Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
Bringing together local businesses and neighbor of the Tri-Cities region. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Skip Mauney helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around The Tri-Cities.
Is your business serving the residents of Tri-Cities? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpTri-Cities.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
EP# 287: From Floods to Fitness: The Resilient Story of Mchone Performance Training
When Hurricane Helene ravaged his newly expanded gym with nine feet of toxic floodwaters on his 40th birthday, Steven Mchone faced a devastating choice: surrender to circumstances or find a way forward. The founder of Mchone Performance Training—"where local legends train"—chose resilience, a quality he instills in his mountain athlete clients daily.
Mchone Performance Training stands apart in the fitness landscape by focusing exclusively on adventure athletes in Western North Carolina and throughout the Appalachian region. Steven's journey into specialized outdoor fitness was deeply personal, watching his park ranger father lose his ability to enjoy wilderness due to neglected physical health. This powerful motivation drives his mission to help hikers, climbers, mountain bikers, and trail runners maintain the strength and mobility needed for lifelong outdoor adventures.
The podcast reveals fascinating insights about strength training myths that hold outdoor athletes back. Many fear weightlifting will make them bulky or slow, but Steven—a former competitive bodybuilder—explains how properly designed strength training actually enhances performance and prevents injury. His clients range from high schoolers to 74-year-old downhill mountain bikers, proving adventure has no age limit when supported by appropriate physical preparation.
Perhaps most compelling is Stephen's resilience story. After pivoting through COVID restrictions by moving equipment outdoors daily, he faced the catastrophic flooding of his Biltmore Village facility. With financial resources depleted from recent expansion, the business survived through community support—members cleaning equipment with toothbrushes, contractors donating time, and unexpected grants appearing when hope seemed lost. Today, Mchone Performance Training operates stronger than before, with a vision to expand to ten mountain towns.
Ready to elevate your outdoor adventures through specialized strength training? Discover how Mchone Performance Training helps mountain athletes reach new heights at MchonePerformanceTraining.com and join a community that embodies their founder's philosophy: never stop adventuring.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast of the Tri-Cities in Western North Carolina. So today I am very excited to have an interesting guest in our studio for the first time, and I'm sure you'll be just as excited as I am because today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, mr Stephen McCone, who is the owner operator of McCone Performance Training. Stephen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Hey, good morning, skip, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We're glad to have you, like I said, very interested to learn all about what you do. Why don't you kick us off by telling us about what you do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so owner, owner, founder of McCone Performance Training. Tagline is where local legends train. So we we're a performance studio for mountain athletes and adventurers, for mountain athletes and adventurers. So we're a little bit non-traditional athletes. So we focus on helping people who get out into Western North Carolina and the Appalachian region and try to keep them fit and well for mountain life and adventuring. So it could be hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, trail running, climbing. We try to keep all of our adventure sports folks healthy so they can stay out there and keep adventuring.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, how, stephen? How did you get into this business?
Speaker 3:I grew up in Western North Carolina and I had a father who was a park ranger. A father who was a park ranger and unfortunately I, you know, as I was growing up, kind of saw what happens when you don't take care of your health and wellness. So to see my father go from an avid outdoorsman and adventure lover to being someone who was stuck in home and, you know, due to his physical limitations he kind of lost the ability to be outside and be in wilderness. So early age I decided I wanted to try to be more fit and healthy, just so I could continue doing those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:So what are some myths or misconceptions in the performance training business?
Speaker 3:I feel like people think that not everyone needs to strength train, or the misconceptions that strength training will make you Arnold Schwarzenegger or you're going to have these big. Yeah, my earlier career I was a competitive bodybuilder and I can assure you that it takes a lot more than showing up to the gym a couple of days a week to become a bodybuilder. So one of the misconceptions is you know, if you lift weights, you're going to be big and bulky. We work with a lot of athletes and their misconception is that strength training will make them slow. And I like to people to know you know, if you're more fit and you're stronger, you're not going to be slower. So that's one of the misconceptions that strength will slow you down. But it's quite the opposite.
Speaker 2:Well, you mentioned you know you're trying to keep people healthy so that they can stay outdoors and do their adventures. Who are your target clients and how do you reach them?
Speaker 3:So our target market is just typically the adult adventure athlete. So we kind of find that around age 30, our bodies, you can't heal it with beer and tacos anymore, so you got to start adding something into the mix. And so we teach people not only like strength training but self-care, stretching, rolling techniques and things they can do to help them, you know, stay fit and healthy with their endeavors. So it's, you know, a majority of our folks are kind of mid-30s to mid-60s. We have some of our outliers where we have a couple of high school athletes and then we have one of my favorite athletes is Bonnie Bonnie's, 74, and she loves downhill mountain biking. So wide range.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow. And how do you reach those folks?
Speaker 3:A lot of it is being at the places that they're going to be at, um, being out at the races. We sponsor races, we're involved in the races. Uh, you know, our, our coaches are also athletes, so they're out there in the community and, uh, you know, we volunteer, whether it's, you know, trail building, uh, you know, handing out food, things like that. Um, so we just try to be involved in directly helping out with the events and the members.
