About Us

Based in the leafy, mountainous seaside town of Hout Bay, Cape Town, Trail Leopards Running Club is an active community centred around trail running, bringing together people with a shared passion for movement, health, nature, fun, and adventure. It is a free community that is open to anyone to join, with options to join a premium, perforamnce-oriented crew and get private coaching. While our main focus is trail running, we also host weekly road runs.

Trail Leopards is a diverse and gender-balanced crew, welcoming members across all ages - we have been joined by members as young as 2 years old all the way through to 81 years old.

We have carefully curated the community and culture over the years to ensure everyone's safety and enjoyment, allowing you to explore, connect, and grow in a conducive and supportive environment. We are built on pillars of equity, inclusivity, and diversity, and celebrate the uniqueness inherent in each of us.

With the Leopards community, you have the chance to explore the mountains and trails, run, and train safely together under the guidance of our dedicated guides. Each pace group has a guide who leads the group, sets the pace, and stops to regroup, as well as a guide who sweeps the back of the pack, making sure that no one gets left behind or lost, and who helps anyone injured or in trouble safely off the mountain.

Our goal is to bring you exciting, novel experiences, exploring a new trail in and around Hout Bay and Cape Town each week, offering you dozens of routes to choose from between the different pace groups. We only repeat a trail at most every 2 months or so, and rotate between nearly a dozen starting locations, offering a balance between coastal, high-vert, flat and fast, and varied trail running experiences.

Who Can Join?

Anyone! While we are based in of Hout Bay, Cape Town, and do our best to give back to and empower the community, we welcome anyone from anywhere with open arms. Many weeks, up to half of the runners joining come from areas far outside of Hout Bay, up to an hour's drive away in some cases, and who feel just as at home with us.

We have a pace and a place for everyone!

Over the summer season, we also serve as a meeting hub for tourists, and have had the pleasure of welcoming hundreds of people from countries all around Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia over the years. We also frequently explore surrounding suburbs and parts of Cape Town, so keep an eye open to see when we are in your neighbourhood and come say hi!

Coaching and LEAP

As of October 2026, Trail Leopards expanded to add a performance-oriented branch called LEAP - a training crew and platform developed in collaboration with Ascent Running. LEAP also serves as a premium membership to Trail Leopards at an affordable rate to support the community's growth, where members get access to 8 active sessions per week (including easy runs, interval/hill sessions, long runs, strength sessions, and recovery sessions). LEAP brings together individuals who are committed to growth and improving their health and fitness, while doing it with a group of likeminded people working towards similar goals.

Trail Leopards also offers 1-1 running coaching, where individuals can apply to get private coaching from Trail Leopards founder, Kai Forster, a UESCA-certified running coach with years of experience competing in the country's biggest trail races, sustainably performing in a demanding engineering job, and growinging the Trail Leopards community and brand simultaneously. For more information on this, head over to the Coaching section.

Our Origin Story

Trail Leopards was founded in the late summer of February 2024 in Hout Bay, a coastal town along the Atlantic Seaboard surrounded by rugged mountains in Cape Town. For the previous few years, Kai Forster had been exploring the mountains of Hout Bay, falling in love with the nature, views, sense of adventure, growth, and history that trail running in the area offered. While he had grown up in Hout Bay, he had spent the first 23 years of his life barely stepping foot on any of the mountains. After seeing how much the mountains offered and how much they taught him, and realising that there was no established and centralised trail running community in Hout Bay, Kai had the idea of starting a club towards the end of 2023, but thought that it would remain another pipeline dream, never turning into reality.

Coming off a fresh heart break over a new year's festival, in early 2024 Kai made a promise to himself - no matter what, he would give this trail running community idea a shot. He discussed it with friends, and onboarded a few of them to join as guides for the first ever run, which was scheduled to take place from Sentinel Ocean Alliance on the 8th of February, and would take people up onto the Chapman's Peak trails, Kai's favourite spot to run.

After a successful marketing campaign, more than 120 people showed up at the first run, split across the same four pace groups that we still have today. After the initial hype and successful launch, dozens of people reached out and wanted to be a part of the Leopards story and contribute to the community. Many of them stuck around and are still with us today, showcasing the strength of the bonds and the camaraderie between the initial group of the founding guides.

Over the years, Leopards has blossomed into a beautiful community and safe space, becoming one of the biggest and best trail running groups in Cape Town, where people can connect, explore, and express themselves in one of the most suburbs of the world. Through collaboration, giving back to the community, and learning from one another, we have continued to create and share profound and meaningful experiences that go far beyond just movement for everyone that joins us.

Our Values

They say that your vibe attracts your tribe, so before joining, please take a look through our values to make sure we are all on the same page and you know what to expect. If you read through them and they don't resonate with you, that is no problem - it might be that Leopards isn't the place for you. We understand that not every community is a good fit for everyone and we won't be offended!

Our community has been built around these values, and we encourage you to embody them to the greatest extent that you comfortably can. We also encourage you to live in alignment with the values that deeply resonate with you outside of our community too, to enhance your wellbeing, fulfilment, contribution, and health in life.

Rules

To ensure that Leopards remains a safe, inclusive, and enjoyable experience for all, we ask that before joining, you take some time to please read through the rules below.

Please note that we take these community rules very seriously - any breach of these rules that affects the Trail Leopards community or any of its members will lead to disciplinary action, handled by the Ethics Committee, a group of five founding members that deal with any disciplinary-related issues to ensure a fair, unbiased outcome. In severe instances, we have banned individuals in the past, and will not hesitate to do so again should the situation be called for.