by JULIET WATERS

I'm a thrill junkie trapped inside the body of someone who's terrified of heights, a truth I came up against last summer when I visited Horizon Roc. After recent renovations, this is, as far as anyone knows, the biggest indoor rock-climbing centre in the world. Not being an expert, I can't argue, but searching the Web I couldn't find anywhere else that could boast more than 2,300 square metres of indoor rock climbing walls.

I was there researching a book, and had no intention of actually doing any climbing. Co-owner Maria Izquierdo, however, is not one to accept a lame excuse like terror. Rock climbing taught properly, she explained, is actually one of the best ways of conquering this fear, which is how I found myself hooked to a rope, balancing in extremely uncomfortable shoes on tiny purple, green and pink plasticine "rocks." Thankfully, five minutes later, I was back on firm ground, muscles totally exhausted, ignoring the repressed little voice that was whining "again."

After six months of pestering, however, "again" finally won out. So one Saturday morning in January, I returned for the Découverte 1 course. My inner maniac wanted something new, and Horizon Roc definitely has the new thing going for it: a massive extension, 250 routes, a competition-level boulder crawling with insanely buff, shirtless fanatics, and keen, friendly staff cruising around in Horizon Roc T-shirts, evidently all on a mission to harness up the masses. I brought my best friend from high school, one of the few people I trust not to be distracted by cute, half-naked boulder guys and absent-mindedly kill me.

All about knots

Horizon Roc is a little off the beaten track, unless you happen to live out near the Olympic stadium, but there are directions on their Web site (www.horizonroc.com). It's also a little bit more expensive than its West End counterpart, Allez-Up - the basic training course is $42, compared with $35. But you get an extra hour of instruction, which, given my fear factor, seemed like a good investment.

Découverte 1 is only about learning what you need to know to climb safely: it's all about knots, figuring out the harness and belaying and the action of mastering the rope so that no one plummets to earth. You learn a lot in three hours. Unfortunately, you also forget a lot after a couple of days. We waited 10 days before going for the certification test, which you have to take to be able to climb without an instructor. This was apparently too long, judging from the dour look on our examiner's face when he gave us the news that we had passed, barely. Fortunately, he wrote out a long list of things for us to work on.

The biggest mistake newbie rock climbers make, next to waiting too long to take the certification test, is wasting a lot of time rock climbing without taking a basic techniques course. Fortunately, I had my pesty "again" voice signing me up for Découverte 2.

No cheap thrills

Découverte 2 is where you learn that trying to teach yourself to rock climb is kind of like trying to teach yourself to swim. It's an exercise in sheer, bloody-minded survival, until someone clues you into this thing called floating. The rock-climbing version of floating is footwork. A couple of hours of instruction on how to use your toes instead of your arches, which enables you to shift weight more efficiently, makes rock climbing about 80 per cent easier, and about 800 per cent more fun. The most important trick you learn is finding your centre of gravity so that you can minimize the use of your arms. It also helped that our instructor, Philippe, was totally charming, encouraging and obviously really good at this. That was the good news. The bad news was that continuing rock climbing was going to be a lot more expensive than I'd hoped.

There's a reason for those funky shoes. For effective footwork, you need tiny, rigid shoes, not unlike the toe shoes ballet dancers wear. A reasonably comfortable pair costs about $100. Then there's the start-up harness and equipment kit that will set you back about $80 at Mountain Equipment Co-op (basically the Costco of outdoor gear). Add to this the $100 spent on courses and the one or two times you try rock climbing without the techniques course, and that's about $300 you need to invest right away. After that, however, rock climbing won't cost you much more than membership at a decent gym. Ask yourself the last time three hours flew by at the gym, and the $300 seems well worth it.

Unfortunately, location is almost everything. Despite the fact that Allez-Up is way smaller and doesn't have nearly as many intermediate level routes, it's where we tend to climb. It's closer and the music is better. To be fair, Horizon Roc only played Pink Floyd once, and because there are so many more routes and instructors willing to give you climbing tips, we'll definitely be back. Just not every week.

As for my fear of heights: climbing up is never a problem. I'm too concentrated on my feet now. Coming down - and sometimes swinging down, if you're climbing on a wall that overhangs - is totally fun. But I still have to work on that moment where I have to let go of the wall and sit in the harness and trust that my totally trustworthy partner has both hands on the rope.

Horizon Roc (2350 Dickson, 899-5000),
Allez-Up (1339 Shearer, 989-9656)