Outlier TV Interview With Richard Ussher 5 Time Coast to Coast Multisport Champion & Owner of Cable
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Andrew McCombe:
Hi, I’m Andrew McCombe and welcome to Outlier. In this week’s episode, I’m in beautiful Nelson, New Zealand, where I’m going to be speaking to Richard Ussher, the Managing Director of the Cable Bay Adventure Park.
Guys, Richard is New Zealand multi-sport royalty. Let’s go and meet him. Richard Ussher, welcome to Outlier.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, thanks very much.
Andrew McCombe:
You’ve been a Winter Olympian. You’ve been a multi-sport champion many times over. You’ve been an Ironman. You’ve been an entrepreneur. You are an entrepreneur, a CEO, and you’re also an environmentalist. It’s a lot of kudos and a lot of things you’re into, and obviously, that’s what makes you an Outlier, but you weren’t always that, were you? Where did it all begin?
Richard Ussher:
I guess it’s always been something where I’ve just never really put any boundaries on what I can do and I was probably really fortunate growing up that I had parents that were really supportive in terms of just essentially letting us do whatever we did. That’s a bit different these days I think. I remember growing up in the late seventies, early eighties, you’re pretty much just sent out to go and roam the streets and build tree forts and just explore. And I think we weren’t from a super well-to-do family, but they were always really supportive and basically just said, go and whatever you want to do, give it a crack. So I think that was probably a big empowerment from a young age.
Andrew McCombe:
And so we’re based in Cable Bay here in Nelson, New Zealand, you’re originally from Wellington, but your first foray into sport, was it skiing? And was it in the North Island or the South Island?
Richard Ussher:
As a kid, I was into pretty much any sort of sport that there was. Mainly, it was a great excuse to get out of class and that’s how the skiing started. It’s hard being a skier from Wellington cause the closest mountain’s four hours drive away. And I went to a school called Onslow College where basically the basis for getting on the school ski team was, were you keen?
So I think even in those days we were hiring gear when you went skiing. It was just a fun time out. There was probably five of us, I think that would go up and a couple of good teachers that took us up there and we got influenced by some of their friends, one in particular who had been a skier at the European level. It was just a good fun time. We were like, this is way better than being at school and it was even better when we got stuck on the mountain, cause the road got closed because of snow or something like that, which was a fairly regular occurrence.
Andrew McCombe:
So obviously it evolved from that and you became quite serious. You went to the Nagano Olympics in 98?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. I went to the to the Nagano Olympics and I think it’s fair to say that being from New Zealand, had a certain advantage in that there’s not that much competition for spots. I didn’t ski for that long really, in the scheme of things I think, and when I was 17, I decided that I’d had enough of school, quit school, moved down to Wanaka to go skiing and I’d probably only done 50 days skiing in my entire life at that stage. So I wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
Andrew McCombe:
This was your 50 days by the time you moved to Wanaka?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. So a lot of the people I got to know in World Cup and Europa Cup and things like that, they’d probably done 50 days by the time they were three. So, it was a different context, I told everyone I was going to go to the Olympics and I didn’t really want to go back to Wellington with the egg on my face going, “It’s just too difficult. I was rubbish.” So I just threw myself into it and I guess I’d seen the Olympics, the Lillehammer Olympics on TV in 1994 and just thought, wow, that looks cool. And that was for whatever reason, I was just like, oh yeah, that should be possible and didn’t really think much more about it. I just went to go and try and do it. And at the Olympics, I was the next skier behind a skier called Jami Broussard, he’d won the gold at the Lillehammer Olympics and he was the guy that I’d seen on TV going “wow, that’d be pretty cool.” And I was the next skier behind him, which was pretty cool.
Andrew McCombe:
Fantastic. So 50 days leading into Wanaka, was it a four year process for you to go to Nagano and it’s not just that, the format was moguls too, so that’s not exactly easy, is it? Compared to normal skiing.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. I guess all of the different skiing disciplines have their challenges, but moguls was definitely pretty niche, we were the snowboarders of skiing at the time. It was a huge learning experience. It was three and a half years from when I saw it on TV and quit school to when I was ultimately at the Olympics. I think in that time I skied something close to, it was about 300 days a year. So, it was probably close to 1200 days and it was basically just total immersion and I obviously got good enough to go there. I never got good enough to challenge the best in the world. But coming from New Zealand, there was a real lack of knowledge and coaching and things like that. So I ended up skiing out of Norway for the last year. The biggest thing in those days, that was before any sports were professional as well, so to go to the Olympics, you had to be amateur. So you couldn’t even ski in the pro races to make some money. It was very hard to just survive and there wasn’t really any funding in those days from New Zealand Olympic Federation side of things. Looking back, I think it was probably about as good a result with the means that I had that I could have achieved, but it was something that I wasn’t that proud of for a long time, because I hadn’t really achieved my goal of being, like a contender. And that was always something that when I looked at the success for a long time, I didn’t really view it that much of a success. I viewed it as a bit of a 50, 50 I’d made it there, but I hadn’t really achieved the bigger part of the goal, which was actually to do really well at the Olympic environment.
