Alex Honnold Once Took A 45-Minute Call And Ate Lunch While Scaling a Cliff

Alex Honnold stopped halfway up a 1,500-foot rock formation to take a phone call and eat lunch

Alex Honnold is a renowned rock climber who is known for climbing El Capitan — a rock formation that is about 3,000 feet tall — without any artificial aids for support or rope.

However, he's like anybody else who needs to take phone calls and eat lunch. 

Except he may have to do it on the side of a cliff. 

While on the Pat McAfee Show, Honnold recounted a time when he was rock climbing on a "rest day" in Yosemite National Park. 

While halfway up the formation, Honnold said he got a phone call that he had to take so he found a ledge that he described as the size of a picnic table and took a little break. But in the normalcy of it all, he forgot he still had roughly 800 feet to go.

"No, no it was casual," Honnold recalls. "So, I sat down, took off my backpack, ate a little snack, made this phone call for like 45 minutes and I hung up the phone and was like 'Oh man I'm still on the dead center of this 1500-foot..."

McAfee found the story hilarious but Honnold admitted he was a little taken back by the change of pace. 

"I kind of lost my groove a little bit," he said. "You definitely do have moments like that where you're like 'oh I'm still up here and I still have a long ways to go.'"

Free Solo, which followed Honnold's journey over two years to prepare to climb El Captain, won an Oscar in 2019.