037: A Pro Triathlete’s Honest Advice for Beginners

“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.

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Instagram: @dylannortje97

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Daniel: @dannyjd_
Jannis: @jannisrothermel