ATHCO

Juli Kleinhans once had almost 100,000 followers on Instagram. She didn’t make a cent from them.

Today she runs Gutsy, a fitness app and community for everyday women, with a far smaller following. And she’s convinced you can start a business with just 1,000 followers.

Juli raced at nationals for the first time when she was 11. By grade 11 her coach sat her down over dinner and told her that if she ran under 60 seconds in the 400m hurdles, she could race internationally. She ran the time. That year, two other girls ran faster, and only the top two went.

At university her new coach asked her a question nobody had ever asked her: why are you running? She burst into tears. At 20 she met her coach for coffee and could only get three words out: “I hate this.” It wasn’t the sport she hated. It was the pressure, and how her whole identity had been built around it. Around the same time her Instagram was hacked. She lost her sport and her following in the same stretch, and then lockdown hit.

What came next is the part we didn’t expect. Home workouts during COVID led to a personal training certificate, then group classes at F45, a hiking community, and eventually the Gutsy app, which launched in September 2024 at R99 a month so South African women could actually afford it. Now there’s also her podcast, She’s Gutsy.

In this episode Juli breaks down how to get brand deals with a small following: what a media kit needs, why your audience numbers matter more than your follower count, why she’d look people up on LinkedIn rather than send one DM, why doing your first deals for trade can pay off, and how a protein bar she melted in the microwave turned into a partnership with USN.

We also get into what nobody tells young athletes about pressure, why she came back to the track four years later to race her younger self (“I miss everything except the pressure”), doing an Ironman 70.3 in their first year of marriage without owning a bike, and the burnout she’s dealing with right now, which is why she trains 20 to 30 minutes a day.

Plus the time Sydney McLaughlin followed her back, and why she films weekly car reviews that have nothing to do with fitness.

Juli’s first ever podcast as a guest.

🔗 Follow Juli
Instagram: @julipoeli_official
Gutsy app: @gutsy_app
Podcast: She’s Gutsy Podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)

🔗 Follow ATHCO
Instagram: @athco.cc
YouTube: ATHCO

🔗 Follow Us
Daniel: @dannyjd_
Jannis: @jannisrothermel

“I’m not an influencer, I’m a triathlete.” That’s what it says in Dylan Nortje’s Instagram bio.

Dylan is a professional triathlete from White River who started racing at 16. He’s 29 now and, by his own count, still on his twelfth gap year. He never sat down and decided to go pro. He wanted to make it in cycling and didn’t crack it. Then he did one race in Joburg, and it kept going from there.

Making a living from triathlon in South Africa is a different game, though. Brands here run on small margins, importing is expensive, and very few of them can put big money behind an athlete. One brand owner told him straight: sponsoring the package he asked for would mean cancelling all her marketing. So they met halfway. Two years later, they’re still working together.

He’ll also tell you he hates Instagram. If he could delete the app today, it’d be gone. At the end of last year he decided to post anyway, on his own terms: he only shows products he actually uses, and gives an honest answer when people ask whether they work. When he started speaking up about depression, 15 to 20 guys messaged him privately within the first hour.

In this episode Dylan gives his honest advice to anyone getting into triathlon, especially Dan, who’s only a few weeks into his own training. We get into why “you don’t race triathlons, you train for them,” why he hasn’t raced since December and still loves every week of training, and how running without a watch helped take his 5K from around 16:40 into the 15s in six months.

We also get into why copying pro triathletes can make you slower. Instagram shows you the heat sessions in hoodies on a 36-degree day. It doesn’t show the nine hours of sleep and the 99% of unglamorous work behind them. Plus how Strava pushes people to run faster than their body wants, why work stress hits your body the same way a hard session does, and why he says that training alone, he’d have quit years ago.

And fuelling the simple way: how many carbs per hour, how to train your gut, whether DIY sugar mixes are worth it, and why a Bar One makes it onto his long rides.

An honest one about loving the process, and doing sport because it’s fun.

🔗 Follow Dylan
Instagram: @dylannortje97

🔗 Follow ATHCO
Instagram: @athco.cc
YouTube: ATHCO

🔗 Follow Us
Daniel: @dannyjd_
Jannis: @jannisrothermel

We met Michael Brand by accident. We were organising an event at SaunaHaüs, he happened to be there, and when we asked if he trained, he said he did "a little bit of triathlon." Then he sent us his list.

A self-made Ironman. A 100-miler. Top five at the Prom backyard ultra. Medals at the South African rowing champs. And the Cape 253. A 7.4km swim from Robben Island, a 138km cycle, and a 108km run over Cape Town's 13 Peaks with 6,500m of climbing.

His mates told him it was the dumbest thing they'd ever heard. He did it anyway.

Mike grew up rowing. For a kid with ADHD who didn't quite know where he fit, it was the first place where hard work showed up clearly in the results and the first time he found real confidence. Years later, struggling during his master's year, he went back to that lesson: pick something so difficult that it forces you to lock in every day.

At 12, he'd written two things on his bucket list: do an Ironman without ever doing a half, and run an ultra before a marathon. When COVID shut down races, he didn't wait. He built his own Ironman between Stellenbosch and Franschhoek and added 8km to the run so it would count as an ultra. He weighed 102kg when he started training. His first run was 2km and gave him shin splints. Fourteen hours later, he'd ticked off both.