Speaker 2:Very cool, very cool. Well, outside of work, I imagine I know what do you like to do for fun.
Speaker 3:Jumping waterfalls, mountain bike, trail run, you know, just trying to live the things I want to do. And, yeah, my goal is to never stop adventuring and trying to always learn something new. So this year I'm getting a little bit more into the whitewater sports and this fall I hope to play around a little bit more with climbing. So I'm getting on some big rock stuff.
Speaker 2:Wow, have you done mountain climbing before?
Speaker 3:No, but we also train several of the local guide companies to help them stay fit. For you know being out there and taking folks up, so, uh, I've been telling them for a while I'm gonna get out there with them. So there you go you know, it's good to be out there. So it lets me feel like what others feel like when they come into the gym the first time and they're nervous. That's that's going to be me on the on looking glass rock this year.
Speaker 2:There you go, there you go. Well, let's switch gears for just a second. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you've overcome and how it made you stronger in the end?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean life, just you know it comes at you. You know the rock you say yeah, I mean life, just you know it comes at you. You know the Rocky say you know life's going to come at you and it's going to beat you down and you, just you have to keep getting back up and that's. You know, covid happened. So we had a year where we're like, wow, like this is going to, this is going to be something. We, you know we had grown and we'd start off the second year of our business and then we got shut down.
Speaker 3:We live in a state, in an area where the lockdown lasted a bit longer than some areas. You know, my gym was in a complex where I'm worried about my neighbor, you know, sending an email that they saw me talking to someone without a mask and we just had to pivot. So we, you know, we started moving all of our equipment outdoors every day. So behind my, my original gym, we had a big outdoor space. So I had bought a two ton rolling rack, like a big industrial rolling rack, and we would put all the equipment on the rolling rack and roll it outside and we'd work out, and any of you guys that live here in you know the mountain region. It rains in the summer or spring, you know almost every day. This summer particularly, it's been a big thing.
Speaker 2:It's been insane.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so yeah, we would be outside working out and all of a sudden you'd see the clouds rolling up and, all right, load everything on the cart, push it back inside. So you know, we pivoted on the COVID stuff. When we were allowed to come back indoors we had to go with a lot of restrictions but you know, our members and our community continued to show up and you know, whatever we had to do to keep moving and stay healthy and support our community, we just pivoted on that and we got through it, built a really strong community. And then, you know, we got hit with a lean. I moved my studio last year about this time into the Biltmore Village and that's kind of one of the ground rules. So I got to move into a bigger studio space and built more village and invested in new equipment and it was our big chance.
Speaker 3:And then, six months into that, complete devastation from Hurricane Colleen, which also was my 40th birthday. So I got to spend my 40th birthday pushing sludge, essentially out of my gym. So while a disaster tourist came and took pictures of me and talked about how sad it was, I was spending my 40th birthday, you know, sweeping away my dreams. But you show up when you get hit and you just keep showing up. So I showed up every day, you know, cleaned off a little more sludge, took all my metal equipment, took my dumbbells, kettlebells, anything that I could salvage, and we took it up to my house. My house looked like a backyard gym. It just has all my squat rack, my parking area, my dumbbells and kettlebells and anything metal that we could keep.
Speaker 3:We were out there. We didn't have water for, I think, at least three weeks, um, so I had friends that were were coming by and helping us refill my, my, uh, my tubs so that we could bring water down and spray off the equipment. So, uh, so that was a little fun hiccup. Uh, I had an amazing uh have an amazing team and amazing staff who who stuck through through this one with me and, uh, you know, they were out there with toothbrushes and spray bottles and helping get all the grime off of it and making things happen. So that was our scenario. We, you know, got everything cleaned off and we said, all right, well, we still have people to keep fit. So we took our kettlebells and dumbbells to a park and five days a week, we had workouts in the morning and in the evening and continued to do that while our space got renovated and took about three months for them to completely renovate the space and make it safe. I think we were the second business back in Biltmore Village after the storm.
Speaker 2:Wow, and and your birthday, september 26th.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's the 28th, so the storm happened.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's the 28th, so it happened that you know, the 27th was the biggest part of the storm and then the first. You know, the water was still. On the 27th, when I went down to look at the gym, there was probably still five feet of water. We had roughly nine feet of water in there at the height of it. Wow, so all our treadmills, our bikes, our rowers, and then it wasn't just mud and water, it was a lot of toxic chemicals and pollutants and things like that in there. So a lot of stuff we just had to get rid of because it became a biohazard. And then, yeah, I looked at my bank account and I said I don't have any money. So this is going to be interesting, because we had spent our money to get into the new space and outfit it. So that's that's when, like, blessings just started happening.
