#ShootingTheBreeze with Tim LeRoy
Welcome to the third in our irregular series where we chat to outdoor industry professionals: Shooting the breeze. We’re hoping to start conversations, help people coming into the industry and share interesting advice and thoughts which come up.
This time it’s the turn of Tim LeRoy, “a writer, teacher, adviser, counsel, coach and seahugger.”
Tim “helps people who want to build responsible companies that operate with integrity and purpose. Some of them have said very nice things.”
What quick advice would you have for someone looking to combine a love of the outdoors or sport with their working life?
Get comfortable with being a teacher. In fact, learn how to enjoy being a teacher.
When you are starting out, accept that most of your time will be spent helping beginners and not being paid to do high speed rad sh*t. So it’s essential that you find the joy in helping other people to progress and learn. It’s easy to wish you were with your mates ripping it instead of hand-holding, but leading, guiding, instructing and teaching are wonderful ways to learn a huge amount about your chosen sport or discipline. They’re also the best classrooms for you to learn about human nature and how to deal with people who are frightened. A life skill you’ll need in offices more often than you’d imagine.
To build on that, there are very few ‘outdoor’ jobs that carry a big salary or the likelihood of above average wealth, and so it’s a good idea to learn how to love what you do just because you love doing it. You’re not going to get rich as a mountaineer or a sailor, so to paraphrase Mickey Smith, “if you only scrape out a living, at least make sure it’s a living worth scraping. If there’s no future in it, make sure it’s a present worth remembering. Something worth remembering with a photograph or a scar.”
What do you feel is the biggest issue facing the sector in next 5 years?
Sustainability, no question. The vast majority of the equipment we use, the ways we clothe ourselves and transport ourselves to spend time in the hills or the oceans, are toxic and catastrophically damaging. We’re trapped in a system that makes hypocrites of us all, but I suspect that elements of outdoor lifestyles are going to become socially unacceptable quite quickly. No one who really cares about the environment can now fly to go skiing, or buy a Neoprene wetsuit. Brands that don’t get ahead of that, and provide genuinely, really, truly sustainable alternatives, are going to quickly become pariahs. The future is quite bleak and it is a true existential crisis so we’re going to have to work really hard and really fast to create viable alternatives.
What’s the one thing you always pack for an adventure?
A towel. Because I read a lot of Douglas Adams when I was young and impressionable, and he was right.
Has working in the outdoors or sports ever killed your buzz? How do you stop it becoming just another job?
Honestly, no. I don’t think so. I spent many years working with hot air balloons which involved a lot of getting up before dawn to stand in a muddy field wishing the wind would drop or the rain would stop whilst placating pissed off potential passengers before calling the flight off and then driving hours to the next destination to repeat the process. But even then, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t in a cubicle in an office cold calling strangers to try and sell them insurance. If you’re guiding some moaning beginners down a bumpy, icey piste, in a white-out, just remember those guys in that office, in Slough.
And finally, tell us something Outside Of Ordinary about yourself?
In 1999 I organised and flew in the first ever hot air balloon flight in Vietnam. It was in a 155 foot tall replica of an iconic brand’s beer bottle. Everything about the flight (and the whole promotional tour in general), was a very bad idea that should never made it off the drawing board, and it definitely shouldn’t have been given to us clueless jokers to run. But somehow the sight of a giant Tiger beer bottle hurtling across a central Saigon racecourse, at an alarming 45 degree angle, before wrapping itself over the grandstand, sold a sh*tload of beer. The brewery were so happy they sent us on to Cambodia to repeat the stunt. Absolutely none of that year was ordinary.
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