Off-Season Do’s & Dont’s for Aquabike Athletes

By Coach Karen Parnell MSc, Triathlon & Multisport Coach

The off-season is a gift. Used well, it protects your long-term progress, tidies up niggles, hardens your strengths (swimming and cycling!), and lets you stroll into base training feeling fresh, not rusty.

Below are coach-tested, evidence-backed do’s and don’ts tailored to Aquabike athletes — followed by a practical way to ease back into structured training with one of my Aquabike Maintenance Plans, available on Final Surge and TrainingPeaks.

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New #1 in Women’s Aquabike.World Ranking

Last May long term leader of the Aquabike.World women’s ranking Monika Lukens has been pushed off the top spot of the podium by Eleanore Nash but regained her position only one week later. Though this time it looks like the new leader will stay up there for a little longer.

After major events, there are naturally always a few more shifts in the rankings. But the new #1 was not a participant in last week’s standard distance world championships in Wollongong, Australia.

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2025 Aquabike Standard Distance World Championships Wollongong Race Report

It’s only seven years since the first ever aqaubike race took place in Australia. While the development wasn’t huge from the get-go, it gained some momentum with the announcement of the long-distance world championships taking place in Townsville 2024 and after Ironman events started including aquabike options in their races. Today every Ironman 70.3 event in Australia offers an aquabike option – and so do pretty much all other middle-distance races as well as many shorter and smaller events as well.

Last weeks race in Wollongong vividly showed what a success story this young aquabike discipline has been over the last few years in Downunder. Despite not a huge number of athletes travelling across the oceans from all around the world, no less than 430 aquabike athletes showed up at the start line, making it the second biggest race in the history of our sport. While the number of competitors was a bit below last year’s race in Torremolinos, the athlete’s race experience certainly wasn’t.

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2025 Aquabike Standard Distance World Championships Wollongong Race Preview

One year after the biggest aquabike race in history at the 2024 standard distance world championships in Torremolinos, I expected a significant drop in number of aquabike athletes at this year’s race in Wollongong, Australia. With the vast majority of aquabike athletes being in North America or Europe the remote location of the 2025 edition I would not have been surprised if the number of competitors was cut to half. Boy was I wrong. With about 450 athletes being signed up for the race in Downunder we will see not only a big but also quite competitive field of athletes fighting for the world championship titles. However, the large number of participants also comes with a downside.

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Aquabike Long Distance World Championships 2025 Pontevedra - Race Report

It was the second time since 2019 that the city in western Spain hosted the Triathlon World Multisport Championships, which include the Long-Distance Aquabike World Championships. The field was noticeably smaller than six years ago – I discussed the reasons in my race preview – but we still enjoyed an eventful race day. Although several aspects could be refined for future editions, let’s start with the good news: no finish-line drama this time. In my preview I had questioned the new finish location, yet in reality the right-hand bend after the line was little more than a gentle curve, easily taken at full speed.

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Aquabike Long Distance World Championships 2025 Pontevedra - Race Preview

After years of growth the Long Distance Aquabike World Championships will see a significant drop in the number of participants in 2025 – despite the number of aquabike athletes still being growing year by year all around the world. In this race preview we will not only – as always – take a closer look at the race course and the race favourites but also analyse why so much less aquabike athletes will be competing in Pontevedra next weekend.

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European Aquabike Championships 2025 Pamplona Race Report

Last weekend Spain’s half-distance classic from Lerate’s Alloz Reservoir into the heart of Pamplona hosted the European Aquabike Championships. A 1.9 km swim in crystal-clear lake water was followed by a challenging 85 km point-to-point bike course.

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New #1 in Women’s Aquabike.World Ranking

Since September 2023 we did not have a change of the leaders, neither in the Men’s, nor in the Women’s Aquabike.World ranking. Frank Erk and Monika Lukens also both took the lead in the all time ranking during this period, which is the ranking including all results since January 1^st 2021.

For as much as 588 days Monika Lukens was leading the Women’s Ranking. Since taking the lead on September 27^th, 2023, she competed in no less than 20 aquabike races, taking quite a few wins and a silver and a bronze medal in the US aquabike nationals in the process.

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European Aquabike Championships 2025 Pamplona - Race Preview

The sevenths edition of the European Aquabike Championships will take place in Pamplona this Saturday. Well, actually the race will start about 40 km outside the Capital of the Navarra region in northern Spain. For the first time we will have a point-to-point race in an international aquabike championship. 281 athletes have signed up for the aquabike race – if all of them will be competing, this will be the biggest European Aquabike Championship yet. A title currently held by Pamplona’s neighbour city Bilbao, where 268 athletes started the race in 2022.

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