“When things go sideways, they go sideways.” Photos: IG//Screenshot
We’ve all had poop panics at some point in our lives. I shit my wetsuit at full sprint once after a dawn patrol surf that was preceeded by a dinner of empanadas sold out of an old lady’s truck on a Mexican beach — but luckily, most of our poop panics have likely not occurred while scaling a sheer rock face thousands of feet in the air. Alex Honnold, a guy who poops and also happens to scale sheer rock faces thousands of feet in the air, recently sat down across from Hasan Minhaj to talk about it.
I have spoken with Alex Honnold a handful of times in the past. He’s a very nice guy. Humble but confident. He’s got a dry wit. He makes jokes with a straight face, waits for you to realize that he made a joke, and then smiles a bit when he sees you get it. He’s amazingly blasé about what he does, and every time we’ve spoken, I’ve been tempted to ask him about cliffside dumps. I can never do it, though, because then I’d be the guy who asked Alex Honnold about taking cliffside dumps. Thank God we’ve got Minhaj to ask the real questions, like “how do you pee and poop when you climb?”
Honnold didn’t even pause. “You just pee and poop,” he said. “I have never actually shit my pants before, but I’ve had a lot of serious emergenies while rock climbing, yeah. You just like, freakin… go. But you’re in nature, so it doesn’t matter. You just make sure you’re not impacting other climbers.”
I can only assume that by “impacting other climbers,” Honnold means not shitting on someone below you, which would be a very unpleasant addition to a climb.
Minhaj, who seemed a little stunned at the answer, prodded deeper. “You just let it run down your leg, like at a public pool?” he jokingly asked.
“No, it’s a little different,” Honnold responded. “But there have been some — I mean, there’s been like one-handed, hanging off the side of a cliff taking a dump… I mean, when things go sideways, they go sideways.”
Truer words were never spoken, Honnold.
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