Then came the Cape 253. On the run leg, three peaks in, around 3am, he partially tore his ITB coming down a rocky descent. He'd trained for ten months. So instead of stopping, he told himself: just one more peak. A doctor monitored his painkillers every two hours, friends joined for every leg, and he moved one peak at a time until he finished. 57 hours after starting.

In this episode we get into why he only picks goals he'll probably fail, why the race itself is never the point, and why an ultra can feel like a whole year of life condensed into 35 hours. We also talk about hallucinating friendly spiders 36 hours into UTCT, why backyard ultras are the only format that gets harder the more you train, his strategy for running one, why "sport is about doing the boring things very well," and the 200-miler he's training for next.

Plus ADHD and endurance sport, injury prevention, and our honest take on David Goggins.
Recorded inside Sauna, Cape Town.

🔗 Follow Mike 
Instagram: @michaelbrandrsa

🔗 SaunaHaüs Cape Town
Book a session or say hi: @saunahaus.cpt

🔗 Follow ATHCO
Instagram: @athco.cc
YouTube: ATHCO

🔗 Follow Us
Daniel: @dannyjd_
Jannis: @jannisrothermel

Chanel Kruger didn't grow up a runner. At school she only played netball, and by her own admission she hated putting in the work. Her sister was the track star.

That changed during COVID. Her sister kept training at home, so Chanel joined her, mostly just to spend time together. They worked through a Burnt Studios at-home program, one session led to another, and she never really stopped. She's been strength training consistently for five or six years now, and running came later.

She was sharing her training online long before it was a "creator athlete" thing. And at around 5,000 followers, she reached out to Burnt Studios and HOKA herself. Almost four years later, she's still partnered with both.

In this episode she breaks down exactly how she approached it. Why she bought and wore the brands long before she ever pitched them. Why you should "do what you would do if you were already a partner." Why staying within your niche matters more than saying yes to every offer. And why brands often see the value in you before you see it yourself.

We also get into how to grow as a fitness creator in South Africa without chasing perfection: why most of Instagram is actually normal parkruns and ordinary 5Ks, the simple content ideas hiding in every beginner's running journey, the editing tools she uses, and why her own page has become more of a fitness scrapbook than a planned content calendar. Even though she now manages social media for six brands as a freelancer.

Then there's the injury. Cape Town Marathon was her A-race. A week after Two Oceans, on an easy Saturday run with friends, she rolled her ankle and fractured her foot. She was back in the gym on crutches that Monday, missed the marathon, and slowly built back. Starting with two minutes of running and two minutes of walking, until her first continuous run of 12km.

Plus HYROX, why it's really a running race with obstacles, why Cape Town's packed run club scene makes it hard to stick to a training plan, and why fun and goals can coexist.

🔗 Follow Chanel
Instagram: @chanel_cronje

🔗 Follow ATHCO
Instagram: @athco.cc
YouTube: ATHCO

🔗 Follow Us
Daniel: @dannyjd_
Jannis: @jannisrothermel

One in four children in South Africa is affected by childhood stunting. And if a child doesn't get the nutrition they need in their first two years of life, the effects can't be reversed later.

Jeremy Cook is a motion designer with a nine-to-five. He's not an elite athlete, he's not running across a continent, and he doesn't have a big following. What he does have is a race calendar and this year he decided every event on it would be for something bigger than a medal.

It started with a swim. Three years ago his boss introduced him to a foundation that funds high-protein daily meals for young children, and their annual fundraiser was the big swim: 7.5km through the Atlantic from Robben Island to Blouberg. With a competitive swimming background, he signed up immediately. He's done it every year since. The most recent one in rough chop that added an hour for almost everyone in the water.

This year he started Strong Starts. Not a new NGO, but a way to connect the organisations already doing the work with people and companies who want to help. He set himself a goal of raising R100,000. He honestly didn't think he'd get to R20,000. He's past it.

The campaign now builds to one race: the UTCT 55km. The mechanic is simple. 55 kilometres, 55 children fed for a full year, R55,000.

In this episode we get into how he trains for open water endurance swims, the 15km river swim he signed up for almost on a whim, falling in love with trail running through the Running Late community, and why he'd rather swim in cold water with a wetsuit than risk the sharks on the other side of the peninsula.

We also talk honestly about the content side of fundraising. Why good causes still need good content to get noticed. Why he started on his phone rather than waiting for the right gear. How his page grew 16% a month once he posted consistently. From just over 100 followers. And how he approaches brands by offering his motion design skills in return for their support, rather than just asking for money.

Plus open water swimming tips for anyone training for their first triathlon, and the terrifying event he's shaken hands on for next year.

You don't need to run across a country to make a difference. Sometimes you just need to put a reason behind the race you were already going to do.

🔗 Support & Follow
Strong Starts: @strong__starts 
Jeremy: @jeremy__cook__
Donate: https://www.givengain.com/project/jeremy-raising-funds-for-startwell-foundation-118624

🔗 Follow ATHCO
Instagram: @athco.cc
YouTube: ATHCO

🔗 Follow Us
Daniel: @dannyjd_
Jannis: @jannisrothermel