Hannah Rose PR
There’s a version of Alicia Portelli’s story that looks like a straight line.
Australian cycling coach builds a following, opens a studio, gets noticed globally, moves to Asia, lands in New York, and ends up coaching at one of the most talked-about boutique fitness studios in the world. Alongside the coach who first inspired her. Nine years after watching him ride on Instagram and thinking, quietly, I want to work with that person someday.
Clean arc. Great ending.
Except that’s not what happened. What actually happened is messier, longer, and — if you’re a fitness professional who has ever wondered whether the slow build is adding up to anything — probably a lot more useful to hear.
The version nobody posts about
Alicia got fired from two studios before she opened her own. She opened JAMM — a rhythm cycling studio in Sydney built around community, athleticism, and a deep love of Michael Jackson — poured years into it, and then closed it when noise complaints made it legally and financially untenable. She moved to Singapore to lead a cycling division there, built something she was genuinely proud of, and then left that too when the opportunity in New York finally became real.
She arrived in New York in February 2026. After all of that. And her first practices at AARMY had one or two people in them.
One. Or two.
“People don’t see the less glamorous side,” she told me in the episode. And she’s right — they don’t. What shows up on Instagram is the high-production video, the packed room, the touring schedule. What doesn’t show up is the part where you start again, quietly, and coach two people like it’s a full house. Because you love it enough to.
That’s the thing about Alicia. The love is not contingent on the audience size.
What nine years actually looks like
When Alicia first saw Akin Akman — now her colleague at AARMY — she was teaching performance-style cycling at a studio in Sydney. A rider named David came to her class one day, started double-timing, and eventually invited her to audition at the rhythm cycling studio he was opening. That studio posted a video of Akin on Instagram. Alicia saw it and thought: I want to learn how to do that.
From that moment to actually working alongside him took nine years.
Not nine months of hustle and a big break. Nine years of teaching, getting fired, starting over, building something, closing it, moving countries, auditioning, getting told AARMY didn’t offer visas, applying for one anyway, waiting twelve months for it to come through, and finally landing in New York to start from scratch one more time.
“It took me nine years to get to New York,” she said in our conversation. She said it like someone who has made peace with every chapter that came before.
If you are in year two or three of building something and it feels slow, write that down somewhere.
Hard classes, harder lessons
Alicia teaches hard. Notoriously so. And she’s thought carefully about why.
“I’ve only ever learned through hard things,” she told me. “Therefore, through my experience, I teach best teaching you hard things.”
But it’s not intensity for the sake of it. One of the things I love most about this conversation is how she breaks down what hard actually does for a rider — and why she believes that constantly chasing distraction and fun in a class can rob people of the thing they actually came for.
She described a drill she uses called the ladder — eight counts up, eight counts sit, sixteen counts up, eight counts sit, and so on — and the way she coaches it is less about the physical output and more about what it proves to you. Every time you come back to the saddle, she tells her riders, it’s not a break. You’re being knocked down, and you’re getting back up. And with every attempt, you’re a little wiser, a little further along.
She pulled that metaphor from a book called Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston — a book she credits with helping her through a long personal battle, and one she recommends to coaches and riders alike because its lessons extend far beyond any single experience. The image is of crossing a rapid river on a log: every time you fall off and go back to the shore, you stand up, you try again, and you get a little further. Until one day you make it across.
I’ll be honest — I got a little emotional when she described it. It’s one of those images that lodges itself somewhere and doesn’t leave.
Building a coaching identity that’s actually yours
One of the things Alicia is most intentional about is creativity — specifically, how to pull inspiration from everywhere without just copying someone else’s homework.
She studies coaches the way athletes study film. She walks out of a class and mentally takes it apart: what landed, what didn’t, what she could borrow and filter back through herself. She draws from Pilates teachers, from concerts, from audiobooks, from watching the Michael Jackson documentary too late at night. She talked about the way Angela Manuel Davis uses repetition — saying a phrase again and again until it lands in the body, not just the brain — and how she took that observation and made it her own.
“Why would you want to be somebody’s second best?” she said. And that line stuck with me, because it’s both a philosophy and a practical instruction. It’s not about being precious — it’s about staying in the process of creating, so that you’re never just deploying what you already know.
She also made a point about simplicity that I think gets lost in the conversation about choreography and production value: sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is put on a climb track with no moves and let a rider sit in the discomfort. No distraction. Just them, the music, and the work.
“The tough things in life aren’t always fun,” she said. “If you’re constantly looking for the fun, you’re gonna be genuinely disappointed.”
The books she recommended
If you’re the kind of person who immediately opens a new tab when someone mentions a book (same), here’s what Alicia is reading and recommending:
Grit by Angela Duckworth — the case for persistence over talent. The argument that the hardest worker, not the most naturally gifted, tends to go furthest. This one hit her hard during her time in Singapore.
Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston — she recommends this one regardless of whether the reader has any personal relationship with disordered eating. It’s structured around fables and metaphors, and the lessons it carries about understanding yourself and breaking cycles apply broadly. The rapid river analogy lives here.
Rewire Your Mind by — what she’s currently listening to on repeat. About getting out of your own way, understanding self-sabotage, and not letting single-minded focus on career cost you the other parts of life that matter.
And Hannah added one of her own: The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks — about upper limiting, limiting beliefs, and the sneaky ways we sabotage ourselves right at the moment things start to go well.
The slow build
Here’s the thing about Alicia’s story that I keep coming back to.
It’s not that she was relentless in spite of the hard parts. It’s that the hard parts were what built her. The firings, the closure, the fresh starts — each one added something to her coaching that she couldn’t have learned any other way. She says she teaches from lived experience, and you can feel it. There’s a depth to her coaching philosophy that doesn’t come from a training manual. It comes from actually having been knocked down and gotten back up enough times to know what it costs — and what it gives you.
“With every no, I’ve been like: what can I learn from this and how do I pivot?”
If you are in a chapter right now that doesn’t feel like progress, I want you to hear that. The chapter you’re in might be doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
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© 2025 [Hannah rose pr]
