Staying sober, crushing the Comrades

From rehab to recovery: Denver is always on the move

It has been a long road to the Comrades for Denver Van Der Bergh. From rehab, after 25 years of alcohol and drug addiction, to a respectable job in financial services and crushing it in marathons on the weekends.

The 47-year-old from Athlone on the Cape Flats ran his first Comrades in 10 hours and 40 minutes on Sunday June 9 2024.

“It was tough, but I was tougher,” he says.

Denver knows about tough; he also knows about being tougher.

In the last four years Denver has done a lot more than beating addiction, cleaning up his act and becoming an accomplished long-distance runner. He has also earned a degree, got his driver’s licence, found himself a respectable job in the financial services industry, and made his family very proud.

It has been four years of incredible highs and lows. Denver is the first in the family to graduate, which makes him feel like he is “breaking generational curses”. He has also recently experienced the loss of his father, who died as Denver was making final preparations for the Two Oceans Marathon.

Denver said at the time: “At least I don’t have any regrets with my dad. He saw me become the son that he could be proud of. He got to see me graduate, he saw me run the Two Oceans, he saw me happy.”

For anyone who doubts that they should try an intervention with family or friends who are struggling with addiction, Denver’s story is an instructive one.

Four years ago, his life was a mess, with drugs and alcohol at the centre of it all. His then-boss (in the hospitality industry) did him the favour of doing an “intervention” that left him with two choices: get fired or go to rehab. Denver chose the latter and “decided to make the change and turn my life around”.

When he came out of rehab at the beginning of Covid, the isolation threatened to destabilise everything he had achieved. To avoid “everything going down the drain”, he decided to make his new life a mirror of life in rehab.

He would wake up early and sit down to a proper breakfast. He made time for exercise and for meditation, as well as watching motivational videos. Denver spent a lot of his time online looking for ways to better himself and taking practical steps to get his life back on track. He got a driving licence. He applied for a replacement copy of his matric certificate. He renewed his CV.

He had done well at high school, but lack of funds and opportunity had denied him the chance to go further than high school. Now, fresh out of rehab, he was determined to get back into the education system somehow. He went online and applied to as many places as he could.

He had all but forgotten about applying to Tsiba, a not-for-profit higher education institution in Cape Town, when someone from the university called him and asked if he wanted to join a degree course. He was a bit hesitant because of Covid and because he “didn't have much money” and was delighted when he was told that he didn’t have to pay for his studies.

“Okay, when do I start?” he said. He describes this time in his life as:

“One of those phases where you decide to make your life better and the universe conspires to push you forward”.

That is how he found himself starting his business degree at the age of 44, worrying about how he was going to “reignite this old brain”. He didn’t have to worry, as it turned out. He completed his degree and was honoured with the 2024 Graham Lashbrooke Award for outstanding academic achievements in entrepreneurship and leadership.

His next big step forward was to sign up for the Investment Management Administrator course (iMacs) that Tsiba runs in partnership with the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa (ASISA).

iMacs at Tsiba is just one of a number of high impact graduate programmes that ASISA runs to bridge the gap between university and the financial services world. The programmes are extremely well received by the students, the institutions of higher learning and, importantly, companies that employ these graduates as interns and full-time staff (more than 80% of the trainees go on to fulltime roles in the profession).

Many other industries in SA would do well to have a look at what is being done by this industry federation to upskill and support students and, ultimately, to expand the capacity of the sector’s workforce.

Through the graduate programme, Denver consolidated his skills and found his way into fulltime work in the industry. Before joining the iMacs programme, he says, he had put successful people on a pedestal and thought of himself as a failure. By bringing in successful professionals and teaching him how to converse with them, ASISA gave him confidence, he says. It also taught him that his idols were human, and probably also started at the bottom.

Denver has really made his life work and could easily turn his back on his past and forget about it. He doesn’t want to hide his scars, however, and pretend his past didn’t happen.  Rather, he hopes his story will inspire other people.

“When I came out of rehab, I was told to go to the AA meetings. I went, and it helped. What I didn’t like was the concept of sitting there, being honest, telling everybody your story, but the minute you leave you take on a whole other persona, where you hide yourself and your story.

“When I was in rehab, helped me a lot when other people came in to tell their story. It gave me hope. So I feel that I have a responsibility. It is also an honour to tell the story as much as I can.“

Another responsibility that Denver has taken on is to help people in his community become more financially aware, more knowledgeable about the basics of saving and investing. He says: “Guys from backgrounds like mine, we don't know anything about this investment world whatsoever.”

He sees community members of his parents’ generation struggling to survive on their state pension. Denver plans to carry on studying so that he can fulfil his dream of helping people in his community to access the tools of wealth creation and change their lives for the better.

Another of his dreams that was born when he was reinventing himself after rehab was to run the Comrades Marathon, a mountain (yup, it was the up-run this year) that he has now climbed.

The marathon is also the subject of a book that he has written. When he was looking for ways to improve himself during Covid he taught himself to touch-type. Once he had completed the theory, he was looking for ways to practice and came up with the idea of writing a book. He started the book (working title: How Hard Could It Be?) about his “big, hairy, audacious goal of going from being a drug addict to running 80km”.

Running the Comrades actually started as a bit of a joke, Denver says. In rehab, he took part in morning walks that sometimes ended in a race, which reminded him how much he had loved running at school.

When he left rehab, running was one of the ways that he decided to mirror life in rehab. People in his community would see him out running and, instead of saying he was running to get fit or to stay sober, he would answer playfully that he was training for the Comrades. And then it got serious.

Now that he has achieved that he will finish the book. “It's basically me having that goal of the Comrades to drive me and kept me sober and focused on my studies and my purpose.”