I've free soloed easy routes (long 5.4-5.6 routes in tahquitz -- I regularly climb in the 5.12s). Soloing something that you are comfortable with is enjoyable precisely because you _dont_ feel like you are cheating death. It feels like a fun romp -- quickly up and down -- you move faster, you don't have to stop and deal with belays, and often you can downclimb the route and avoid a lengthy walk-off. To the extent that you feel like you accomplished something -- you only really have that feeling if the climbing felt easy and smooth. If it felt hard and scary -- it was probably a _not_ fun experience, and certainly its something you would feel less "proud" about because a "better" climber wouldn't have felt the need to experience the discomfort.

If you listen to Alex talk -- he climbs a huge amount of "easier" terrain and he often describes those experiences in similar terms. It's just for him "easy" is waaaaaaay harder. I can indeed imagine how cool it would be to run up 5.11 (or in honnolds case more like 5.12) with the same fun casualness that I have experienced when running up 5.4 -- and it really does sound like it feels that way for him often.

Pushing the difficulty of his soloing as he has is partially about the specific challenge of doing a harder route and partially about moving up his comfort zone so that he increases the range of "easy" terrain that he can go casually solo. His expanding comfort over time has given him access to a huge range of terrain that he could comfortably free solo - which is a huge part of the reason why Caldwell asserts that Honnold has probably climbed more technical rock mileage than anyone else ever.

I think one thing that's interesting (mystifying?) about the way Honnold treats risk -- he doesn't really acknowledge that the longer he solos the more likely he is to have an accident. Instead he focuses on how fear in some of the situations he pursues can only ever have a detrimental effect on performance -- and that setting aside that fear is actually a required part of the task of minimizing the risk involved for what he wants to pursue. I think this is probably true though the mathematician in me still struggles with the first part -- and actually if you look at Alex talk, it sounds like he's starting to change his tune a bit too. Free rider was one of his top life goals related to soloing -- and it sounds from his interview that his next goal at least is more focused on climbing harder routes than on pursuing harder soloing.