Andrew McCombe:
I was a New Zealand Beach Volleyball athlete. So I’m in the same boat. We had to fend for ourself and half the time stressing about how to pay for things, let alone actually be at training, right? So we’ll talk about that a little later cause I think that’s really important for the Outliers out there, when they’re starting out, it’s a real resourcefulness exercise, but from the Olympics, at what point did you choose to move on and get more into the multi-sport?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, so after the Olympics I went back and the goal was to try and go to the next Olympics. But it became a little bit political and there were all sorts of barriers being thrown up from within the sport that I just decided I didn’t really need. I think ultimately I looked at the reality of the situation. I think I was doing a year on about 15,000 New Zealand dollars and the top guys, like Johnny Moseley who won the gold in Nagano, I remember seeing somewhere that his budget was about 150,000 US for a World Cup season.
So it just seemed like it was going to be a constant struggle and I didn’t really want to go back to the Olympics and be in the same or slightly better position; if I was going to commit that amount of time, I needed to see a pathway through, to a gold medal, and I just couldn’t see that from that side and I think ultimately just starting skiing so late in life. I was realistic enough to know that it was probably unlikely. So I ended up quitting skiing and doing an office job for 12 to 18 months back in Wellington and then ended up realizing that that wasn’t really for me, and I went on a holiday down to Wanaka just to see some friends and show some friends around and got back down there and just was like, “Oh, this is where I need to be.”
And so I resigned from my job in Wellington and I just started multi-sport like Coast to Coast style things while I’d been in that job and so I moved down south. I think I went from making like a good stable salary to thinking, okay, all I need to earn like $150 a week to pretty much pay for rent and some food, and that’s all I kind of needed. And so I moved down there and not really with any other plan rather than to try to keep getting better at multi-sport, but more just to get back to a lifestyle that I enjoyed.
Andrew McCombe:
Fantastic. Again, another 150 bucks a week. It ain’t much these days, is it?
Richard Ussher:
In those days I remember, I think in the skiing days we only paid 25 bucks a week for a cabin and usually we thought that it was pretty pricey, so we’d usually jam two or three or four people in a room that size. And there were some pretty low level rents going on, but also some pretty low level living conditions as well.
Andrew McCombe:
I was going to say, even as a budding athlete and endurance athlete, the nutrition’s quite important, right? So that costs a bit of money and now 150 bucks a week with rent and food, that’s not going to cut that very well either. Is it?
Richard Ussher:
Well, I guess sport’s moved on a lot as well. It was never really something that I worried about back in those days and as long as we had a few gels for the racing , it was kind of whatever was cheapest to buy and I don’t think it was necessarily the same as what it is now. A lot of things like just good vegetables and things like that were probably a bit more reasonably priced back in those days and we weren’t buying a whole bunch of junk and trying to not buy too much beer and things like that, so that kind of kept the cost down a little bit as well, but it was just about being resourceful and trying to focus on what we’re trying to get out of life rather than, what the barriers were.
Andrew McCombe:
So if you think about, and I guess for the viewers sake, multi-sport and Coast to Coast. What is the Coast to Coast for those that don’t know? And what are the different disciplines in the sport?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, sure. So multi-sport is a little bit like triathlon but where generally the swimming’s replaced with kayaking. The majority of the races are off road and the Coast to Coast, is quite an iconic race here in New Zealand. It crosses the South Island of New Zealand. The main race as far as participation goes, its the two day race. So athletes start on the Friday, they do half the course and then finish it on the Saturday. And then the main competitive race, is the one day race and that starts on the Saturday and athletes go the whole way through. It’s about 240 kilometres long.
In terms of distance it’s quite similar to an Ironman, but it takes the top guys usually about 11 hours, so it’s almost a quarter to a third longer than Ironman as far as time goes. And it’s essentially road cycling, mountain running and then kayaking like river kayaking. So there are some pretty chunky sections in there.
Andrew McCombe:
So the mountain running in particular, is it marathon length or is it like 20 KM length or?
Richard Ussher:
The run itself is about just under 30 K. But you’re basically running almost off track the whole way.
Andrew McCombe:
Like a goat.
Richard Ussher:
Like a goat. Yes, you go over Goats Pass. It’s not a traditional run in any sense of the word. So there’s been a lot of really quick marathon runners and mountain runners go through and just not be able to get to grips with it. And the fastest runners through there are the ones that have real off-road ability and can put lines through really broken terrain and are not afraid to be jumping through rivers and other roots and down rocks and so the run takes about just under three hours for the fastest runners.
So not that dissimilar to the marathon times, probably a little bit slower than the marathon times for the elite guys and Ironman. But the crux of the race for most people is the river. The kayaking sections about 70 KM long down a grade 2 a river called the Waimakariri and a beautiful section of river. But something that not only requires all the fitness and strength, but there’s also a really high skill component to it. So that’s where, especially the newer competitors really find the element they have to overcome the most generally.
