Several years ago, Brandon Barraclough, Emily Vincent, Tim Richards and Sarah Thorne bonded over rock climbing in Newmarket.
Now the quartet has opened their own rock climbing gym, Reach Indoor Climbing, in Aurora at 212 Earl Stewart Dr.
“There was always an idea in the back of our minds, what if we had a space that was accessible and we could build our own programming,” said Sarah Thorne, one of the owners of Reach Indoor Climbing and a Newmarket resident.
“Our mentality as a group is that climbing is for everybody. Anybody with a physical or cognitive disability, young or old. Brandon is very passionate about providing opportunities to under privileged individuals and First Nations individuals and he’s doing a lot of outreach work.”
Thorne, who is an occupational therapist and clinical lead at the Centre of Arthritis Excellence in Newmarket, is the accessible and therapeutic climbing lead with Reach Indoor Climbing.
“People think climbing is a physically demanding sport, which it certainly can be,” she says. “But there are a few things that make it an amazing tool to use therapeutically. It’s inherently mindful, which means you can only pay attention to climbing when you’re climbing, so in terms of managing emotional or thinking challenges, you have to be in the moment. That mindfulness practice is a gateway to managing emotional health.”
With her background, Thorne is able to combine her expertise in occupational therapy with her passion for climbing as she develops and promotes programs that will provide opportunities for accessible recreation, therapeutic intervention, and elite paraclimbing.
“One thing with climbing is every movement is a newer novel movement. When our brain is working in different ways, it lets us access our recovery in a more unique way than the traditional machines, walking on straight ground, or laying flat,” she says. “It makes us activate and recruit our muscles in a very different sequence with every movement. That novel movement is something our brains really like.
"Already at Reach we’ve used climbing for all sorts of different types of diagnosis, including young children with ADHD, people with physical and cognitive disabilities, people recovering from concussions, and people with anxiety and depression. Those are areas I have experience and those are areas we hope to expand as we launch our full slate of programming in September.”
Sports climbing made its debut as an Olympic sport at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and the team at Reach Indoor Climbing hopes to make the sport more accessible in York Region.
“There’s more interest now in the competitive aspects of climbing,” says Thorne. “We want to demonstrate to the community that this sport has longevity and growth potential. Especially because it’s a sport you can do across your lifespan.”
A full-service climbing gym, Reach Indoor Climbing offers all of the major disciplines of climbing with bouldering (unroped climbing), top rope climbing, lead climbing, auto-belay climbing.
The gym also has an upstairs that includes training boards for those who want to come on their own or are training for a specific event.
“In addition to the climbing spaces, we’re offering all kinds of climbing programming for adults and youth,” said Thorne. “We’re also offering summer camps, birthday parties, and team building.”
A big step in building Reach Indoor Climbing was creating the layout of the climbing walls and the angles to offer different climbing options.
“We wanted to have variety so we could use and reuse the space,” said Thorne. “We want to be able to create unique climbs all of the time. Every week or two weeks, part of the wall will be taken down and new ‘problems’ will be put up on the wall. People are used to climbing different grades, but we want to focus on teaching our customers a new skill with every different boulder or route. Our team is focused on introducing people to new skills and building climbs that let them progress through that skill development.”
There are a few key objectives the Reach Indoor Climbing team is hoping to achieve by opening in York Region, and chief among them is fostering a feeling of community while showcasing that this is a sport for everyone.
“We want to make people feel like they can come for a workout but also come for a hangout,” said Thorne. “We also really want everybody who walks into our facility to feel like it’s an easy entry point for them to climb for the first time and then develop from there. We want people to know that anybody can do this if it’s something they’re interested in.”