Speaker 3:During COVID, I had written for grants and we didn't get any grants because we were such a small new business. So this time around, when I started writing out for grants, every time I click submit, I expected nothing back. So I would submit another grant and I'm like well, I just wasted two hours of telling my sob story again on an email and I'm like. Well, I just wasted two hours of telling my sob story again on an email and then, all of a sudden, grants started showing up.
Speaker 3:Wow no-transcript change the trajectory. One of our coaches also has set up a GoFundMe account and our GoFundMe hit, I think, right around $35,000. So between the grant and GoFundMe yeah, yeah, I was telling people it was, you know, just a lot of emotions. During that time I would hear a ding on my phone, I'd get an alert that we'd had another donation and I would just, you know, someone I hadn't talked to since high school, you know, you know, donated you know a thousand dollars and said we want to see you open.
Speaker 3:So, wow, you know things like that, um, so we, uh, we we were blessed, um, to be able to come back and we were actually able to rebuy all of our equipment and and upgrade some of the equipment, um, so we were able to come back, you know, bigger and better than before the storm. So we're back up and going. So that was a little bit of, you know, a hardship we went through there and now we're, you know, we're thriving, we're busier than we were before this storm and looking forward to what we can continue to do.
Speaker 2:Wow, so you're back in Biltmore Village.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's hard for businesses these days. If you're a small business, especially in an area like Asheville, there's a lot of competition and the prices are not there for the small business entrepreneur. So, yeah, the options you get presented are either or you're either in a floodplain or you're you're in a less desirable area. So we're we're making the most of it. We have four years left on our lease there and you know we now we have action plans. So you know we're even on a high alert during this, this next hurricane season.
Speaker 3:We have local, the folks that live in the neighborhoods that have trucks. We all have a list now that if it looks like it's going to go this way next time around, we're going to pull the trucks down, we're going to put the treadmills and all the equipment that we're worried about in the trucks, take them to higher ground, and that's about all we can do. So we have a plan and you know you never expect something to go so wrong. There's a lot, of, a lot of connections around here with you know the surrounding areas and the mountain communities. You know our guides. You know they. They work in the Nolichucky, they work in Tennessee, they work in Kentucky. You know the climbers, the rafters, the mountain bike guides, and we were all like hitting a real widespread way for that one.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you what it's been a you know horrible situation but stories like yours and I've talked to so many people in Western North Carolina about you know very similar stories where neighbors came out helping neighbors. You know people showing up, very resilient community, uh, coming together.
Speaker 3:It's been a been a real blessing, I think, from my perspective yeah, one of the the moments that we had was, uh, we basically got given, uh, 24 hours to remove all the the equipment out of the facility after not hearing a whole lot of communication to that point, and we were given 24 hours to get all of our equipment out until they were going to start the out of the facility after not hearing a whole lot of communication to that point. And we were given 24 hours to get all of our equipment out until they were going to start the remodel demo project the next day at five o'clock. So we sent a message out to our members and a big shout out to Zen Contracting, One of our members, Zen. He brought his contract company in and in 50 minutes, with the help of him and our members, we had we had pulled everything out, cleaned up shop and we were done.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, you know, seeing those moments where the community shows up, you know having having the folks help us clean, having folks help us pull things out, you know, and it's you know all walks of life. You got CEOs in the back parking lot with full eight. You know hats, you know. You know the hazmat suit on and they're going out there and getting on a zoom call in between helping us clean up and things like that. So, uh, it really gave us the hope and inspiration to continue.
Speaker 2:Awesome story, awesome story. Well, stephen, if you could think of one thing that you'd like our listeners to remember about you and about the cone performance training, what would that be?
Speaker 3:Oh that if you, if you live in the Appalachian, is getting to the tops of the highest peaks. Continue to move your body and look into the possibility of strength training if you feel like you're not capable to do things that you love, and try to never stop adventuring.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And if any of our listeners are intrigued you know, intrigued, interested and want to want to try to improve their strength so that they can get out and do some, do some wild stuff in the in the wild, what? How can we learn more?
Speaker 3:You can go to MacombPerformanceTrainingcom and reach out to us on our contact link. We do do some remote training. We are hoping to expand into other mountain towns. My vision with Macomb Performance Training is to have 10 mountain gyms and 10 mountain towns, one of those being Johnson City, tennessee, is kind of a part of my vision. So I want to give mountain athletes a place, and mountain folks in general a place that feels more welcoming to them, uh, and a place that can keep them, keep them fit. So look us up and, uh, keep an eye out. Uh, hopefully we'll come to a mountain town near you.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Well, we'll definitely be watching for that, steven. Thank you so much, appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule, uh, between clients to clients, to uh tell us all about your story and your journey and and all the great things you're doing at uh mccomb performance training, and wish you and your family and your, your clients, your business, all the best, moving forward. Awesome thanks, skip. Appreciate you, appreciate you and maybe we can have you back sometime, maybe when you open some of those in other mountain towns. Sounds good. All right, man, thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnptry-citiescom. That's gnptry-citiescom, or call 423 3, 7, 1, 9, 5, 8, 7, 3.