Andrew McCombe:
Did you do the two day first when you first got into it or straight into the long day?
Richard Ussher:
My first crack at the coast to coast was in the two day race. I didn’t really know anyone in that community at all. I’d seen it on TV again and thought, “Oh yeah, that looks like a bit of fun.” And so I was just eyes wide open and just basically going through the process of learning something new and that was probably the element I enjoyed about it the most.
There was that learning new skills and meeting new people in that community and it was it was quite daunting even standing on the start line for the two day race the first time around. It was quite difficult to get your head around what it was going to be like when you’re standing on that start line looking at going the whole way in one day.
Andrew McCombe:
That’s a really good point. How do you train for that when you haven’t done it before?
Richard Ussher:
What the training was, is you just got to give it your best guess really. And I guess it’s like any kind of aspirational thing that you’ve got or any goal. You can only give it your best guess and the path to get there is always going to be a lot windier than what you anticipated at the start. And I guess that was something that I’d learned through the skiing. It was a really good process just for having a goal and then making a plan and then being able to look at it objectively and keep revising it, and I think that was one of the most valuable things I got out of skiing. It set me on that path for just developing a process on how to succeed in any sort of given endeavour.
Andrew McCombe:
So again, it’s an immersion process you spend that time and we haven’t told the viewers how many times you won the Coast to Coast, but 5-time winner. Obviously over, what was that over? How many years? Nine years was it?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, I don’t even actually even know how many times I’ve raced, but yeah, I think I did one two day and one team’s race and maybe nine or ten longest days. So it was a reasonable kind of ratio, in terms of the wins there. And it was interesting cause I raced for a while and then I went away to some other sports and then I came back and it was quite interesting just to see how when you take yourself out of that environment and then come back to the race, how some of the things that you take for granted had changed. Like your skills and when you’ve been training different things.
Yes, I was always pretty fresh in terms of the challenge each year. And I remember one year I had really lined up to try and just really smash it because I’d won a couple of years in a row and it was just a complete disaster. It was a good lesson on not changing fundamentals and always having a bit of humility about the challenge that you do.
Andrew McCombe:
So what was the change for you when you wanted to smash it? Did you go too hard or?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, I mean, it was really around trying to look at the run record and some of the records around the race and the one thing about the race, because it’s in such a fluid environment, like going over the mountain, it depends on how high the rivers are and which way the wind’s blowing and the same on the river.
The level of the river can impact the speed of the race by 30 or 40 minutes and that’s totally out of your control, but this particular year I’d really decided to try and just absolutely hammer the run and, I’d managed to do some pretty quick times in training, but when it came to the race, like I basically just set out, what was probably not really a realistic expectation of what was possible and I guess just ignoring some of the things that normally I would do in terms of trying to achieve the overall success and I just wasn’t very smart about it.
Andrew McCombe:
Started taking a few shortcuts?
Richard Ussher:
Not so much in the training. But it was just probably just trained a little bit too much for speed as if it was like a road marathon and trying to run really fast for a shorter period of time, but because of the nature of the run, there’s such a strength component involved and such a skill component that when part of it breaks down, it actually knocks a whole lot of things down rather than just getting fatigued, like on the road, and then just having to back it off a little bit, cause I had burnt the legs so hard.
And then you’ve got that coordination factor involved as well. So then you’re less coordinated and the effect on your speed is not just one component. It’s two or three different components stacked on top of each other, and it just ended up impacting the entire race from there. That was a good learning experience.
Andrew McCombe:
That’s on a physical level. What about the mental level? Cause the other thing I’m thinking is there’s Ironman and there’s flat road runners and marathon runners and that. But once you add the element of rocks and uphill and downhill and kayaking, throwing in wet socks all of that, is there a difference mentally in the athletes or is it just everyone learns to deal with whatever pressures and challenges are going on at the time themselves? Did you notice they are a bit harder, the multi-sport athletes?
Richard Ussher:
I don’t think that there was necessarily a difference in how hard the athletes were. Multi-sport in general, there was quite a small selection of it that gets to the professional, semi professional athletes. It was probably a little bit more skill-based, but it was a lot less in those days, especially, it was a lot less about what bike you rode or how many sponsors you had, it was very much part of the enjoyment of the training and racing was the environment you are in. That was always a really big part of it, but when I went to Ironman later on, there were truly professional athletes and that mentally, was a much harder game because it’s just so one dimensional. It’s basically, you’re on the road, and once you get out of the water and the course isn’t the challenge. It’s the challenge between yourself and your body and your mind. It was quite a contrast.
