can’t really have all three at the same time. However, over the course of a week, I can juggle everything.

A friend and I were just in Yosemite National Park for a short trip with my dad, and even though I was on the wall for two days, I FaceTimed my family so my 3-year-old could see El Cap at night from the ledge. It was really cool.

After spending a few days together, my friend said to me, “My God, you optimize everything. You are so efficient. And I was like, “Yeah, otherwise you can’t keep all the balls in the air. If you’re not strict about everything, the whole empire collapses.”

I do everything really quickly and just turn the level up to 11. By being super efficient at everything, you can get a lot more done.

Literally, our only thing is time, and then we die. So I just don’t want to waste time. I unpack one thing, I’m already planning my next thing.