There’s an uncomfortable truth that many climbers in various cities are having difficulty accepting: their gyms may be better than the actual rock climbing in their areas.

“Yep, blah blah gym has the best cragging in the region,” I now hear people say, chuckling, mostly joking, but partially serious. I’ve so often entertained this punch line—usually dropped to bring conclusion to the absolutely maddening platitudes of small talk between myself and some climbing acquaintance—that I’ve begun to think the only joke is how many people are lying to themselves when they say they’d rather go to Clear Creek than Movement, Boulder’s new awesome plastic maiden.

I spent Sunday at  Movement, which is definitely one of the best indoor facilities I’ve visited. It has a great lead-climbing wall, sick bouldering, tons of open space, and really soft grades to make me feel good about myself. Compare that to my day on Saturday, when I hiked for hours to an outdoor climbing area, and the real rock tore to shreds every cell of my fingers’ epidermis in 45 minutes flat. Plus, I didn’t send anything and I also realized what a gumby I am.

There’s no doubt, however, that climbing in the gym can be lame. I hate all of the rules … mostly because I hate rules, as a general rule. Why can’t I tie in with a double bowline if I want to? As far as I’m concerned, the double bowline is the imperial knot for single-pitch climbing. So when I have to use a figure-8 instead, just to follow some lame and fretful protocol born of the idea that double bowlines come undone like Weezer’s “Sweater Song,” it feels like I’m a Nascar driver being forced to use a Saturn. It’s embarrassing.

The other common gym rule I hate is how you must clip every single draw when leading. This isn’t a problem that exists for me outdoors, where I’m normally happy to get as much protection as I can. But most of the indoor lead routes have so many quickdraws per square foot that leading becomes a stuttering experience of making approximately 1.5 moves before having to stop to clip. A climber has about as much chance of feeling the flow as he does falling more than four feet.

Recently, I was in my other favorite gym, Momentum, in Salt Lake, climbing with my good friend Mason, a big ol’ boy. Mace was owning the green route, but somehow he fell. Since he weighs about 40 pounds more than me, I got sucked up into the first draw.

Normally, this would’ve been fine, except that I was belaying with my left hand. The kid whose job it is to make sure that no one skip clips or tie in with a double bowline or belay poorly, ran over and scolded me for belaying in a manner that did not appear in the instructional poster hanging on the adjacent wall. This was frustrating to listen to, obviously, since no technique short of giving Mace a hard ankle-snapping catch would’ve prevented me from flying up into the first draw, which is only five feet off the ground anyway. There’s nothing more maddening than when fault is unfairly assigned.

As I was listening to the spiel, another kid came running up out of nowhere and said, “Hey, are you from Utah?”

“No,” I said.

“Yeah, people who aren’t from Utah belay this way,” kid number two explained to kid number one. “Trust me, it’s fine.” I thought that was interesting since I had assumed that belaying left handed was how left-handed people belayed. I told the kids that I had heard that a new book was coming out soon that would explain all of this to them.

Gyms have rules, and I suppose I understand why. Shortly after kid number one scolded me for my renegade belaying, I saw him scolding Ivan Greene for climbing without a shirt on. Ivan is a great guy, but he is no doubt a little showboat. Having just seen him streak the Mammut Bouldering Championships to a crowd of inert, blank expressions that seemed to find his hooliganism more dumb than subversive or incendiary, I couldn’t help but laugh and feel thankful for the higher enforcing body of a gym with rules, some of them not so bad.