Andrew McCombe:
Richard what’s fascinating to me is $150 a week and you are doing this and from what I understand, there’s not a heap of prize money and heap of sponsors in the Coast to Coast thing. So you’re really doing it for the honour and that can be a real burden in itself, can’t it? When you’re trying to survive on a daily basis, as well as survive, physically and train as hard as you can, because you would’ve trained what, five, six hours a day at least wouldn’t you?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, in the early days my body just simply couldn’t handle. I think if I did four hours a day, then I was getting really kind of smashing myself into the ground, but it was a progression in size. I was working as well. I was serious about it, but it was also a bit of a hobby and at the time Coast to Coast was winner takes all. So unless you won, there was nothing and I was really fortunate to pick up some product sponsors and things like that but until you’re right at the top of the sport, then it’s pretty slim pickings. And I guess over a number of years, probably three or four years, I gradually built up my results to the point where I ended up being asked to race by Nathan Faavae on his adventure racing team.
And that was my first taste of, truly as a professional athlete, we were getting a salary and everything was paid for, and that was probably what set us more than anything on that path for the next, probably 15 odd, 20 odd years. And before that, it had just been a gradual process between work, training and racing, and then the balance just slowly moved over time. I was working at a sports store in Queenstown and they’d call up “Are you available for work?” I was like, “Actually I’m not.” So it just kind of just progressed over a period of time, and it was probably because I hadn’t been exposed to that professional side before with the skiing being totally amateur. I hadn’t even really given it any thought that it would be a possibility, and it just evolved quite naturally.
Andrew McCombe:
That’s a really interesting conversation though, isn’t it? Cause there’s a lot of Outliers out there who see all the external things that champions receive, but they don’t realize the years of struggle that’s gone into it and it can often stop them before they even start. Going, jeez, it has taken four or five years for him to even start to get his fitness up there, let alone getting some results, et cetera? So what advice would you have for an Outlier who’s starting out in that regard who wants it now?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, there is no such thing as instant results or instant rewards for anyone. I’ve certainly never seen it and I’ve been exposed to a lot of pretty amazing people over the years, and the one constant is that they’ve had to push through barriers and that it takes a lot more time and a lot more dedication than what anyone will ever see on the outside and that I think is the only constant. And it can be really difficult to try and get a good gauge on what people have had to do because nowadays with all social media and stories and things like that, a lot of stuff tends to get sensationalized and then other people will just put stuff out as misinformation. So I know it was really common for a lot of the endurance athletes to be posting over 60 hours training this week.
Cause if the competition got on and just decided that they were, oh jeepers, such and such is doing that, I’d better do that as well. They’d just smash themselves into the ground. So there was all sorts of like tactics. And I remember hearing some really funny stories from other athletes where I think it was Cameron Brown, who’s one of New Zealand’s top Ironman competitors. And I remember reading a post that he put up one day and it was something about one of his heroes, like Rick Wells or someone like that and said, “You need to run half in the gutter and half out of the gutter.” They were just messing with him, so I always take what you hear from other people like that with a pretty big grain of salt, and you just need to do a bit of a gut check on it and be like, does this make any sense at all?
Andrew McCombe:
Well, it’s interesting too. Everyone’s different, right? So if more than four hours training, doesn’t work for you, you’ve got to listen to that, don’t you? Cause it’s not going to last long if you don’t.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. I mean you’ll just end up getting sick and injured and it changed a lot over the years. I haven’t raced for six or seven years now, but I can still go out and do more training than back in those days. Like the body’s just got the hardness to it after all those years of training. You see so many young athletes just smashing themselves into the ground unnecessarily and I think especially in the multi-discipline sports where a lot of people tend to look at it as; I’m swimming, biking, and running or kayaking, biking, and running. And so I’ve got to do like a full kind of program of kayaking and the same for biking and same for running, and it’s just unrealistic. And I think that the training nowadays is becoming a lot more refined. We’re now realizing that you’ve got to treat it as a package and but it’s pretty easy to blow yourself out.
Andrew McCombe:
It’s about quality, isn’t it? Not quantity at the end of the day.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s just finding that balance. There’s one of my biggest competitors in Coast to Coast, Gordon Walker, who now coaches Lisa Carrington for the kayaking, been a very successful partnership and he’s an amazing coach, and in our sporting days, we would be so close together, we’d be able to see each other at the finish line after, 10 or 11 hours of racing. And every race we did it was like that. And our approaches were like chalk and cheese. So there are a lot of different ways to get to the same position.
Andrew McCombe:
So you’re a 5-time winner the Coast to Coast. You had a foray into Ironman. I think I read somewhere you had the… do you still have the best time ever by a Kiwi in an Ironman distance race?
Richard Ussher:
No. Well, I did at one time. It was actually in a challenge race in Roth in Germany, which is I think is still the largest triathlon in the world, but I did 8.02 hours over there. It’s been well and truly beaten by a lot of the young guns now but that was a pretty special day out. I didn’t do a huge amount of Ironman racing, I think like five or six of them but the reason to go to Ironman from the multi-sport side of things, it felt like a lot of the Ironman athletes were really kind of going like “You’re not real athletes like if you came across the Ironman, you’d just get smashed.” And so it just became a bit of a personal crusade to just go and prove them wrong really but ultimately I didn’t really find the enjoyment in road racing that I did in the off-road racing. And so even the satisfaction of getting faster and more refined at that side of the sport didn’t get me out of bed every day and sports got something that it’s, it’s too hard to do, unless you absolutely love it.
Andrew McCombe:
Yeah, exactly. Just speaking of that. So at what point did the tipping point come from being the athlete to organizing the Coast to Coast because you became the race director for a few years there didn’t you?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. So I went back to doing a bit of multi-sport and racing coasts again, after Ironman and I still did one or two. I think I did another couple of Ironman races or challenge races as they were. And I’d always been really aware that I didn’t want to be 40 and an athlete and not have anything else. So I was always acutely aware of having to remove myself from that. So I’d actually already moved away a little bit. I’d set up a business called Flow Kayaks with a friend of mine who unfortunately he’s not with us any longer, but we set up a company basically making racing kayaks and paddles.
I’ve been doing that as well as racing. And then a guy that I knew ended up buying the Coast to Coast off Robin Judkins, who was the original founder and basically he came and said, “I bought the race, what do we need to do to to get it humming along again?” And I think I certainly felt from an athletes point of view that the race was nowhere near in the shape that it could be. And it had been, it had been way ahead of its time at the start. It was internationally one of the biggest and hardest and best races that you could possibly do but 30 years later it was essentially the same race there was very little added to it in terms of the athlete experience or the spectator experience or how you can follow it.
And it goes across a pretty remote part of the country and the price had just kept going up and up and up. So our strategy was just really to try and just get the balance back right for the money that people were paying and the experience that they were getting, that it was reflective of what the actual race was and also make it a lot more accessible to wider groups of people and make it a bit more spectator friendly so people could follow it online. So there’ve been all these advances in technology and things like that had just never been captured.
Andrew McCombe:
Did you change course or the route or was it more just a case of the technology changes and being more accessible in that regard?
Richard Ussher:
We did end up changing the last cycle route. The last cycle goes through the center of Christchurch and when it had been set up, it basically went through a route that really made sense. I don’t even think there was any traffic lights on it at the time, by the time the race changed hands there were 17 or 18 sets of traffic lights. And we went to talk to the police who managed all the traffic lights and they were like, well, to give you an example, we put 40 or 45 people on the Coast to Coast race and the route through Christchurch and I think at the time was when the Wellington Sevens were kind of still going and they said, “We give four to that.”
And so it was pretty disproportionate. And the other issue with the original route was that the police would leave at seven o’clock when the majority of the people had all gone through, but quite often there was still the top women racing for prize money and it is classified as the multi-sport world championships. A big part of it was to try and make sure that the race experience was consistent for everyone and that people weren’t putting their lives in danger chasing prize money and running red lights or things like that, which I know happened because my wife was one of them.
We basically were able to reroute the course to a different finishing spot in Christchurch to New Brighton beach, as opposed to Sumner and essentially take out all the traffic lights, all the the police presence went back to about four people, and it was just much easier logistics wise and funny enough, the course only changed by about 500 meters and that was more by luck than by design, but I think it’s been viewed pretty successful, that change, and it certainly improved the athlete experience across the board.
Andrew McCombe:
And participation wise, it started to sell out I hear?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. So it’s a little bit like what you’re talking about earlier with, it just takes time for things to happen. So I was there for five years and we went from about 450-500 people on the start line to about a thousand. And they’ve since got a couple of extra concessions for numbers and it took about three to four years, for it to sell out the first time. And it sold out in November, December, and then there’s a bit of attrition towards the race and so it was slightly down and the next year it sold out in about three months and then last year, about 10 days, and this year it sold out in three minutes. So yeah.
Andrew McCombe:
People, they want to get out, right? Out of lockdown and get out into the bush.
Richard Ussher:
So I guess looking back on it, there’s lots of things that we set in place. The new organizers have been able to just keep extending on and but it’s nice to know that we played a little part in it, in the revitalization of it.
Andrew McCombe:
And so the journey from Winter Olympian to Coast to Coast champion multiple times over to race director and obviously building it up and I know it’s always been a successful product and a very attractive product, but then you had your time there and you decided from there it was move on and you’ve set up, was it Cable Bay Adventure Park from there, or?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, while I was running Coast to Coast. I was fortunate enough to work for a little start up that was operating in Sydney and in London. It was essentially an AI company that developed some sensors and some AI around coaching progressions called Guided Knowledge and I got exposed to some very clever people there and a lot of people that had no boundaries on where they thought things could go.
My goal had never been to be a race director or to be involved in that side of sports. It wasn’t something that I had a huge interest in and so I guess I was just looking for opportunities and my wife and I decided that we wanted to stay in Nelson that this is where we wanted to be based. And so, I was just looking all the time for opportunities and stumbled across the Adventure Park, which was for sale. And it was quite a long way out of the realms of our possibility at the time, but…
Andrew McCombe:
From experience, from financial…
Richard Ussher:
From a financial point of view?
Andrew McCombe:
Yeah.
Richard Ussher:
But I guess it was something that I just couldn’t really shake and so it was just something that people would be like, “what are you looking at?” And it would come up just again and again in a conversation, and I couldn’t get anyone to tell me it was a silly idea. So in the end, I went and had a look at it with a couple of other friends and had a chat to a mate who worked in the bank and just see if there’s any possibility that we’d be able to make it happen and he was like, “Can’t see why not.” And so we ended up putting an offer and which ended up being accepted and that started about a year long struggle around how to finance it.
So ultimately we ended up having to subdivide a part of the property and bring another family on that. We sectioned that part off. And we gave it everything we had and threw ourselves into it 100 percent. And that was three and a half years ago now. And it’s been a pretty interesting ride with all the global developments and things like that. But we have also been very fortunate in that we’ve been extremely well supported by Kiwis, since the end of the COVID lockdown here. And so the business has actually been able to thrive, over the last, nine to ten months. Whereas a lot of the industry has been hit really hard. So very fortunate in that respect.
Andrew McCombe:
And the cable park itself, or the Adventure Park, I’m sorry, Cable Bay Adventure Park, what are the key things we can do there from a business perspective or as a user perspective?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. So the park’s essentially an Adventure Park. It’s somewhere people can come for an experience and I guess as opposed to a lot of the attractions in Nelson, which are walk or kayak or drink, it’s about you can come be entertained, so our signature ride is the Sky Wire, a big, giant flying fox that flies across the valley. It’s really what everything’s backed off. In terms of the park there’s also quad biking here, paint ball, and then we’ve got a licensed cafe on site.
We’ve got another operator who runs archery and we’ve been developing the whole park into a mountain bike park as well. So that’s been a really big project and one that has been taking a lot of time, but it’s all driven off the back of volunteers from the community coming out and helping build that. And that’s become kind of a real focal point for our true Nelson locals and something that there’s still a lot of development to go, but I think has been a big part of the engagement with the community and yeah, and it help’s give us that visibility locally.
Andrew McCombe:
It’s very renowned, I believe. It’s not just a mountain bike park. I’ve been up there and the terrain is pretty sharp for someone like myself who’s a novice, but you’ve had some pretty high level riders up there.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. We haven’t really advertised it as such, but we’re really lucky that Nelson’s pretty renowned for their high level riding and we’ve also got people really involved in the mountain biking community, like Sven Martin who’s one of the world’s top mountain bike photographers, lives just down the road and has been incredibly supportive along with his wife Anka but a lot of the local EWS riders, like Brandon Stone and Rae Morrison come out and we’ve had some of New Zealand’s best riders out here like Brooke Macdonald and Wyn and Eddie Masters and they just seem to filter through the park whenever there and Nelson, like they come out and jump on the shuttles and we shot a few product releases for different brands out there as well. And it’s more of a passion side to the business side, but it’s pretty cool when you see people peddle off into the hills and then come back with a massive smile on their face. It definitely gets you pretty pumped to keep pushing and keep trying to make the park a success.
Andrew McCombe:
And one of the things I noticed, you mentioned community before, but it’s also doing a lot with the natural side of it and the environmental side. Tell us about that.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. So the environmental side, I guess, is something that has developed as our knowledge of the park has developed. So when we first looked at it, it was not really on the radar at all. But like a lot of places in New Zealand the farming side has been predominantly the use of the land and sometimes not always the best farming practices and we’ve got 400 hectares of native on the property from true remnant forest is about 50 hectares of that with trees literally thousands of years old through to…
Andrew McCombe:
You’ve got a few, 2000 years old haven’t you? We saw them the other day…
Richard Ussher:
There’s some pretty impressive trees on there. And a mix of regenerating stuff from 20 through to almost 150 years old. And that was, a big part of the attraction for us. Was just in terms of the beautiful native forest and then as we learned more about it, you start to understand about how poor the health of the surrounding areas was and what an issue the single species plantations, like the pine plantations and things like that and when we saw how engaged people were with the native side and the things that we were doing there, like trapping getting people in there on the track so that they could see the different things.
We started to realize that it would be a great project to actually try and remove and restore the whole area back to something like what it would have been thousands of years ago. And I guess a difference to what we’re doing is that because we’ve got a successful commercial venture on there and the mission is two-fold like do all this restoration and get the health of the area back really good, but it’s also to provide a recreational asset for people coming through whether they’re local or whether they’re from New Zealand or from overseas, somewhere where they can come and walk and bike and explore and appreciate. And I guess I’m a big believer that if people can actually go and experience these areas, then they can see how special they are and then they become advocates for it and for its protection, whereas if it’s locked away and people just can’t go in there, “You can’t go in there they’re special.” It’s actually not that special for people because they don’t get an appreciation for it.
Andrew McCombe:
They don’t understand it, do they.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. So everything we do on there, we try and make sure that it serves dual purposes. So the mountain bike tracks are also trap lines. We’re trapping possum, rats, stoats, cats; all of the things that destroy our native bird life and our forest. And then there are also hunting lines for removing goats and pigs and other things that again decimate the undergrowth and so effect the forests. And then all those tracks, whether it’s mountain biking or walking, or recreational assets as well. And we also get a lot of people coming through from the schools or the education providers, like the Polytechs and that and so they’re also educational assets.
Andrew McCombe:
What’s the long-term vision with the park?
Richard Ussher:
I guess the plan that we’ve got in places is actually for 500 years. So we’re obviously not going to be around to see that, but if you don’t take a view that’s that long, then you can’t restore the ecosystem to how it was. So, we’re doing our part to get that project started, and then it’d be up to other generations to carry that on. I highly doubt the Sky Wire will be around in 500 years, but if people are still mountain biking, then there may still be some tracks through there.
Andrew McCombe:
A few e-bikes in 500 years won’t there?.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, there would probably be something we can’t even think about right now, some kind of hoverboard or…
Andrew McCombe:
So when you think back on your journey it was very individualistic, or singular focused when you were doing the skiing, and then you’ve just slowly migrating through the process to being more about a company, having vision, et cetera, to now giving back to the community with a 500 year plan. Do you think for the entrepreneurs and the young Outliers out there that if you look back at the start of your journey, that was even on the radar? I know you mentioned earlier that it just evolved over time, but to try to help the Outliers and entrepreneurs out there. Is that something that’s important at the start or what would you recommend? Like at a starting process for people looking at your journey as an example?
Richard Ussher:
Yeah, it’s a really good question and a really hard one to answer. I think that what’s important at different stages of your life is quite different and people always go with the benefit of hindsight, I’d do X, Y, or Z. But I also do think that life’s kind of a process that you mature on over time and that what is important to you at different stages of your life is quite different. So when I was 20, all I cared about was trying to be the best at something and chase girls and have a good time. That was what I cared about and some people will be different and have a much more bigger world picture at that time, but that was what I was passionate about.
And then as I started to get into my late twenties, early thirties and I started to think, well, at some point I’m going to get slow and I won’t be able to make my living as an athlete. So what am I going to do? And that started the exploration into what could I do from a business point of view? And then even from a business point of view it wasn’t until I understood the particular business that we had become involved with until I actually understood it at a deeper level from being immersed in it for a while that I kind of really appreciated what an impact we could actually start to have on our community and how we could run a successful business but how some of that success would actually be about giving back.
I do think it is pretty individual, but I think the most important thing is, whatever it is, that you’ve got your dream, where ultimately, if there were no barriers, where do you want to get to and from there then, I always have that as my dream. And that’s part of my big picture thing, what gets me out of bed in the morning when things are getting tough and then you have your goals and you develop your pathway off that. And the pathway that you go is always going to be different to what you think is the start as you move through. But, I think that for me, that’s been pretty solid and it’s just given me a process to work through for anything I’ve wanted to do.
Andrew McCombe:
I read somewhere, you mentioned that one of your mantras or mottos is that every challenge is designed or meant to be beaten. So when you come up against a challenge, what’s your process for overcoming it?
Richard Ussher:
Well usually, there’s probably a bit of bloody mindedness at the start, just trying to smash on through it. But , generally, at some point, if you can’t just push through, then it’s about stepping back and trying to be really objective about the situation and just look at all the different sides of it and see if there’s an obvious route or if not, try and design a pathway, either around it or over it or under it, or through it. And then it’s just really about continuing to revisit where you want to go and then the pathway that you’re on. And I guess for me, I just try and always just keep a mindset that nothing’s impossible.There has to be a way to do it. So it might as well be me.
Andrew McCombe:
That’s a really interesting point. And to me, that’s an Outlier trait, right? Nothing’s impossible. There’s infinite possibilities but there’s a lot of people in the world that get in their own way and stop their own success. Right. Do you believe it’s an Outlier trait or do you believe it’s something that can be taught, to to be successful?
Richard Ussher:
I think just by nature of how I think, I would say that within everyone there’s the ability to achieve whatever they want, but it’s the same as the super talented athlete who isn’t prepared to put the hard work in, that you have to actually want it and it has to be part of where you want to go. And I think that there’s a lot of people that they never quite pushed the buttons in the right order to get motivated enough to achieve something beyond what they would think is possible. But I do think that there’s a lot of people who also have these big visions and big dreams and big goals, I guess their process falls down because they don’t take any action or the actions that they take are not kind of appropriate and they’re always looking at things and going, “Oh, well, I tried that or I tried that,” but ultimately I think actions are the defining thing.
You can have the best plan in the world and if you don’t do anything about it, then you’ll never get any closer to it. And I do think a lot of people they’ll try one way and then not succeed at it and then be like, “oh, well, I tried” and give up. And probably the Outlier attitude you’re talking about is not accepting that that’s an acceptable outcome. Okay I tried that, so that doesn’t work. So I can cross that off the list and I’ll try it this way. And how important it is to you depends on how many times you’ll try a different way to see whether you can make it happen.
Andrew McCombe:
And in that process too, looking back in time and looking at your parents and the values, they instilled in you, how important is support in the process that, not only for your journey, but for others that are out there and making sure they’re surrounded with the right people.
Richard Ussher:
Yeah. Support is really, important. I think it’s also something that as you start to develop things, you’ll naturally take people on the journey with you. And then if people are inspired by what you’re trying to do, then, you’ll develop a network of peers and friends who actually help make that journey possible. I wouldn’t say that our family is super close but what my parents didn’t do was put limits on how we thought about things. And that probably was the biggest gift of all. But I think there are lots of people that have to overcome far more barriers, than what I did.
Whether it’s social or economic or… as I said at the start, we weren’t particularly well off but we were still a whole lot better off than some people. So I think that part of it is just acknowledging what advantages you have at the start as well, and then making sure that you don’t use excuses that are not really valid and just take advantage of your situation. You’ve got to take advantage of the situation that you’re given and I think it’s a healthy perspective to look at it and look at all of the positives that you have in your life. And you can think about there’s hundreds of examples for most people of how much worse it could be.
And then you realize that even if you don’t succeed in something, you’re still going to be way better off than a lot of other people’s situation. As soon as you realize that failure in something is not that bad, then that means that you’re far more willing to take some risks and put it on the line. And I guess, going back to when I was skiing and I started off in multi-sport and I was living on pretty meager amounts. There was all the money that I had and that I could generate but when I quit my job and I went back to that lifestyle, it actually made me realize that what you’re doing and how you’re sort of empowering yourself to do things is far more important than whether you’re making a certain amount of money. So I think that if your goals are driven by something bigger than just a financial reward, then they are a lot more powerful.
Andrew McCombe:
So if there was one ultimate thing that would sum up, the one piece of advice that you’ve observed throughout your journey, other than, obviously you’ve mentioned so many, immersion is one, commitment, planning, support giving back, legacy, et cetera, et cetera, what would it be for the young Outliers out there on the start of their journey that you feel could help fast track that for them not in a “It’s not going to take work perspective,” but maybe just a wisdom thing that you could share with them.
Richard Ussher:
This is something. It’s a little analogy from a race that I did. I was at a Primal Quest race in the Seattle mountains with Nathan Faavae and I think we had Christina, and might’ve been Hayden Key. We had a really good race team and I remember we were probably in second or third at the time. And on the map, it showed us going from this transition, riding up this huge mountain and then straight across to a checkpoint and we were with another team at the time, and we rode up this mountain and we were probably about 10 or 15 K from the checkpoint and the road just stopped and we’d been riding up this whole, I don’t know, it felt like we’d been riding up the hill for six or seven hours; it was a long way.
And if we went back down the mountain and around the other way, it was going to be a couple of hundred kilometres. And so we decided that we would just bush bash through the forest and get to the checkpoint. So about 10 hours later, we’re still about halfway from where we’d been to get to the checkpoint. And the general feeling was like, “Well, we’ve obviously made a mistake, but we’re committed now. We just have to keep pushing through.”
But everyone was pretty down about it. Another seven or eight hours later, we arrived at the checkpoint and we were expecting the whole field’s gone past us, and what had actually happened is that the two teams, we were still together, it was with our arch rivals Nike and we’d actually passed the other team and we’re now in the lead. So I think that sort of sums up what the journey towards anything that you succeed.
There’s going to be lots of points where you want to give up or you feel like you’re just wasting your time or whatever. Within the team, basically we had an agreement that the only way you pulled off a race course was by medical. Like you couldn’t quit. And I think just taking that off the table straight away, like, I can’t stop, it’s just like there’s no option but to see the journey out to the end and sometimes that’ll be successful and sometimes it will be less successful, but that will always be a really good learning experience if you look at it in the right way.
And so the way that I always try and look at things as go well, it’s bad for me, how bad is it for everyone else. And if you’ve got that positive mentality and you’re looking at things the right way and you’re finding ways to stay motivated and taking action, then ultimately that’s a way forward and a way to success.
Andrew McCombe:
Well, our journey’s come to an end Richard, you’ve certainly inspired me to be a better person and maybe even run in the Coast to Coast at some point. Thanks very much for coming on Outlier mate, you’re officially an Outlier.
Richard Ussher:
Excellent. Thanks Andrew.
Andrew McCombe:
Well, there it is. I hope you enjoyed this inspiring Outlier TV episode with Richard Ussher, for more videos, resources, and information, visit us at www.Outlier.tv or connect with us on our social media pages below. I’m Andrew McCombe and here’s to living the Outlier life, outside of the comfort zone. I’ll see you soon.
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